Karl pointed me to this great article by Tom Givens: Follow Through and Recovery: The Often Neglected Fundamentals. One of the best parts about the article is a great graphic they did on the shooting cycle. Click and read and look.

All too often what happens is someone shoots, and the moment the gun goes *bang* the follow-up motion is to drop the gun and cran their head over to try to see if they hit it.

That’s not right.

Gun goes bang, and you need to watch the front sight lift (which implies you were watching the front sight before the shot), gun recoils, you reset the trigger, gun comes down out of recoil, you reacquire the sight picture. That’s follow-through.

The hole in your target will be there 5 seconds from now, 5 weeks from now, 5 years from now. You don’t need to immediately determine if you hit or not; you can and should wait to make that determination. Follow through, recover, be prepared for the next shot. After all is done, THEN you can lower or reholster the gun and check your target.

What’s even better? If you keep watching that front sight, there will come in a time in your shooting when you’ll actually see the front sight lift up and out of the rear notch. When you can start doing this, you won’t need to look at your target. The moment the shot breaks you’ll already know.

Here’s a good video that USPSA GM Roy Stedman made to explain the concept: