Distance Might Be The Key To Solo Training

  Dec 11th 2017

Many gun owners take a handful of gun training classes then subsequently train and practice on their own. Before we know it, our schedules and lives take over and we soon find ourselves making a few errors as we try to keep up our marksmanship skills. While there isn’t one all-encompassing solution to avoiding errors while training on your own, the key to improvement could lie in the amount of distance between yourself and the stationary target.

Setbacks When Training Alone

Practicing any skill, and marksmanship is a skill, alone means running the risk of having setbacks. You may see steady improvement before plateauing in certain areas, such as sight alignment. Or, other gun owners and enthusiasts who have years of experience working with firearms may begin to develop errors seen in new shooters. The setbacks you experience are likely ones experienced by any gun owner and enthusiast, including time and a lack of feedback.

Limited Amount of Time to Train

It’s easy to look at your weekly schedule and wonder where you’ll eek out another hour or two for a gun training class. Many people cite a lack of time for setbacks when solo training as they attempt to cram several skills into a single block of time. Multi-tasking rarely works in your favor anywhere else and definitely won’t help you improve your shooting skills unless you dedicate time, focus, and motivation to solo training.

Lack Of Feedback

Any time you’re training on your own, it’s up to you to notice and make note of your errors. This means it’ll be up to you to give yourself honest feedback regarding stance, aim and everything else, then take the initiative to make corrections. But first you’ll need to identify your shooting errors which can be difficult on your own.

How To Identify Shooting Errors

If you’ve noticed or realized your marksman skills aren’t what they once were or what you’d like them to be, good. As with fixing any mistake or error, acknowledging a shortcoming is the first step for improvement. But don’t begin to think about what you’re doing wrong and how to fix it. Instead, feel your way through.

Let’s look at grouping. The rounds are grouped on either side of the bullseye, but obviously not on the target you want. This is where you’ll need to begin feeling, in this case, feel the position of your finger on the trigger. Trigger control, along with proper sight alignment, both play an essential role in your accuracy at any distance.

Tips For Better Shooting

Zoning in during solo training is the only way to isolate the errors you’ve begun to make and to see them. But tunnel vision can also kick in to the point those errors become faded to you without being corrected. While we recommend supplementing your solo training with periodically taking a firearms training course, you can break the tunnel vision by adding distance and using dummy rounds in your training.

Add Some Distance

Rather than getting closer to the issue, put some distance between yourself and the target. If you’ve been working from 25 yards, move the target back in increments and work your way up then back down in distance. Pay attention to the feeling and staying in control with each round. The more distance you add, the more likely you are to see firsthand the areas where errors such as sight alignment are happening.

Use Dummy Rounds

Using dummy rounds allows you to feel your error more so than with a live round, especially as the distances increase. If you’ve struggled with flinching, an instinctive reaction to the recoil, noise, and/or flash, dummy rounds blatantly show you if you’re still flinching or not. Another way to counter flinching is with dry-fire practice. This should only be done with all gun safety precautions and in a safe setting.

Enhance Solo Training With A Gun Training Class

One of the best ways to enhance your solo training is to take a gun training class. Whether you’ve pinpointed your errors and cognizantly corrected them or are looking to have some unbiased feedback, Six Maritime offers a variety of training classes to engrain and/or brush up essential skills for gun owners and enthusiasts. Contact us today for our training schedule.