The Balance Between Speed and Precision

Here's another important video from the Personal Defense Network. The balance of speed and precision is a component of all of our shooting. There's always going to be some balance between how fast we can get the hit that we need to get in terms of speed and precision. The conditions under which we shoot, that moment, the target and the circumstances are what dictate our need for precision. The relationship between the target dictating the need for precision and our skill dictating whether or not we get that hit is all based on the speed with which we shoot, assuming all of our fundamentals are in place.

We're gonna talk about stance and grip presentation, all those important fundamentals of shooting, but the speed with which we execute those is really based on our confidence and our belief in our ability. The targets behind me have colored shapes with numbers in it. What we're gonna do is call out numbers. All of a sudden your target area's gonna be less predictable than it was before. Now certainly, okay this is your target area, you're gonna be in the ready position.

It's still a rather sterile controlled drill. But there is gonna be a little deviation into what your actual target is. As you're sidestepping and recognizing that target you're going to punch the gun straight in your line of sight, parallel to that threat. If I call three, three is your threat, four, four is your threat. What we're going to be looking at the end of this drill, the balance between speed and precision.

Your precision need is going to remain constant. Something else is actually gonna change in the middle of the drill. When that changes it may change the speed with which you can attain that group, okay? That's what we're gonna work on now, is how the distance or the relative size of a target affects our speed. Nothing changes about what objectively we wanna accomplish.

We wanna get the shots in the colors. We want the holes to be in the colors or very close proximity to the color. That's our goal. How fast you can do that is what we're gonna be looking at. You decide through empirical evidence how fast you can get that shot.

Make sure you're at full extension, good consistent position, focused on the threat that I call, we're gonna continue to sidestep on presentation, we're gonna continue to sidestep on our reload to significantly effect the target's ability to present a lethal threat using our environment. We're gonna use our tool, the firearm in our training, to get those combat accurate hits. Grip your firearm and go to the ready position. Make hot if you need to in the ready position. Stand by.

Two or three rounds, two or three rounds. At the number, the shape that contains the number that I call as your threat, sidestepping to the right first. Stand by. Five! If you're significantly out of the color, slow down.

If your shots are in the same hole, speed up. Use the maximum area for combat effect in this that we'd identified. Three! Holster. We're gonna look at balance between speed and precision using one of these SEB targets.

It gives us multiple target areas of different sizes. The other nice thing about this drill that you can do with your training partner to learn your balance between speed and precision without needing to increasing your distance or change anything dramatically, is that the up commands, the standard firing command that gets you into that high-centered chest area, the box on the SEB, is going to be much more predictable and obviously behaviorally more expected than the number call. Your training partner also has the option of calling a number which is inside of a shape on the target which is going to cause a deviation in that standard presentation. Just that little bit of change is gonna obviously require a longer duration of presentation because you have to find and acquire the target, it's not coming straight out into the center mass of that bowling pin. So for a couple of different reasons, both the smaller target area and the less predictable nature of the target area, it's going to require a more precise shot which means our speed is not gonna be as attainable as it is when we have that larger surface area to get two or three shots into to significantly affect the target's ability to present a lethal threat.

So the drill is on a standard command which we'll use up, two or three rounds will be fired into the high-centered chest attempting to significantly effect the target's ability to present a lethal threat. On a number call we're gonna fire one round into the smaller target area and we're gonna look at the difference between the speed with which we can attain those rapid shots into the large area versus the precise shot into the small area. Mike's gonna call for me. I'll be standing by in a non-violent posture. Up.

Up. Up. Two. Up. Three.

So you can see there, what I did was rush that shot and try to take it at the exact same amount of time that I was taking that center mass shot which is a much larger target area, and while that shot would have been within the large box it's clearly not within that smaller surface area. That's what happens when you don't respect the balance between speed and precision. The area we wanna hit high-center chest doesn't change. Just because you're 30 feet away or 40 feet away or 50 feet away, maybe you shouldn't be shooting a pistol. You can't say, "Well gee, I hit one out of 10 shots, that's okay," that's not acceptable, okay.

Whatever your level of acceptable consistency was, when you were at this eight, 10 foot range, is exactly the same level of consistency and combat accuracy you should be satisfied with at that 20 foot range. What does that mean? It means that you have to slow down. It means you have to concentrate more. It means you have to be more consistent in your fundamental, smoother in your trigger pull, more determined in your extension, weight forward, controlling that gun especially for the follow up shots because it's not acceptable to be able to come into a target area, let me find a target that exemplifies, okay.

This is perfect. Look at this. Good hits on the five, good hits on the three, good hits on the two. Then all of a sudden we went back to 20 feet we have no hits on the six, no hits on the four, okay? Too fast.

We're just shooting too fast here. We're capable of being combat accurate but we went too fast and we weren't able to do it. Similarly, we can look at a target like this. Look at this big, tight group here on the five, great tight group on the one, great tight group on the two, great tight group on the three. Then we look at the six and the four and what do we see?

We see combat accurate groups, okay, these are acceptable groups. So apparently we were shooting too slow when we were in here because that works both ways. This drill will allow you to look at your balance between speed and precision. If this is an acceptable group size and you can do this at 20 feet, you should be able to shoot much, much faster at five. So it's possible that this was a pacing issue.

We shot exactly the same way but when we expanded our distance it expanded our group, okay? So we wanna pick up the pace here and shoot even faster to take maximum advantage of that combat accurate area because there's a great drill that you can take home, do this on a square range anywhere to help you balance speed and precision, to be able to determine whether or not you can shoot as fast as you want to and figure out your pacing at any given distance so that you're aware of it and that you would then recognize the pacing with which you need to shoot given a target size or a distance or dynamic environment reality. Understanding that the correlation between our belief in our ability and our actual ability is going to be more accurate if we train more realistically and train more often is incredibly important as we move forward in the combat training shooting program. That correlation strengthens when we shoot realistically. If we require ourselves, for example, to shoot at an extreme accuracy level, always wanting to put each bullet right next to the other one in the very center of that target we're gonna be confident in our ability to do that in a very mechanical way.

But that's not the need that we actually have in the dynamic critical incident. By training as realistically as we can, preferably with reactive targets, three-dimensional targets, in a realistic environment with all the real distractions that we can incorporate into our training that will be there in a real, dynamic, critical incident, our correlation and our belief in our ability to shoot as fast as we can or as slowly as we need to is going to be more accurate. The balance of speed and precision is incredibly important concept. The better the correlation between our ability and our belief in our ability, the more efficient we're going to be because the more intuitively we can react to the needs of a dynamic, critical situation. Check out more videos just like this one at the Personal Defense Network.