Shooting Career
Career Path
Sports shooting should be about skills and not about equipment. Proper instruction, effective practice and perseverance are a better path to enjoy shooting sports and be successful than buying fancy and expensive gear. SwissAAA and selected partners offer a well-proven career path for competitive shooters.
The foundation provides the fundamentals of shooting and hitting. The fundamentals remain the same, independent of whatever specialization one wants to explore afterwards. Whether competing in dynamic sports shooting, carrying a firearm on armed duty or participating in traditional precision shooting: sound fundamentals are the basis for safety and success in any case. Specification facilitates the start as an IDPA competitor for pistol, revolver and PCC (Pistol Caliber Carbine). From there, the next step is to actually compete and keep a focused practice schedule in order to become a better shooter!
The career path is designed to take you from beginners to master level - if you do your part of course. Take contact today and get moving up the career path!
Foundation: Basic Firearm Education
What is included in a good basic pistol education? What skills should you have in order to start with dynamic sports shooting? Well, actually with any type of activity involving pistol shooting?
A solid foundation for pistol shooting should at least comprise the following skills:
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Understand and automatically apply the four universal firearms safety rules. Always and under all circumstances.
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Know the main pistol parts and their function
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Execute pistol disassembly, maintenance and re-assembly
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Safely execute drawing and re-holstering
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Understand and apply the five fundamentals of shooting: stance, grip, aiming, breathing, triggering
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Execute the basic pistol manipulations: load, unload, PSC (Personal Safety Check), magazine change and reload
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Shoot and hit from standing, kneeling, crouching and prone positions at distances of 5-25m
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Produce accurate hits with fast double taps
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Shoot and hit after drawing from the holster
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Swiftly clear simple as well as extended malfunctions
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Shoot and hit one handed (left and right)
You should be able to perform and apply all of the above correctly on your own without any pressure in order to move up from the foundation level. Those skills form a sound basic pistol competency, irrespective of the following specification steps.
Whether you will carry your gun on duty or for civilian self defense or you will become a sports shooter in any discipline you choose, with this foundation you will be able to acquire the additional, specifically required capabilities building up on a solid and universally relevant basis.
The Four Universal Safety Rules
There are four universal safety rules that every shooter has to apply at all times and under all circumstances. They are valid for all types of firearms.
Do it always and don't accept any exceptions or excuses!
The Five Fundamentals of Shooting
Effective shooting is based on five fundamentals. In the center is the shooter and his or her mental and physical capabilities. Whether you do target shooting, dynamic shooting or self defense training: the fundamentals remain the same, while their execution may differ depending on the circumstances.
Most, if not all, shooting success as well as shooting mistakes can be traced back to solid or lacking fundamentals!
Specification and Application: Advanced Firearm Education
After the generic basic pistol education, you can chose to start your career in dynamic sport shooting.
The additional skills you will learn in order to be successful include:
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Sports rules and their application in competitions
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Shooting and hitting from behind barricades
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Shooting and hitting while moving
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Efficient movement techniques and optimal departure from and arrival in shooting positions
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Manipulating while moving
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Building and using muscle memory
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Mental preparation and superior competition performance
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Overcoming perceived performance barriers
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Stage execution planning
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Training strategies, planning and execution
Many of the general methods known from other sports apply to advanced-level dynamic shooting as well. The more you invest, the bigger the return.
Performance Factors
A very common trap that catches many shooters is to keep buying new guns, parts and equipment and expect to somehow perform better with all the new kit.
Of course, your equipment has to be reliable and it has to fit your individual characteristics such as for example hand size or eye sight. If a pistol keeps malfunctioning or doesn't fit your hand or you can't acquire the front sight well, then you need to make the necessary changes in order to free the path to performance improvement. If you don't, you will be stuck fighting against a sub-optimal setup.
On the other hand, if you don't know how to execute a proper shooting position or how to move efficiently, then an expensive 'race' gun or a super-light tuning trigger won't really get you anywhere.
The graphic shows some subjective estimations of the importance and the investment done in the most common success factors that make you a better shooter. It's not scientific, there's no thesis behind it but it's probably not far from the truth. You should invest in the most important factors and reap the benefits. There's no way around sound fundamentals, hard practice and physical and mental fitness!
Training Effort and Performance Progress
The 80/20 Rule or Pareto Principle states that with 20% of effort 80% of the result can be achieved. However, for the next 20% of the desired result you will need 80% of total effort spent. The principle comes from project management but is probably applicable to sports activities as well. Whether it's exactly 80/20 or rather something like 70/30 is beside the point.
At the beginning of your shooting career, using simple and regular practice sessions based on sound basic know-how will enhance your shooting capabilities dramatically. You will get better almost from one training session to the next one.
If you are on a fairly high performance level, making further progress will prove increasingly hard to achieve. You will need to practice multiple times a week and keep a detailed record of your exercises, the training results and make expert analysis on it to adapt your training program. Individual coaching and specialized, proven training programs are going to be a big plus. To get near your personal maximum will take years of practice and experience!
Repetitions
Remember that repetition makes perfect. In sports, there's a rule of thumb saying that about 10'000 repetitions are needed in order to really learn a particular physical skill.
Let's take the magazine change as an example: if you perform 20 repetitions a day, five times a week, it will take you roughly two years to become really good at it.
Make sure to you adopt efficient movements and the right coordination and timing before you push for faster times.
Here's the good news though: each repetition will make you a little better and will bring you closer to your goal!
Equipment
Choosing the right equipment is an important factor to enjoying shooting sports and advancing your skills.
There's a lot of advice out there, some good and some less good. Buying fancy shooting gadgets is fun if one can afford it, but it will not help much if your techniques are flawed and your practice is lacking or ineffective. That said, there are some best practices you can follow when choosing equipment. Watch some of them in the Online Academy under 'Introduction' or below on youtube. Additionally, some practical equipment tests can be found here.
