The last BP2/DPS1 class I helped with at KR Training generated a bunch of thoughts in my head. I thought I’d make a small series out of it.

DVC

The motto of IPSC is abbreviated DVC, which stands for Diligentia, Vis, Celeritas, or accuracy, power and speed. All of these things are critical to successful shooting. We don’t need to discuss power here… the 9mm vs. .45 ACP debate can rage elsewhere. Let’s talk about accuracy and speed.

There are camps that say accuracy is most important. There are camps that say speed is most important. And then there’s the camps that say both are important. Me? I think both are important. It can be the most accurate shot, but if you can’t get it off in the time needed what good is it? It can be the fastest shot possible, but if it doesn’t hit what you wanted, what good is it? The fastest miss is still a miss, the bullseye that hit after it counts doesn’t matter.

That all said, accuracy and speed are opposing forces. The faster you go, the less accurate you’ll be. The more accurate you try to be, the slower you will go. So it’s about finding a balance.

But more important, it’s about finding YOUR balance.

A lot of people in the DPS1 class just blasted away at the targets. Yes they were fast, but they didn’t hit what needed to be hit. I’m sure if there was a shoot-off between Karl and these students, they could both shoot at the same speed but not at the same level of accuracy. You cannot judge by someone else’s standard. You have to find the rate at which YOU can accurately shoot and not shoot beyond that level. You want to go as fast as YOU can to get good hits. If that’s not fast enough for class well, realize again that we’re just going to put pressure upon you. If you are improving and doing better now than you did before, that’s all that really matters.

Qualifications

From time to time, push yourself beyond your limits. Get a shot timer. Shoot some courses. If you Google around you can find tons of different drills and qualification/standards courses. Some are simple tests, others work out specific skills. Whatever you pick, Karl told me a good way to run these courses. Run the course with no regard to time. That is, a string may say “3 shots in 5 seconds”. Well, just do 3 shots and ignore the time. What you want to do is run the course with no pressure, and clean the course: all A-zone hits, 100% score. What that does is shows you can run the course. If you can’t run the course, the course may be too advanced or there may just be areas that you need work before you run the course (e.g. weak-hand-only shooting for groups at 25 yards), so go address those things. But once you can run the course clean with no time pressures, now run the course again to establish your own par times. So now turn on the timer but don’t set par times… just a start signal and record your shot times. Again, run the course at the same speed you ran it clean, clean the course, and see how long it took you to run that string. Record it. This establishes YOUR par times. Now you can compare it to the established times, and that can give you some measure of where things lie but don’t stress over it too much. What is key is for you to progress. So let’s say you did those 3 shots in 7 seconds. Next time, work to do those 3 shots in 6.5 seconds: set up the timer with a 6.5 second par time and work to get all A-zone hits within time. If you can do that, bump the time down to 6.0 seconds, and so on. Just keep pushing yourself. If you get to 6.0 seconds and are making 1 A and 2 C hits, now it’s time to analyze and work on that level. And so on and so on.

Accuracy and speed are both important. I perhaps edge just slight on the side of accuracy (take that quarter of a second to find the sights… it’s faster than realizing you missed and having to take a second shot), but perhaps because it’s the very thing I’m working on myself right now (reminding myself to take that quarter of a second).