Shooting steel

[mongo404]

I worked and shot the Indiana state steel challenge saturday. The experience was humbling at least. Our first stage was smoke and hope. Oh boy was I embarassed I am so use to shooting uspsa targets. Now dont get me wrong I am not that bad of a shot but you couldnt tell it then. So I really started focusing on my front sight and my times and hit started to improve a bit. And I noticed I was really noticing my front sight rise with each shot which I thought that I was before but to my surprise I wasnt really seeing it. The other thing that I noticed that helped was getting my arms to full extention without locking the elbows. Once I started doing both of these things together I noticed that I was gettting alot better times by the end of match. The best thing about this revelation was that It seemed to transfer to the uspsa match Sunday at Wabash which just tickled me to death cause I had a great match there if I am not mistaken I shot the match clean with pretty good times. Even had a great classifier which is very unusual for me. I was just thinking about it and thought that I would pass along my experience maybe it will help somebody else. Needless to say I will probably be shooting steel more often. Using steel as training day for front sight focus doesnt seem to bad to me.

 

[slow1911s]

Variety is the spice of (shooting) life.

If USPSA is your primary game, Steel Challenge and Action Pistol (not being shot currently in IN, but there is some hope to revive it in 2011) will help you with your goals.

Steel Challenge is a good skill builder because (1) to do it right you need to shoot with your eyes not your ears and (2) there is a heavy emphasis on on target-to-target transitions. The moment you can call a hit on a steel target without relying on the "ping", you're ahead of 90% of the people who step to the line. Steel also teaches you how snap your eyes ahead of your sights to the next target. Lastly, it is much more of an accuracy game than people give it credit for. And those who treat it like one are ahead of, again, 90% of the people who step up to the line.

Action Pistol teaches you about accuracy under a time constraint. Yes, the target is the NRA D1, and it is as big as a USPSA paper target. But THE target is a 4" X-ring for 144 of the 192 shots of the championship match. Can you hit a 4" circle at 10 yds on two targets in 3 seconds? Hit that same 4" circle twice on two targets at 50 yds in 10 seconds. Even better, hit that same 4" circle six times at at 35 yds while standing behind a 2'x6" barricade in 9 seconds. If you can do any of those on demand, there isn't a shot in USPSA you can't make.