How to Shoot Better at 25 Yards

[Music] hey everybody chris baker here from luckygunner.com for most pistol shooters something seems to happen when the target is between about 15 and 25 yards where their confidence level just plummets we tend to do most of our pistol shooting at closer distances it's easier that way we can shoot faster which is more fun and for self-defense purposes or even like action pistol competition those closer ranges are a lot more relevant anyway that said a truly well-rounded pistol shooter doesn't have any problem getting hits out at 25 or 50 yards and beyond even with some pretty tight time constraints so today i want to give you some practical tangible steps you can take to improve your long range pistol shooting but first let's define our goal what does proficiency at 25 yards look like i think a good yard stick is the kyle de four pistol hat call this is a test that kyle runs in his pistol classes if you pass it you earn a hat the target is a b8 bullseye repair center placed at 25 yards on the beep you draw and fire 10 rounds and you have a time limit of 20 seconds score the target as marked any hits off the paper are zero points the maximum score is a hundred passing requires a score of 90 or higher now this has become a fairly popular shooting test for evaluating proficiency out at 25 yards you may have even seen it before there are a lot of videos out there of other people demoing the test of course they always seem to pass it in those demos but the brutally honest truth is that most shooters are not going to be able to just go to the range and nail this on their first try unless they're regularly practicing out at longer distances i actually ran through the defour hat call with john johnston the last time he was in town and we were filming a batch of videos for this series we each shot it three times because kyle gives his students three opportunities to pass the test during his classes john got really close a couple of times and didn't quite get a passing score i managed to eke out a 90 on my second attempt but my first and third were pretty rough with an 80 and a 74. overall it was a pretty humbling experience now normally i would show you the commentary that john and i did afterwards but honestly neither of us really had much to say at the time that was useful the basic takeaway was that we should both practice more at 25 yards because it's hard and everybody already knows that so i'm changing things up a little bit today instead of just showing you the tests and saying good luck let's look at how to actually get better the hard way is to just shoot the test over and over and hope for the best the better approach is to break it down into smaller pieces and drill those pieces individually so i put together a little practice session based on the defor hat call yesterday i tried out that practice session at the range now i haven't been doing much pistol shooting at all lately i'm way out of practice i was kind of worried this practice session was going to be an absolute disaster and i would not have anything to show you guys but it actually went really well it ended up being a good way to kind of knock the rust off and also focus on some skills that i don't usually spend a whole lot of time on so today i'm going to walk you through that practice session now i know ammo is in short supply these days you probably don't want to burn through a few hundred rounds every time you go to the range this practice session can be done with as few as 40 rounds 50 at the most we're gonna do everything today at 25 yards with b8 bullseye repair center targets you can buy these or i will leave a link in the description so you can print out your own uh my demo gun today is a sig p365xl with a swamp fox optic sentinel red dot i reviewed this gun a few months back i'm still really happy with it i've also got some pistol optic reviews coming sometime down the road so far this swamp fox dot has been a great addition to this gun having a decent red dot has almost completely eliminated some of the most serious shortcomings of shooting a smaller gun like this now you absolutely can do some good work at 25 yards and beyond with iron sights but it's hard to overstate just how much easier it is with a red dot and i'll talk more about that in just a minute let's get to the practice session okay so the first thing i would suggest is to fire five rounds with no time limit preferably seated with a bench rest of some kind doesn't have to be anything fancy you can just use a table and your range bag if you want now these might end up being the five most important rounds of the whole practice session so i'm gonna park it here for just a minute what we're looking for with these five shots is first to confirm our zero and second to make sure we can actually shoot a reasonably tight group if you can't get five rounds in the black shooting from the bench at a leisurely pace trying to pass the defore hat claw is probably just gonna be frustrating and you're not gonna learn anything so instead we would need to go into diagnostic mode and trying to figure out what's wrong the most common culprits are probably trigger control or maybe some kind of recoil anticipation either of those are going to mess up our sight alignment even small errors that we make in sight alignment can have a magnified effect out at 25 yards if you don't press the trigger straight to the rear without disturbing the sights you're going to miss at 25 even with a bag or a rest for support mastering the trigger press could probably be a book all on its own so i'll just leave it at that for now if you are pretty sure your trigger control was solid for those first five shots but your group is off center especially with rounds outside the black the next thing i would look at would be hardware issues related to your sights or your optic very few handgun manufacturers actually zero their guns at the factory usually the sights will be close enough so that you can hit something like an 8 inch circle at 10 or 15 yards with no problem but now we're out at 25 yards and this black circle is five and a half inches wide your zero can make a huge difference for something like that obviously with a red dot optic it's really easy to adjust your zero if you need to with iron sights you can usually drift the rear sight for windage if you have the right tools elevation is not as easy to change you're going to need a file or a new front sight blade fortunately with modern semi-autos the elevation is usually going to be pretty close right out of the box however the gun might not be set up for the type of sight picture that you prefer now again this is something that you probably haven't noticed when you're shooting big targets up close but at 25 it definitely matters so for example the sights on your gun might be set up for six o'clock where you've got to have the top of the front sight lined up with the very bottom of the bullseye in order to hit the center of the target or it might be set up so that you need to bisect the black in order to hit the center or it might be that you have to cover the center with the dot on your front sight because your rounds are going to go right where that dot is if you don't already know what your sights are going to do with 25 just take these first five shots to figure it out pick the sight picture you prefer and fire five good shots from a rest with a perfect trigger press hopefully you'll have a nice group on that target and that's going to tell you whether you need to change your sight picture or make some hardware changes you might also need to try a different type of ammo your point of impact can wander quite a bit depending on what load you're using now what if you're having problems with shot consistency maybe you've got a nice group except for one flyer that's way off on its own or you've got a group that's evenly distributed around the center of the target but it's just a really big group again the black circle here is about five and a half inches wide if we can't shoot a five round group from the bench that's smaller than five and a half inches passing that test is probably going to be out of the question again it could be a problem with trigger control or recoil anticipation if we rule those things out the next potential cause i would look at would be inconsistent sight picture so you've got a good sight picture it's just not the same from shot to shot are the sights in the same place relative to the target every time you fire now this gets a little tricky at 25 yards with iron sights if you shoot with a sharp visual focus on the front sight the way most of us were taught that black circle probably looks more like this at 25 yards so i prefer a sight picture where i bisect the circle like that because i can be a little more consistent if i'm doing a six o'clock hold i can't always tell is the is the front sight is that at six o'clock or is that at six o'clock there's some wiggle room here and then uh if i'm supposed to be covering the target with the dot uh you know 25 it's actually going to be more like it's going to cover more of the target you might not be able to tell exactly where your front sight is so if you can't get it in the same place every time you're going to end up with flyers sometimes to work around the target being blurry we might subconsciously shift our visual focus from the front sight to the target then back to the front sight to kind of make sure everything is just right and lined up without realizing it we might even do this as we're pressing the trigger and i think that can actually cause some flyers i think it's better to just commit get a sight picture lock in your visual focus on the front sight or on the target if you're a target focused shooter and then press the trigger if your eyesight prevents you from getting a sharp focus on the front sight you might be trying to precisely line up one blurry thing with another blurry thing that's going to be really difficult to do consistently a red dot optic might be worth considering if that's the case i'll say it again for everyone visual issues or not a red dot tends to make life a lot easier at these longer distances it's really no contest getting a good sight picture takes a fraction of the effort that it does with iron sights once you shoot with a dot at 25 it's really hard to go back now unfortunately red dot optics are not immune to these problems with visual focus with a red dot your focus should be on the target and you just superimpose the dot over that if you get a lot of bloom when you see the dot which can happen if you have an astigmatism or simply because the dot is too bright the dot might appear to be larger than the target you can't tell if you're actually centered on the bullseye that's going to make your groups open up even if you've got perfect trigger control one last thing that might be a problem for consistency is again the ammo anytime i review a pistol i always shoot some groups from the bench at 25 yards with several different loads most of the time a gun has a couple of loads that it will shoot really well with like groups around one to three inches at 25 yards it'll have several loads that it shoots okay with groups around three or four inches and then it'll have maybe one or two loads that it hates and sometimes it won't shoot better than six inches maybe even eight or nine inches usually the best groups come from some of the premium hollow points but every now and then sometimes the worst groups also come from the premium hollow points you can't make any assumptions about the groups you're going to get solely based on how much you paid for the ammo now more often than not i can get groups around three to four inches or better with everyday full metal jacket range ammo if a gun won't group well with one load nine times out of ten the groups will get better with the next load you try okay so that is your first five rounds if you make any changes to your gun or to the way you're shooting do another five round group from the bench before you move on if you don't get a nice five round group in the black within a few tries maybe this isn't the day to practice at 25 yards most of us can't afford to waste a whole lot of ammo right now so just know when to call it a day or switch over to some drills that you can do at closer range if you are in the black then we're going to move on to the next step we're going to get up from the bench and alternate dry repetitions and live fire no timer yet take as much time as you need but no more than that with our dry wraps we are just getting used to holding that sight picture then a nice smooth trigger press without disturbing that sight picture as the shot breaks take a break rack the slide and do it again repeat that until you've done at least 10 dry reps then load up the gun and fire five individual shots again slow fire no time limit if you need to bring the gun down to a low ready or a compressed ready in between shots and take a little break we basically want to confirm that what we are doing in dry fire is gonna get us on target after five rounds go and check the target for this whole practice session don't fire more than five rounds without going to look at the target i've got 20 20 vision and i can just barely see some of the nine millimeter holes when the light is just right at 25 yards maybe you can see your hits from the firing line but most of us will need to go downrange and take a look at the target if we're not getting any feedback from the rounds we're shooting we're not accomplishing anything it does us absolutely no good to fire 20 or 30 rounds before we see what's actually happening when we pull a trigger if you've got any rounds outside of let's say the eight ring here hopefully you called those shots and you knew something was off when you pulled the trigger if you've got multiple rounds off the paper completely you should probably repeat this step keep doing the slow fire thing until you can figure out what you need to fix if that means you don't have enough ammo left to do this whole practice session that's totally fine i think it's time well spent to diagnose some problems and fix your shooting patch up the holes or get a new b8 and then go back and do 10 more dry reps this time focus on not over confirming the sights if you are in the black on the last five you know you can do a good trigger press at this point so as soon as you see a decent sight picture that's your go signal see what you need to see then make the shot after those 10 dry reps do five more live rounds now this time do them all as one continuous string i would suggest using the timer but you're not holding yourself to any specific time limit at this point just fire five rounds as quickly as you think you can stay in the black check your split times and that will give you an idea of how your pace compares to where you would need to be for the defore test that test is 10 rounds in 20 seconds so to be on the safe side you want to be a little under two seconds in between shots maybe around 1.7 or 1.8 at the most but don't let that timer push you around if you're not getting your hits you have to figure out what needs to be fixed before you worry about the timer at the same time going too slow can actually hurt your accuracy sometimes you don't want to over confirm the sights or overthink your trigger press you don't want to stand there so long that you get visually physically and mentally fatigued sometimes if you just go for it you will actually see your group size shrink right away okay after that five shot string go check your target paste it up next repeat 10 dry reps and a five shot live fire string if your first five shot string looks good and you feel like you're on a roll and you just wanna jump straight to five more live rounds i think that's probably okay if you think you could benefit from more dry reps than do those first so at this point we have fired 20 rounds total we did five from the bench five careful individual shots standing and two five shot strings with the with the timer to tell us what pace we're firing for the next ten live rounds we're going to work from the holster but we'll do it dry first this will be just like the first dry reps that we did we're just going to add the draw stroke to it when you do this think draw quickly shoot carefully we obviously have to take a little more care with our site alignment and our trigger press at 25 yards than we would at say seven yards but there's no reason for the draw stroke itself to be any slower so go ahead and draw at full speed the way you normally would and just get the gun out there now for me when i haven't practiced in a while the first thing to suffer is my draw stroke it gets much slower and i lose consistency so i ended up doing a lot more than 10 dry reps on this on any of these you can always do extra dry reps it doesn't cost you anything just don't do so many that you start getting tired or sloppy after your dry practice try it with five live rounds take time to recover in between each shot and go at whatever pace you need to go to guarantee a hit check your target then we're going to repeat all that but we're going to add the timer so for this next set of dry reps we will set up the timer with a second beep for our par time when i did it yesterday i set a par time of two seconds i think that's a pretty good goal to aim for at 25. in hindsight that actually ended up being a little overly ambitious for me at this point considering how out of practice i am with my drawstroke i felt pretty rushed at two seconds and i wasn't getting the kind of clean sight picture that i knew i should have at 25 you have to be honest with yourself in dry practice was the gun really on target when the trigger broke or did you just pull the trigger because you thought it seemed like it was time to the first shot out of the holster is super important and it's the one that you're probably most likely to miss if you had 1.7 or 1.8 or better splits on those five round strings a minute ago that's a pretty good pace for the test at that pace you can afford to take a little extra time on that first shot even if your draw is three seconds that's still going to get you under 20 seconds on a 10 shot string next go ahead and fire five live rounds from the holster with the timer you can leave the par time on or turn it off i decided to turn it off i averaged about two and a half seconds for this set of five but i threw my last one almost out of the eight ring so now we're at 30 rounds total so far you might be at 35 or 40 if you had to make some adjustments at the bench for our last 10 rounds we are going to put it all together and shoot the actual defour hat call 10 rounds and 20 seconds from the holster here is my attempt from yesterday that low shot that i fired on the draw stroke practice had me a little nervous so i ended up really taking my time on the draw honestly it was probably too much time it was just over three seconds but once i got going i felt pretty good and i ended up firing at a little faster pace than i had in the practice i finished with a 1606 with a score of 95. i'm pretty happy with that especially considering how little trigger time i've had lately that's five points better than the best of three from the last time i attempted the de four hat qual i still had 10 rounds left in my box of ammo so i decided to give it one more try and make sure that first one wasn't a fluke the second time i finished in 16.62 with a score of 94. i think that's pretty good progress for a practice session that only used 50 rounds so to summarize all of that here is how your 25 yard one box ammo practice session breaks down first fire five rounds from the bench to confirm zero inaccuracy next ten dry reps standing at the 25 yard line with no time limit fire five individual live rounds with no time limit 10 dry reps at a faster pace press the trigger as soon as you get a good sight picture with a shot timer fire five live rounds and one continuous string take note of your split times repeat 10 fast dry reps fire another 5 shot string with the timer 10 dry reps from the holster no time limit draw and fire 5 live rounds no time limit 10 dry reps from the holster with a par time draw and fire five single live rounds with a timer and then attempt the actual defor hat qual all right guys that's it i hope you found that useful give it a try and let me know how it goes [Music] you

Channel: Lucky Gunner Ammo

Views: 285,165

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Id: O1xUFA4ZD2Q

Length: 20min 37sec (1237 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 13 2020

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[u/SetYourGoals]

Sucks that I can't support Lucky Gunner by buying ammo through them, because ammo doesn't exist.