Written by: Greg Ellifritz
My friend Claude Werner recently wrote an article where he postulated most shooters don’t do any real structured practice with their firearms. They plink or play, but they generally don’t perform drills designed with realistic standards in order to improve performance. In the article, Claude talked about sharing details and photos of his practice routines to give novice shooters an idea about how they might better spend their practice time.
I think that is a wonderful idea. I plan on sharing the drills I shoot in my weekly practice sessions. Hopefully, you will get a little value out of my posts and come up with some new drills to make your own practice sessions more effective.
I’ve been slacking a bit lately. I normally try to practice at least once a week. Due to some family medical problems, my free time has been a bit tighter than usual for the last six weeks. My weekly shooting has degraded to just two sessions in the last month and a half. This session was the first time I had shot in three weeks.
My stated practice plan this year was to begin each session with the Guerilla Approach Consistency Drill. I ran the drill twice with my Glock 17 duty gun. I expected horrible performance but I didn’t do as badly as I expected.
Round 1- 22.46 with five misses = 27.46
Round 2- 22.55 with one miss = 23.55
After the consistency target, I did a few runs of the 10-10-10 Drill.
I ran the drill as designed twice (with times of 8.75 and 8.8 seconds). I then ran it as 6-2-2 with six rounds fired two handed, two rounds right hand only, and two rounds left hand only. I didn’t make the time goal with that version, shooting it in 11.64 seconds.
I then ran the drill two more times, adding a reload to each string of fire. I barely made the par time, shooting 9.99 and 9.64 seconds.
The target from my 10-10-10 runs with the G17
I then ran the 10-10-10 drill again with my .22 magnum S&W 351C. The gun only holds seven rounds, so that’s all I fired each string. I started out doing three runs two handed with times between 4.98 and 5.61 seconds. I finished up with four more runs shooting the drill 4-2-1 (four rounds two handed, two rounds RHO, and 1 round LHO). My times on those drills ranged between 7.43 and 8.32 seconds.
My 10-10-10 target with the .22 mag snubnose. Note the significantly larger group than the target I shot with my G17.
I finished up test firing some rounds I wanted to try for low noise/ low penetration injured animal destruction. For what it’s worth, neither the low noise “quiet” CCI .22 rounds nor the CCI .22 shotshells cycled the slide on my Ruger SR22 pistol.
Total rounds fired:
119 9mm Glock 17
50 .22 magnum S&W 351C
15 .22 LR Ruger SR-22
