Some emails were being exchanged between KR Training instructors and students. One person mentioned how he was wanting to work on improving his split times (time between shots). Karl Rehn gave an informative reply and was kind enough to grant me permission to reprint his reply here.

1. Gunsmith the gun to have a lighter trigger pull with a shorter reset. This will buy you the most improvement fastest.

2. Don’t wait to see the sights again to start resetting and pressing the trigger again. If you work on this, put the target up against the back of the backstop and start at 3 yards from the backstop so if you let one go early (high) it does not go over the berm.

3. Work on Bill Drills (6 shots) not “double taps.” Practicing “double taps” will teach you to get one sight picture and slap the trigger twice (Alpha-Mike syndrome). Bill Drills will teach you how to be consistent in your shot cycle. Set up a full IPSC target at 3 yards, set yourself a par time of 4 sec to draw and fire 6 shots. If you hit all A’s in 4 sec, drop the par time by 10% (0.4 sec) and try it again. Keep dropping by 10% until you are shooting ½ A’s and ½ C’s. Don’t worry about what you are seeing or “not seeing.” Just look at the hits on the paper after each drill. A Master class score for a 3 yard Bill Drill is 2 sec (1 sec draw, 0.16 splits approx).

Repeat the drill at 7 yards, 10 yards, 15 yards. Longer distances — draw time should be the same but splits will slow down as distance increases.

The best way to learn to go fast is to set par times and force yourself to go fast and make the times regardless of the hits. You have to teach your brain to process the information at that speed. Once you have basic technique down, trying to get fast by being careful and consistent won’t get you there. You have to start in your comfort zone, then push to find the edge of what you can do and then dial it back to 90% of your max.

What you have to learn is the “rhythm” of your gun — when it is ready to fire again. At some point you may have to go back to equipment mods — heavier guide rods, lighter loads, trying different weight recoil sprints, to “tune” the gun’s recoil cycle. If you get your splits down in the 0.15 – 0.20 level at 7 yards then there’s limited “return in investment” by spending ammo trying to go beyond that. There are a lot of other skills that are more important than split times (target acquisition, movement) that shouldn’t be neglected obsessing about hitting 0.11 splits.

If you don’t know what some of these terms mean, I intentionally did not link to stuff because either it should mean you’re not ready for this level of stuff or you’ll be better served by Googling on it yourself and exploring and learning.

But I did want to post one cool thing about the Bill Drill, from Brian Enos:

With a target, what do you need to see? One thing you might notice is that you’ve gotten in a blind rush to make the time. So what did (or didn’t) you see? Sometimes recollecting what you didn’t see tells as much as knowing what you did see.

As the old Kuk Sool saying goes “We need more practice, sir!”