Shot Cadence

[ptrlcop]

I think that it is an accepted fact that shooting to a cadence(consistent splits) is important for maxing scores on certain drills such as an el prez or bill drill.

I suck at this, particularly on the el prez where my transitions are longer than my splits by a good margin. I want to improve on this, but I have a nagging feeling that I am putting effort into gaming drills and that the skill I am training is not terribly relevant to the type of shooting I am training for.

Is there an application for being to have spits=transitions in the real world? I understand that having good transitions and good splits are important, but is it important for them to be similar.

In the real world it seems that by the time you have shot your first target the world has probably changed. I probably need to relocate that next threat, and then reevaluate if it is still a threat before I can start shooting again. This does not seem similar to mindlessly transitioning to a threat evenly spaced 1 yard to the right of the first(like in the el prez).

Discussion on what the el prez (or similar drills) teach us may answer some of my questions. I am aware that these are drills and are not meant to be tactical scenarios.

I put this here since I think it applies to carbines and pistols.

 

[Presscheck Consulting]

Ok... yeah. Consistent splits have nothing to do with the real world. Jerry Micheulik was the one that finally taught me to run a cadence effectively and I realized the reason why I could never do it before is because to do so is to ignore tactical decision making.

So I will briefly describe how to game the drill and then I will discuss why that is not a viable tactical training option.

1. In order to shoot cadence effectively you need to be pulling the trigger at a rhythm. That means you are pulling the trigger to pull the trigger and the visual input of your sights has nothing to do with the gun going bang again. Simply put, the gun is going off.. bang bang bang. It's your job to keep the gun moving from target to target. Taking the "front three" of the El prez as an example, you are firing your first shot as the gun is still pressing out and then firing again as the gun in settling back on the A zone, as the gun recoils from shot two you are riding the recoil up and away from ipsc 1 and driving it back down into target two. NO FOLLOW THROUGH ON ISPC 1!!!! The gun should be coming into the C zone of target two as you are finishing your trigger pull and the gun should bang as you cross over the C/A zone line. Quick recoil management and you are giving target two it's second shot. As the fourth round of the drill fires your eyes are again rapidly shifting to target three and you are riding the recoil of the 4th shot to drive the pistol to target three. You are still not pausing your trigger pull to align the weapon you are pressing that trigger again at the same speed as you drive the weapon through the c zone of target three breaking shot 5 as it enters the A. Control recoil press the trigger for shot six as the pistol returns to line of sight and then it's back into your work space with NO FOLLOW THOUGH so you can get your mag change done.

Now take a second and think about what the fuck I just wrote.
1.no follow through.... PERIOD. As Jerry told me if you watch your sights settle in the A before moving to the next target, you could have just pulled the trigger again for the time that you wasted. So you visually shot a 9 shot "front three" instead of a 6 shot front three.
2. The gun is gonna go off!!! the only thing you are doing is holding on for dear life and using your eyes to make sure the gun in on brown when the weapon discharges again. When practicing this cadence drill you will get rounds landing in the D zone both coming into and exiting the target as well as shots landing in between targets because you are not driving the gun fast enough. Remember pull the trigger as fast as you can and don't stop for shit..... KEEP THE GUN MOVING!

So let's relate that training to killing people. Can I ever not follow through? Probably not because it is my visual assessment of the thing that I'm killing that let's me know I killed it. I can't just shoot and move on, unless I gotta spread some love to prevent accurate shots on me and then go back and clean up. As a general rule, I give them the gas until they are burned down and trust that others are picking up my slack.
Firing my gun because my cadence clock says so with no concern about where my front sight is..... 100% absolute nogo! It is the exact opposite of proper shooting accountability and complex problem solving.

There is no doubt that with practice that shooting cadence works, I shaved 3 seconds off my El prez and shattered my previous glass ceiling. However I'm a high function complex problem solver with a super fast CPU. Average people do not have the processor speed to crunch data at that rate. I know when I'm gaming and when I'm training and I can turn off the switch. I would never practice what amounts to stupid human ticks if I thought there was a chance that I was going spray a room with lead in a left to right motion and try to time the movement of my pistol to make sure it was pointed at something I wanted to hit everytime that it discharged.

In closing I think that most of us should be happy that our shit sounds like bang bang....bang bang... bang bang. It means that you know where your gun is pointed, you are aiming the fucking gun, and you are applying follow through and reevaluation of the threat..... ALL GOOD THINGS.

If you want to shave a little time in a preferred manner, quit living your life 30mm at a time (trapped inside your aimpoints or EOTECH), after you make the call that you don't want to shoot a person anymore, immediately get your eyes shifted to the next threat and then DRIVE that red dot or front sight to where your eyes are locked on the threat. Finally for iron sights conduct a focal plane shift as the pistol comes into your line of sight from the threat that you were staring at to your front sight and then get it on. Most missed shots with irons are a result of failing to refocus on the front sight after aquiring a new threat.

 

[Grayman]

Roland,

All I can say is wow! I think you nailed it with your post. I can't add much but I will say this just to kick the obviously dead horse.

There is a fine line between what works for punching paper and what works for making bad things, dead things. It's very easy for new shooters to get wrapped up in gaming their drill times and forget that the real world doesn't care about split times. If you are training new people remember you can't make everything about time and expect them to somehow extrapolate a "real world" situation from their shot timer.

 

[Presscheck Consulting]

Of course I don't want to downplay speed..... if you are fighting in a phone booth with a guy and he is all like "jihad jihad. Pew pew pew!" The only way to make his bullets stop piercing your flesh is to flip that bitch's CNS switch. The faster you flip that switch, the less holes you have in you. It pays to be first in the punching holes in people game.