How to shoot better sustained fire scores, Dave Salyer, 4/18/2016

How to shoot better sustained fire scores, Dave Salyer 4/18/2016 
1** Accept your present wobble area rather than trying to reduce it.
2** Standardize your thought process during raising the arm and shooting.
3** Apply steady pressure straight back on the trigger while not altering your firm grip on the pistol.
4** Keep this pressure mounting until the gun is in recoil.
5** Immediately, start mounting pressure straight back on the trigger again even though the gun is at peak recoil.
6** Continue  applying trigger pressure steadily while recovering from recoil at a rate that will cause the shot to leave the barrel sometime while sights or dot are in your aiming, wobble, area.
7** Repeat the process when the bullet has just left the barrel.




Back-up Comments on each step:

1**
Your hold ability or wobble area will be a certain size on a given minute, hour or match day.  Accept it.
You can improve on it in a training session of dry firing or holding/gripping exercises on another day. 
No need to try and hold in a smaller area than what’s comfortable on match day. Struggling will cause trigger errors. Shots that go outside your comfortable wobble area are the result of trigger errors!
Again, accept your comfortable hold area and smoothly apply ever increasing trigger pressure straight to the rear. The shots will land within your hold area and cluster to the middle.
 
2**
Talk to yourself! Repeat a one or two word instruction before each shot in slow fire and before each string in sustained. This will trigger your conscious and subconscious mind to concentrate on the exact same thing for each shot. Some top shooters go through the commands from, “Is the line ready?” to “Ready on the firing line.” before each shot or string.

3** and 4**
Notice that this instruction does not mention shoot or shot. This is an important point! You do not want to know or decide exactly when to shoot. Your job is to pressure the trigger straight back until the trigger stops. The shot will happen somewhere between starting the trigger pressure and when the gun recoils. Your job is just to actuate the trigger somewhere within the window of time that the sights have entered anywhere into the wobble area. Follow through will be achieved.

5**
As soon as the gun recoils restart the above process of applying pressure to the trigger and moving the sights or dot back into the aiming area. This is recovery, not follow through.
In slow fire, stop the recovery process there.
In sustained fire keep applying pressure to the trigger until it is stopped against the frame. Some call this keeping the trigger moving. If this is done without hesitation there will be plenty of time to squeeze off five shots in rapid fire without being rushed. 

6** 
We often worry about time especially in rapid fire. We often take too much time trying to refine our aim in slow as well as timed. The hesitation associated with this causes trigger errors and bad shots. Each time the trigger pressure is stopped and restarted, the gun’s angle changes away from the center of the target. Emphasize smooth unhesitating trigger pull rather than consciously emphasizing aiming. Your subconscious will help you do the pointing.



Hand to eye co-ordination:

We hear a lot about this being good for athletes. It doesn’t work too well with shooters because we must do it backwards. We must take what we see and do hand and finger coordination to cause a shot to leave the barrel at the right time and direction. This is not so precise because what we think we are seeing is not real time but is actually recent history. Plus, it takes a finite amount of time for what’s happening to reach the eye, move to the brain for processing and send a message to the trigger finger to pull the trigger. By the time the shot fires the sights have moved around somewhere else in the aiming area. (Hopefully)
So, again, we must start and continue trigger movement before we see a perfect sight picture.
We can achieve almost perfect sight alignment with our eye by choosing the same grip on the pistol for each string. Then sight picture can be the less precise but adequate to keep our shot(s) inside our aiming area. Nature and statistics will make most hits cluster in the middle of our area. 
 
P.S.
No matter who you are, shots that hit in your aiming area are good shots and will most likely cause you to win your class.

It’s the misses, 5’s and 6’s that subtract significantly from your score, not the 8’s and 9’s!

For many people, l suspect that slowing the total trigger time period down such that the shot discharges just as, or after the pistol wobble has settled in will be beneficial. Letting the shot happen, not making it happen. It's a magical and wonderful feeling like watching TV with the gun either stopping or drifting towards center as it fires. You'll remember it but getting it all the time is tough...

I’ve always thought that smooth triggering is the key to good bullseye shooting.   If you can learn how to do it in competition, just the way you do when you dry fire, you will most likely never shoot outside your area of hold.   

There have been days when I was tired, and just gave up worrying about my hold.   Thought about the trigger only.   Good shots just somehow appeared well inside the black.   Amazing how that happens.

I used to shoot with Dave at matches around SC back 20 yrs ago. He always shot at or near the top just about every match. Like his personality, he writes in an easy going, matter of fact kind of way.
For a while, he was recovering from an arm injury, so he switched to left hand shooting. Quickly, he was shooting Master level scores.
That illustrates the importance of mentally understanding the fundamentals.
Jim