Check out this video of top-shooter Max Michel drawing, shooting 18 shots, 2 reloads, under 5 seconds

Yeah, with an open gun, but let’s see you do it with an open gun. 🙂

After you’ve watched it a few times and picked your jaw up off the floor, there’s a few things worth pointing out.

• On the draw (most evident during the “side” replay), notice that the only thing that moves is his arms/hands? His body doesn’t squat down. His head doesn’t duck down. When he draws, he doesn’t bring his body down to the gun, he brings the gun up to his eye-target line.
• When he reloads, he looks at the magazine well. He watches what he’s doing.
• Economy of motion. When he reloads, the gun stays up there instead of dropping down and in — the gun has to come back up there to shoot again, so why waste time/energy to put it back? as well, it keeps everything in the same eye target line, so less time to reacquire the sight picture.
• Follow through. He doesn’t stop to check what he’s doing, no looking at the target to see if he hit, no dropping the last shot — he shoots everything until he’s done shooting, THEN looks at the timer. Oh sure it’s still quick, but the whole thing was quick — he still followed through until the end.
• Pause the video during the side shot. Look at his grip and stance. Arms extended but not locked. Look at the muscles in his forearms — he’s gripping the gun like mad (as we like to say “Homer choking Bart”).

But the biggest thing that struck me was how even as fast as he’s going, he still shifts his eyes to look at the mag well when he’s reloading. It probably stood out to me due to all the recent classes I’ve been involved in, since reloading was a skill to be used. Too many people reloading without looking (I was guilty of this in the past). Too many people dropping the gun and reloading down at their belly, etc..  So that just stood out to me when I watched the video.

Another thing? It’s all fundamentals. Oh sure he’s got a race gun and race gear, and that does help the overall time. But if he didn’t have the technique, the equipment wouldn’t matter. It was sights, trigger, follow-through, etc.. All the basics.

I can’t shoot anywhere on the level of Max, but I know there’s wisdom in modeling after success.

(Edited to add): sometimes I write and queue up for publication at a later date. This was one of those times. Well, after having written this but before publication, TLG wrote an article that touched on this very thing about looking while reloading. Give it a read.