From AccurateShooter, an interview with Julie Golob performed by Kelly Bachand (you may know him from the first season of “Top Shot”).

Here’s a good explanation of the concept of “acceptable sight picture”:

As [former IPSC National Champion Mike] Plaxco explained it, an acceptable sight picture is the degree to which you need to see your sights to make a good shot at X-distance. For instance, at 3 yards you only need to see a vague outline of the back of your slide superimposed on the target. At 10 yards, you need to see a rear sight and a front sight coarsely aligned. At 25 yards, you need a clear front sight in the rear sight’s notch, and at 50 yards you better have a perfect sight picture, the front sight clear and sharp, flush with the top of the front sight, with even gap on either side.

Brian Enos’ book Practical Shooting: Beyond Fundamentals discusses this concept, as well as many other relevant topics.

Karl Rehn actually helped me with this. We had some discussion some time ago about how to improve your split times. One key was then later reinforced in a comment Karl made here on my blog.

 

re: speed. Try working the problem backwards. At 3 yards, set yourself a par time of 1 second. Start with gun pointed at target, finger on trigger, trigger prepped. Lean forward and grip the gun as hard as you can. On the go signal, pull the trigger 5 times as fast as you can. Don’t wait for any visual information. Just observe what you see as you are pulling the trigger as fast as you can. Then inspect your hits. If they are all in the A-Zone, then whatever you saw is all you need to see. If they are not all in the A-Zone, back off the par time to 1.25 sec, 1.5 sec.

At 3 yards you should be able to shoot 0.20-0.25 splits.

You can work at it and get down to 0.15 splits at 3 yards, but honestly once you get to 0.20 splits, your time is better spent moving back to 7 yards and finding out what you need at 7, 10, 15 etc.

 

 

The key is to “just shoot” and not worry about the sight picture. Of course, you must do it in a safe and controlled manner, but still just shoot. The point is that you shouldn’t try to have your eyes do the work, then shoot, but instead just shoot. Let the mechanics work themselves out. Then instead of your eyes being involved in the shooting process, your eyes are just observers… let them take in what’s going on with the gun and sights. This will help your brain to say “OK, I know mechanically we’re shooting a good Bill Drill, so this is what the eyes see when shooting that good Bill Drill”. Your brain will learn what’s acceptable.