Wednesday Workouts

It's been a couple of months since I've been out to practice at my local outdoor range. However, the past couple weeks I've made an effort to get out and focus on particular skills to supplement the dry fire work. I head to the range on the way home from work, with 100 rounds of ammo, and a plan.

Last week I went with the purpose of focusing on longer shots. After dropping a lot of points on the 20 yard shots on Stage 3 of the IDPA classifier recently, I felt I needed to work on concentrating on the sights and trigger press. On that trip I shot exclusively from the 25 yard line. My eyes are such that I can see the sights sharply, but any targets beyond 15 or so yards are blurred. I have to aim at the blurry brown blob against the blurry brown berm. As I was checking my hits, it occurred to me that in the excitement of a match, I tend to rest on the center of that blob. That was the years of USPSA shooting habits coming through. The "down zero" zone on the IDPA target is located in the upper portion of the target so I needed to adjust where I indexed on the target. Let's hope that epiphany sticks in the next match!

For this week's trip, the practice focused on strong and weak-hand only shooting. The IDPA rules state:

6.19 No “strong-hand only” strings of fire may require the shooter to engage targets more than ten (10) yards (9.1 meters) distant.
6.20 No “weak-hand only” strings of fire may require the shooter to engage targets more than seven (7) yards (6.4 meters) distant.

I decided to do the SHO shots at 15 yards, and the WHO shots at 10. I figured if I can hit them from those ranges, the match distances should feel easy. (One can hope!) The right handed shots were hitting well, but I was initially shooting to the right when using my left hand only. There are many opinions on the best stance when shooting one handed; for me the best position seems to be standing squared to the target with the gun mostly vertical. By the end, I was fairly satisfied with the hits I was getting.  (I'm aware that last month's Area 8 USPSA match had WHO shots at something like 18 yards, but that's just silly.)

This might be a handy training tool

It was another quick, but I think beneficial, practice session. After 50 strong hand and 50 weak hand shots, I found a couple dozen extra rounds in my range bag and did some shooting just for fun. I did feel the effects of all those one-handed shots later in the evening.

After shooting, there was still time for a good exercise session as well. The two activities made for a complete "workout Wednesday" and an excellent diversion from the work week.