When it comes time to shoot, will you be prepared to deliver the shot you have to? Will you have the skills needed to face down that moment, through all the stress and pressure? Have you invested the time needed to develop these skills so that they click in immediately and without a second thought?
Seasoned shooters are intimately familiar with what Rob Leatham and performance shooting calls the shooting process: bring stability to alignment, then press the trigger without disturbing that alignment.
Less-experienced shooters often underestimate the tremendous level of mental discipline required to follow this process — especially the discipline needed to resist the detrimental urge to “go fast.” Resolving this issue hinges on three elements, each of which must be clearly identified before an effective solution can be applied.
Each element of the shooting process presents a distinct problem that must be individually solved.
- Element 1 — building stability — means establishing enough structural support to stabilize the muzzle so you can produce an indexed alignment on demand.
- Element 2 — alignment — means maintaining enough visual patience to let the sights settle within an acceptable arc of wobble before you press the shot.
- Element 3 — pressing without disturbing alignment — means maintaining, and if necessary reacquiring, that alignment through the press, the recoil cycle, and either recovery on the same target or transition to the next.
Element 1 — Stability
Building stability is achieved either by drawing the handgun from the holster or by initiating rapid movement during a transition to another target. Let’s take the first and more difficult case: presentation from the holster. Assuming the fundamentals of safety, carry position, and acquisition are already in place, we can move directly into rapid deployment from either IWB or OWB.
How often have you had a poor initial strong-hand grip? How often a good one? If you carry concealed, how often have you fumbled your cover — or managed it cleanly? What percentage of each would you estimate over time? Regardless of how good or bad that initial grip is, you still have to make it work. When the support hand clicks in, stability transitions from strong-hand only to strong-hand supported, going from a less stable position to an optimally stable delivery platform.
Don’t miss Massad Ayoob’s shooting grip article.
Grip is only one cog in a mechanical process that demands both efficiency and control. Structural support, not talking about stance here, but how well you brace what physically supports the grip, comes from the forearms, elbows, shoulders, and upper torso. The greater the total structural support, including grip, the greater the resulting stability. The bottom line is the ability to rapidly establish optimal support.
Pro tips include splitting your practice into three phases. Phase one is acquiring the initial strong-hand grip; par time is typically around 0.5 seconds, plus or minus depending on gear. Phase two is welding the support hand along the presentation trajectory. This is the second and most stabilizing opportunity and should be completed before the sights enter your non-peripheral visual field. Phase three is establishing a “muzzle index,” where you kinesthetically lock into alignment by feel alone, with no visual verification yet. Cumulatively, this sequence should occur in approximately 0.8 seconds.
Element 2 — Alignment
Alignment is achieved through a two-part process. The first is kinesthetically, using your body’s proprioceptors as described above to index and the second to visually verify. If you’re running a red dot system (RDS) then your visual process is to burn a laser-beam hole like Superman in the smallest part of the target area of your intended target with hard visual focus and simply be aware of your dot.
Have you ever pressed off a round before you had either kinesthetic or visual confirmation? Yeah, well don’t do that! Optimal fire control is equally dependent on such confirmation as it is in building and keeping stability throughout the press. Having the discipline to remain visually patient is a skill that nobody is born with (except for Rob Leatham). It can only be developed and the only way to do that is visual discipline.
Pro tips include remaining target focused while being visually aware of your dot superimposing itself upon your “laser hole.” It can express itself in one of three ways based on the technical difficulty of the target. One is like a lightning bolt that is applicable to the least technical — larger target, closer range, low penalty and the like. Another is like a bouncing ball where the target presents more difficulty requiring a bit more stability, which shouldn’t cost more than a tenth of a second. On more demanding targets, the dot may need to float briefly as stability is refined before the shot breaks.
Element 3 — Press
Pressing without disturbing alignment is often the most difficult element because it requires maintaining the first two elements while completing the entire string of fire. Vigilance over consistent grip pressure and kinesthetic/ visual confirmation serve as the guidewires of sustained muzzle control.
How often have you changed your grip or lost visual patience during multiple rounds on the same target, or during a rapid transition? It happens to all of us. Discipline comes from recognizing these failures and remaining conscious of not repeating them — that awareness is the discipline.
Pro tip — the only time you change grip pressure is when you return to the holster. When do you relax visual patience? Never. On same-target follow-on shots, the muzzle should rise and fall along a 6–12 trajectory. During transitions, allow recoil to contribute to propulsion rather than resisting it.
Developing tactical patience for each element is a task in itself, but balancing all three together can initially feel like juggling bowling balls and hand grenades. A practical approach is to train each element independently, then combine Elements 1 and 2 into a single unit and finally integrate that unit with Element 3.
Conclusion
In the world of performance shooting speed and accuracy are illusory, artifacts of the aftermath. During the actual shooting process, they have no meaning or value; they are merely measurements of your performance applied after the fact. Shooters “trying to go fast” or “trying to be accurate” are distracting themselves from the shooting process.
You should be profoundly focused not on the outcome but on the process leading to that result. Such focus is built by developing the mental discipline required to make every round a demonstration of tactical patience.
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