These things are not contradictory. That same person would have to lift their finger 1/2 inch if the reset was long, and wait for the trigger to come back if reset wasn't positive. A short, positive reset is generally beneficial regardless of trigger work technique used.

Prepping works, Jones taught me that

When the feces exits the bowels and deposits into the pantaloons, nine out of ten shooters will be slapping that trigger like a newborn baby. That's what comes natural. And they will do what comes natural because they don't train.

quote:

Originally posted by Photoman:
When the feces exits the bowels and deposits into the pantaloons, nine out of ten shooters will be slapping that trigger like a newborn baby. That's what comes natural. And they will do what comes natural because they don't train.

And?

This article is specifically about training . The fact that somebody who has not dedicated any time to one approach or the other would slap the trigger really isn't material.

quote:

Originally posted by DaBigBR:

quote:

Originally posted by Photoman:
When the feces exits the bowels and deposits into the pantaloons, nine out of ten shooters will be slapping that trigger like a newborn baby. That's what comes natural. And they will do what comes natural because they don't train.

And?

This article is specifically about training . The fact that somebody who has not dedicated any time to one approach or the other would slap the trigger really isn't material.

The article is about trigger control technique.

quote:

Originally posted by jljones:
Here's the real trick. No matter your trigger control style, you slap at a certain pace. Prepping the trigger reduces the distance. Reducing the distance allows the shooter to control the amount of input that gets put into the gun. Practice at prepping, and drills such as the Bump Drill allow the shooter to learn finer trigger control that leads to less motion put into the gun, which equals better accuracy. Speed and Accuracy? What a concept.

What's missing from that article is the crush grip, among other things, that most of the top shooters use to keep the gun from moving while they're working the trigger. Notice I said working, not slapping. I've read other top shooters take on this, and AFAICK most of them are advocating allowing the trigger to fully reset to the limit of it's return stroke as a method of avoiding trigger freeze. Don't ride the reset, just let it all the way out and bring it back again. Even Rob Latham called what he does at speed a controlled slap. I agree with jljones on this one. It sounds like someone breaking out one part of a technique and selling it as a new shooting 'system'.

Um....I'm gonna do trigger control the way Bruce Gray trained me to. If this guy has a different method, good for him.

Read the article in detail twice. As with so many things related to pistol use today it appears the focus is on speed at the expense of accuracy. I can't bring myself to accept this. Based on my training and experience,with Clint Smith's concept every bullet leaving your muzzle has a lawyer attached, accuracy still needs to be the primary focus. Yes there are time speed is important but not at the expense of acceptable accuracy. I have been blasted on another forum for saying this ( I believe the people here are a bit more refined and tolerant) but if I were king in uspsa matches you would be allowed to get in the box with no more than 3 extra rounds for the stage- i.e. A stage required you to use 27 rounds minimum you could carry 30 rounds max. Run out of ammo without targets engaged? Nonengage targets and misses will be plus 100 seconds on your time. Hits outside the a zone- b zone down 1 second c down 5. Make anything except absolute killing accuracy totally unacceptable

quote:

Originally posted by captain127:
Read the article in detail twice. As with so many things related to pistol use today it appears the focus is on speed at the expense of accuracy. I can't bring myself to accept this. Based on my training and experience,with Clint Smith's concept every bullet leaving your muzzle has a lawyer attached, accuracy still needs to be the primary focus. Yes there are time speed is important but not at the expense of acceptable accuracy. I have been blasted on another forum for saying this ( I believe the people here are a bit more refined and tolerant) but if I were king in uspsa matches you would be allowed to get in the box with no more than 3 extra rounds for the stage- i.e. A stage required you to use 27 rounds minimum you could carry 30 rounds max. Run out of ammo without targets engaged? Nonengage targets and misses will be plus 100 seconds on your time. Hits outside the a zone- b zone down 1 second c down 5. Make anything except absolute killing accuracy totally unacceptable

Sounds like you might prefer IDPA, which is headed this way. If USPSA adopted your scoring, the lousy shooters would still suck, the best shooters would still win, and there might be some switching of placement amongst some A/B shooters, depending upon whether they're better at speed or accuracy.

I do prefer IDPA as a matter of fact but so what disagree with the conclusions of what the results of uspsa would look like. Yes the top shooters at pro/ sponsored level would still win for sure. What I have witnessed though is a shooter hosing a stage very quickly ( I do not recall the exact data but this is the example as bst I recall) say a course requiring 30 shots minimum the hoser did in about 18 seconds but with a couple misses and multiple c/d zone hits being higher in the standings than a shooter hitting all a's and doing it in 25 seconds

I refrained from a reply since it is a deviation from the original intent of this topic, but what the hell.

USPSA is a sport as well as a developmental discipline. Developing shooting as a skill, individually and at large, and pushing an envelope. At a higher levels of skill sets speed and accuracy are not a zero sum game. Top dogs and just strong shooters routinely take home 90-95% of available points taken at incredible or just impressive speeds. Stoeger won Area 3 last year with an unreal 3 or 5 Cs for the entire match. This is what the goal and aspirations are for all of us, but if you artificially restrict ability to go fast, you will inhibit this developmental aspect. Cannot penalize speed too much if you want people, or at least some people, shoot superfast and accurate. The example like you pointed out do happen but, unless it is a figure of speech that you used, 18 vs 25 seconds is a whopping almost 30% speed difference and if the dude who did it in 18 didn't hit too many C and Ds, he takes it. Ultimately, there will be a guy who does it with all/most As in 18 and takes it all - unless you impose your rules that will prohibit anyone from even trying to go fast.

Another observation, and this comes from talking to people who are good enough to train others, is that it is easier to take a fast but not very accurate shooter and teach him to slow down and get good hits than take a slow accurate shooter and make him go faster without completely falling apart. We brought up Rogers School earlier in a thread; it is worth mentioning that in his beginners class, Bill exposes new shooters to exactly the same speed (par times) as he tests his advanced class on. Maybe Jerry Jones could opine on this. "But I am hitting all As" is way too often is a cope-out for "I can't go any faster". Comfort zones need to be challenged and we need disciplines that don't penalize too harshly. You can't win any decent USPSA match hitting Cs and Ds, you just can't so I say leave it alone as is.

quote:

Originally posted by captain127:

quote:

Originally posted by captain127:
I do prefer IDPA as a matter of fact but somewhat disagree with the conclusions of what the results of uspsa would look like. Yes the top shooters at pro/ sponsored level would still win for sure. What I have witnessed though is a shooter hosing a stage very quickly ( I do not recall the exact data but this is the example as bst I recall) say a course requiring 30 shots minimum the hoser did in about 18 seconds but with a couple misses and multiple c/d zone hits being higher in the standings than a shooter hitting all a's and doing it in 25 seconds

It is just hit factor math. 30x5=150 points divided by 18 seconds equals a hit factor of 8.33 with all A hits, while your guy with two misses, leaving aside the C/D hits would be 120/18= 6.66. Your all A guy would be 150/25=6.0 HF.

Good shooters can make every shot available on a stage, and the smart ones know how to harvest the maximum hit factor for a stage.

Wow, this thread has taken some interesting turns since I have been gone.

A couple of things right out of the hat. The term "Pre-Ignition Push" and "Post Ignition Push" are one in the same in my world. The bad things begin at the point of ignition and continue through ignition. This is where the bad stuff generally happens. This is how it dopes out. That flinch or pre-ignition push starts in the brain. The conscious mind. The conscious mind generally and most often looks at the sights, and it says "I gots to make this bad boy go off right now because the alignment is perfect". The brain says "Trigger finger, do your thing". The trigger finger convulses to the rear. Because recoil is viewed as an interruption in that perfect sight picture, the wrists push the gun down (actually a bit forward) this generally occurs simultaneously. It begins just slightly before the point of ignition, and carries through the time when the bullet leaves the barrel. For our effort, a right handed shooter gets a low left hit at seven o'clock of point of aim, and a left handed shooter gets a low right group at five o'clock.

Everybody does it at some point or another. It's simple physiology. Man wasn't designed to have a controlled explosion go off eighteen inches from their face. You can do anything you like after the round leaves the barrel, but our general problem occurs slightly before ignition and carries on while the round is still in the barrel.

I fight with this about twice per year.

On the topic of going fast- Going fast means go fast. Yeah, I know, duh. I would put it more like this. No one wakes up on Sunday, who is not a runner, and says "I'm going to run the Boston on Saturday, two and a half hours sounds about right". It takes train up. The proper way to train up is to dry fire. If you have a good dry fire plan, you can accomplish a lot without firing a round. This is what dry fire also does. It trains the subconscious to carry part of the load of shooting. You can then give the conscious mind a job that it can't foul up like watching the sights. Once that baseline is established, and core skills are addressed, it is time to go fast for a certain amount of your training. People often have one way of drawing the pistol out of the holster when their life/trophy depends on it, and one way for when they are just messing around. Unless I am working on something particularly in dry fire, the gun comes out of the holster fast each time, just like my life or a match depends on it. Depending on the complexity of the shot, I can slow down the presentation at the end. But, the draw is always fast.
The sights really do three things in speed shooting. They obviously aim the pistol, they give us feedback on our trigger control, and they tell us how fast that we can go. Jerry Miculek has called it the gas pedal, because the feed back off of the sights controls the pace to which he shoots. If the sights are only being used to aim the pistol in the speed shooting equation, they are doing 1/3 of the work that they can. Speed shooting is way more than just slapping the trigger really fast. Trigger control is king. But, I would follow that up with follow through as queen, and grip there after.

Lastly, back to Rogers. I have some friends that are door kickers for the Feeb. One is pretty well known in the firearms industry. We were talking about a trip that his team had made down to Rogers and he made the comment about the "helluva flinch" that they all came back with. I smiled an nodded. I didn't get it until this thread.
That's not a gig on Rogers. My belief is that they teach the way that they do because they are a finished product school At the end of five days (and 2500 rounds) they are putting out a product that is ready to go anywhere and shoot really fast. Remember, their only prereq is that a shooter can hit a man sized target in 1.5 seconds at 7 yards. I guess that is the way they teach trigger control the way that they do these days. And frankly, it is a damn smart move. I'll take it a step further and say that I would probably do the same thing given the product they want to put out (minus letting the finger leave the face of the trigger). The nasty flinch they talked about didn't effect me, as I prepped all the way through the school both times. They never advocated letting the finger leave the trigger, but they shot to reset. I shot like crap in '06, and finally got my act together in '08. I think that I can break 118 and maybe sneak up on 120. It won't happen this year because I don't have time, but I'm going to try to plan it out for next year. I've got to do it before I turn 50.

Lastly, I have to tell a Bruce story. When we started teaching together, we had a mantra that no one fails. About three years in, I pitched an idea of a true speed shooting class. Three days, 750 rounds a day. With fairly tight accuracy standards. The first time we taught it was down in Florida. I think we had three or four instructors that class, and was running a Practical Fundamentals on one range, and APOC on the other. I taught APOC the first day and we shot a wee bit more than 750. It was good training, and we made some great progress. Good mix of competitors and door kickers. The second day, sometime around mid morning, my side took a break and I went over and chatted with Bruce. He asked if I wanted to swap off with him, so I told him what the curriculum was leading up till lunch was and turned him loose. There was a flurry of gunfire, and all was quiet. For the next 45 minutes. Silence. I went over and asked what was going on, and he told me that a student named Gene was having problems with a particular skill, and they were dry firing it out. I looked at him squarely and told him "Forget Gene, tell him to put on his big boy pants and drive the flipping gun" (I didn't exactly use those particular words but it is close enough you can paint your own picture). Bruce looked at me horrified. He nodded and moments later, guns were a blazing.
At the end of the class, Gene was far and away the top student. He was in that protective cocoon of accuracy, and wouldn't get out of his own way. Give himself permission if you will to go fast. Once a shooter reaches a certain level of competency, the only way to get better/faster/more accurate is to let the wheels spin off of the bus in training. Once the location that the wheels fall off the bus are identified, you can learn to push through it. We now joke and call the technique "Forget Gene". And we all see the value in it.

I am seeing your points in all of this. To bring it back to topic the final paragraph of the article indicated that not resetting or whatever we want to call it is one technique that does not apply to all situations. One of the toughest things for me is knowing and understanding when to speed up and when to slow down, when to accept some decrease in accuracy to obtain more practical speed. I would say this ability to change gears instantly without needing to think about it is part of what makes the top shooters so skilled.