Skill Exploration: A Key Component to Improvement
When you go to the range or start your dry fire practice, what’s your plan? You may broadly know that you want to do specific drills or you need to work on these skills, but does that yield improvement?
We all like to enjoy the range, make good hits and end up with a pretty target but that is the slow route to improvement. Training needs to push the limits and explore your skills. When we have a pretty target we are practicing, executing our current level, and building consistency. To improve, we need to explore the next step up, which often results in failure. That failure is how you learn, it’s important to embrace the process and see failing as a learning opportunity not a mistake.
Execution Mode vs Exploration Mode
Whether you are on the range or doing dry fire, your intention matters. Are you working at your current skill level and building reliable skills that can be consistently called upon, or are you trying to get to that next level? By setting the intention of a session or drill as execution or exploration mode, you can stay on track with what the performance goal is.
Execution mode is performing at a level that decreases risk and increases success based on consistency. This is the level you shoot at and know you will most likely get the time, target, and score you are looking for. This is your comfort zone, the space where you know you will feel good about your shooting performance.
On the other hand, exploration mode is operating in a new territory of skill that you do not have much experience in, if any, and can accept that failure can and will happen. Failure happens because it is the next level up, this is a skill you do not yet own but in order to own it you need to delve into it, explore it so it becomes familiar to you. Once it becomes familiar, you can get an idea of what you can gain, what you need to do to move up your overall baseline.
Exploration is the idea that in order to be comfortable with driving a car at 100 mph you need to drive at 200 mph. You take two steps forward in exploration so that your execution can move one step forward.
It’s important to use both modes; accepting sloppy skills in the name of exploration isn’t the goal. Inoculating yourself to the new performance level is. Depending on what your current focus is you may do more sessions of one mode or the other, but the important thing is to toggle back and forth between the two. Just like your cold start tells you the skills you currently have, you’ll improve fastest by pushing the limit to set a new baseline.
How to Explore New Limits in your Shooting
There are many areas where you can explore new limits. Though we use the analogy of driving a car, new limits aren’t purely speed based. That is only one dimension. A new limit is simply past the current boundary, whether that be speed, distance, ability, accuracy, round count, or even a higher caliber. Shooting sports are vast, we all have places we have not gone not only in our given discipline but as a shooter in general.
Pick a Skill and Push the Limits
You can push for speed in your draw, splits, or transitions. It may result in improperly indexed sights, trigger freeze, or poor shot placement but breaking that ceiling is the first step. Refining it, recognizing what went wrong in the process and adjusting for it enables iterative improvement.
An easy example of exploring a new territory is increasing the distance of the target. Many shooters stay fairly close to the target, around 5 to 7 yards and they feel pretty good about their skills. Push that same target back to 10, 15, and 25 yards, and the loss of accuracy can be drastic. If you have never shot a pistol from 25 yards, you may be surprised how different your target looks. But if you continue to do it, you will see improvement not only at the 25 yards but also at closer distances.
Perhaps you have learned a new skill like transitioning from target A to target B. At first, you may be slow or overdrive your sights but noticing what needs to be corrected allows you to change and explore what needs to be done to be successful. As you learn to let your gun follow your eyes and high visual focus you reset the baseline of your transition skill level. Something that you would never obtain if you never explored the skill.
We all want to shoot fast, but fast isn’t the best way to decrease the time on the shot timer. Doing everything sooner and more efficiently will yield better results. The only way to do that is to break through your comfort zone and explore the next level while learning from your mistakes. This should be done during dry fire, explore and feel more comfortable, and then apply it at the range and work through it in live fire.Exploration mode requires good feedback, high attention to the process, and specific direction to improvement. This is where MantisX can be a huge advantage in quantifying exploration.
The Safe Space Drill
The MantisX Pistol/Rifle app gives feedback on your technique not only in time, but in mechanics scoring and coaching. But we all like to have that high score recorded; we want to see our skill trending up. Doesn’t exploration impact that? Not anymore.
The Safe Space drill is your exploration zone. In Safe Space, you continue to get the same feedback, your shot and session count along with your training session still count but you are relieved of the score impacting your stats. The trigger press score will not be dragged down when you are purposely failing.
As implied, this is the safe area for you to push the limit and learn how you can unlock the next step up in skill. Safe Space is your stepping stone to being a better shooter.
To get the most out of Safe Space, incorporate the free Smart Targets and a laser to see hit placement. This gives you another variable to evaluate on. You may have had a poor score but it was a good hit, that can happen when you are pushing your speed.
Using a tool like TitanX or BlackbeardX in dry fire enables you to mimic the live range, you get a repeating trigger and laser shot placement. You can see the outcome of your shot, and with the app you can see why it happened. Toggle the Safe Space drill on by tapping the pencil icon in the Drills header.
Disconnect your feelings from your score, view it as a learning experience, and feel the freedom to improve.
Why Exploration Mode is Beneficial
Exploration can create dramatic improvement by inoculating you to the next level of skill. By pushing the limit, doing what you have never done before will test you mentally. It proves to you what you are really capable of, and challenges you to analyze your mechanics for refinement rather than brute forcing your way to improvement.
By pushing out of your comfort zone and to your limits, you push your overall performance baseline up. The next time you go back to execution mode it will feel much easier, allowing you to move up on the staircase of progression.
Pick a skill and explore it with Safe Space then take it to the range and see how your performance has improved. Embrace failure, you’ll improve faster.
Kayla House
Author