A few Details:
200 Pages
36 chapters
The Dry Fire Tune-up explained, including 4 tricks that always work to get a sub-second draw
An interview with Max Michel about the one thing he did to become a contender for a national championship
30 new drills, including the best drill I have ever found for improving match performance
Here's an excerpt:
This book was written over the course of a year and a half. It started, as most
books do, with the author having something to say. I was training hard myself,
and I had begun training other shooters. I was also busy writing articles about
shooting for facebook and AndersonShooting.com. That creative outlet morphed
into my podcast, That Shooting Show, which has been downloaded over 70,000
times in 33 countries. It’s pretty to clear I had something to say.
At the close of the shooting season in 2013, I began writing again. Every day,
every match, every class, and every training session provided new material. After
a year and a half of writing I began the task of organizing what I wanted to say.
That process reminded me what I’m hoping to do:
Help shooters get better.
The average shooter is likely to face years of struggle with the frustration of trying
to balance speed and accuracy in sports that have no perfect score. I have been
this average shooter, and I have endured these same struggles and frustrations.
After 10 years of experimentation and research I believe I have found some
solutions. My hope is that I can now explain these ideas well enough to save
others a few of those years of struggle and enjoy more success.
That’s why success is the first topic we’ll discuss. We’ll look at the importance of
goals and examine how setting goals within a level of participation can define
success in a shooter’s career. This is an important part of every shooter’s
mindset, because if success is never defined it can never be reached. This
dichotomy has the potential to be very frustrating and could even cause a
shooter to drop out of the sport. I’ve experienced this more than once, and
preventing this ultimate frustration has become very personal for me.
The next chapters will cover the process of improvement. I have been a
dedicated proponent of practicing since I was a teenager learning to play the
guitar, yet I never fully understood how practice works. That began to change
after I got a book in the mail from a fellow shooter. This book answered questions
I never even thought about asking. It helped me understand how excellence is
actually chemically manufactured in the brain as a direct result of practice.
Knowing that improvement is biologically guaranteed under the right conditions
has changed the way I practice, and it could do the same for you.
This new understanding of practice will bring us to the core of what I’ve realized
in the past year and a half of training:
Trying to improve Speed and Accuracy at the same time is a waste of time.
Following that bombshell, Chapters 12 through 22 will get into the components of
better shooting in a more technical sense. We’ll start with a hilarious story about
my first USPSA match. Then we’ll get into some things I believe shooters need to
do to score more points per second. To close that section, I’ll reveal the closest
thing to a secret in USPSA shooting that I have ever found.
The last group of chapters will get into the match environment. I’ll share two easy
ways to allow your training to manifest itself in what you really want: Better Match Performance.
Shooters often complain about shooting matches below their level of skill, and these chapters
address that very specifically. This section also features an interview with Max Michel about the ONE thing he did in order to go from “just a GM” to a contender for a National Championship.
This technique will allow you to:
1. Get all of the speed and accuracy you’re currently capable of without having to choose between them
2. Correct errors immediately
3. Shoot more consistently
4. Calm your nerves
After the story of Max’s discovery, I’ll take you on a guided tour of the dry fire
tune-up that inspired this book. You’ll get technique recommendations that will
help you become faster so you won’t need to try to go faster in the match
environment.
The final section contains 14 dry fire drills and 16 live fire drills designed to
isolate and improve specific skills. The log for each drill is different from those in
the first two books, and those differences are explained in the drill section
preface.
I believe it’s important to understand and record improvement as it
happens, which is why these logs have been designed to allow flexibility in
recording whatever data you choose. This will allow you to retain the
improvement of your practice and make that improvement a permanent part of
your shooting instead of just a temporary surge in skill.
What did you do to get a better draw?
What were you thinking about when your par time dropped?
How did you shoot 2 alphas on the move at 15 yards?
Remember what you did and you’ll be able to do it again.
Do this enough and you’ll be able to do anything.
Which drills to do and how often to do them is something you will need to decide
after an honest assessment of your strengths and weaknesses. Yes, it will
require you to think a little, maybe a lot. I hope you’re willing to do that, because
none of this will help you if you aren’t.
As I read once in a shooting magazine, “A good instructor doesn’t teach you what
to think. He teaches you how to think.”
In addition, although this book was conceived in the handgun world of USPSA
shooting, a creative IDPA or Steel or 3-gun competitor could easily adapt these
ideas to their corner of the shooting world. There are also applications for Law
Enforcement officers who would like to become better shooters.
This fact was confirmed for me as I read about the importance of calling the shot in a tactical
magazine for SWAT operators, right after I read an article in the same magazine
about the need for mental training in Law Enforcement.
It turns out that there is more to getting better as a shooter than just learning and
practicing techniques. That’s what I’ve been thinking about for the last 18
months, and this book is the result of that process.
In the interest of organization,I briefly attempted to separate the technical information about
shooting from the mental aspects of competition performance. The fact that I couldn’t separate
them in writing only reaffirmed for me that they shouldn’t be separated in
practice, pun intended. That’s why you’ll see a lot of cross-referencing between
the mental game and technical skills as we examine how to achieve the goal of
our favorite shooting games, as well as the ultimate goal of this book:
Scoring More Points per Second.
