A fistful of drills to enhance your pistol skills.
There’s nothing wrong with shooting drills for the sake of fun, but doing so at the expense of practicing more fundamental skills is foolish—if your goal is to be a better defensive handgunner. Drills that have you running and gunning against the timer tend to become the “end all to beat all” for many shooters. However, the serious shooter understands that a drill is a means to an end, with the goal being to attain real-world proficiency as opposed to action movie flash and flare.
To that end, here are five drills taught by some of the top practical shooters in the industry. Only one is really semiauto-specific, and the rest can be run with a revolver—although some of the standards applied to these drills wouldn’t necessarily apply to people shooting double-action wheelguns. Each is guaranteed to make you better at what’s really important: defensive pistolcraft.
Three-Round Fade-Back
While the official version of the Fade-Back drill uses a 3×5 card, you can shoot it on anything of appropriate size. It’s a great drill to start any training session because it gets you in the mindset of good sight alignment and good trigger control.
Dave Spaulding of Handgun Combatives is an excellent shooter. He’s fast and accurate enough to give many competitive shooters a run for their money, but Dave doesn’t train to win a match. The focus of Handgun Combatives is to prepare the shooter to prevail in armed conflict. Sure, being fast and accurate will help in a lethal conflict, but there’s more to it than that.
As Dave preaches, the word “combative” means ready and willing to fight. That’s what Dave’s courses are all about. I know because I’ve taken several of them.
