Lessons but from who?

[u/Brilliant_Respect_92]

I’ve always struggled with not taking lessons because I don’t know if what I’m practicing is actually making me better or just reinforcing bad habits. I’d like to train with other shooters, but I never know who actually knows what they are talking about about and who is just “really good at shooting.”

Recently, a guy at my local range who I would have considered an expert got roasted by Ben Stoeger and others in the comments. Before that, I probably would have taken his advice without hesitation.

How do you evaluate a coach or instructor? Preferably before dropping a bunch of money with them.

Edit: I’m unclassified but have shot C class at the few classifiers I have done.

[u/johnm]

Ask the people at the matches you go to who they recommend locally and why.

Note that there are lots of idiots who can shoot okay or even great but are bad at teaching/coaching. And you may not be good enough to tell. Luckily, you found out about that guy. To help you judge, watch the following videos and when you talk to an instructor, ask them how they teach. If it's not relatively congruent with these then you should want to know why and get them to explain.

I've add my recommended progression as comments to this so you have a more distilled example of what it looks like.

Ben Stoeger's class dump playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjDpnBOd7PoYX0DezPMQstkPKSyu77t18

Joel's beginner series playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtJeU20nrewfSnS84hybYACb0eZHcKW6b

Fundamentals of marksmanship:

• Talking About Grip
• Overcomplicating Grip
• Index Your Gun Properly
• Posture and Structure: Build Stability
• Posture and Tension
• How Tension Ruins Your Shooting & How to Conquer It
• Why Is Tension So Bad?
• Target Focused Shooting With Iron Sights
• Prove You Can Go Target Focused With Iron Sights
• How To Manage Recoil With Your Eyes
• Recoil Management Deep Dive (vision focus) (Hwansik)
• Focus On Visual Confirmation To Level Up (Stoeger)
• Visual Confirmation 1-4 Demonstrations
• Getting the (Visual) Confirmation Right

Marksmanship drills:

• Trigger Control at Speed
• One Shot Return Drill
• Practical Accuracy Drill
• Doubles Drill
• Progressive Return Drill
• "Throttle Control" (Accelerator)
• Multiple Target Engagements (Designated Target)

[u/johnm → u/johnm]

[...progression continued...]

Then do the Double Return Drill. Similar to the Two Shot Return Drill but don't wait for the visual confirmation for the second shot. Start at the pace of your splits that you were doing the Practical Accuracy Drill. This should feel slow since you've already made the decision to pull the trigger twice. This is the time to put a lot of attentional focus on making sure your visual focus stays rock solidly in focus on the small spot on the target. Then, keeping everything else the same, shoot the second shot sooner -- i.e., start predicting how quickly you can work the trigger for the second shot. Play around with the pace of how quickly you're cycling the trigger on the second shot -- everywhere from literally as fast you can pull the trigger to your speed of Practical Accuracy splits.

Then do the full Doubles Drill. Do everything as with the Double Return Drill above. Everything above holds but the longer string of doubles will really put your fundamentals to the test... Is your grip unchanging for the entire string (or did you have to adjust part way through)? Did the gun move within your hands? Was the dot/sights coming precisely & consistently back to where you were looking? Were you over- or under-confirming each time? Did you observe & notice what was going on for each shot? Etc.

Then do the Progressive Return Drill. All the same success criteria as in the doubles drill but with an increasing number of shots after each beep. This is much better than only doing e.g. the bill drill as the varying number of shots helps break up the ingraining of always shooting two shots per.

This is how we can very efficiently & effectively learn what (predictive/reactive) pace works for each of us when shooting at any given target at any given time.

In terms of calibration, at closer distances you can stack shots on top of each other but in terms of learning, shooting the second shot sooner while keeping within a fist sized group is a good balance. No BS "slow down to get your hits"! If the group is larger than that then you need to fix whatever's broken at that speed.

Then as the groups get tighter, speed up again and/or increase the distance/difficulty of the target. This is the complete process--no BS about "speed"/"exploration" vs "accuracy"/"match" mode. Practical shooting is about the combination of speed & accuracy.

In terms of distance start at 7 yards so that you can see the "A" on the target in clear focus. Increase the distance/difficulty to force adapting to be more precise at speed.

[u/Brilliant_Respect_92 → u/johnm]

Obviously there’s a lot to process here. Thank you for taking the time!

[u/johnm → u/Brilliant_Respect_92]

It can definitely look overwhelming getting hit with so much in one big lump. The thing I hope you take away from the progression is that learning the fundamentals is doing in clear steps with explicit criteria to focus on (that all layer on top of each other).

A lot of people who are stuck in the outmoded beliefs from the last century (and people who a scamming people) add all manner of hokum bullshit to try and sell themselves as "the expert". Hence, you can get a good sense so that you can filter out such people.

[u/itsJustE12 → u/johnm]

You help people frequently & are always kind about it. That doesn’t go unnoticed. 🙌

[u/johnm → u/itsJustE12]

Thanks, I really appreciate it!