Is what you do really practice/training?

Training or just plinking?

There is a large misunderstanding among those who use firearms, especially among newer shooters, that any time spent in the woods, the field, or at the range doing any shooting equals “training” or "practice". This confusion leads to wasted reps, inefficient methods, and false confidence. 

Training: Instructor-Led Skill Building

"Training" is a structured learning event, under the direction of a qualified instructor.  It involves the introduction, demonstration, diagnosis and correction of techniques and drills, and is built around progressive performance standards. Real training does not occur in a vacuum, it’s externally guided, evaluated, and designed to install or refine your core skills.

In a real training environment, you should expect to have:

• Defined performance objective

• Drill progressions tailored to developing your skills

• Using metrics (hit zones, timers, scoring) to point out where you truly are

• Diagnostic feedback based on what needs to improve, not just what looks good

- Resulting in instant corrections by your qualified instructor

If no one is coaching you, assessing your mechanics, or holding you to measurable standards, you are not "training".

Perfect Practice: Skill Reinforcement Through Perfect Repetition

"Practice" does not make perfect. "Perfect" practice makes perfect.

"Perfect Practice" is what should follow training. It’s the shooter’s responsibility to take previously taught technique and skills and refine them through structured perfect repetition. Effective perfect practice is deliberate, not recreational. It’s goal-oriented and demands the same standards applied during instruction, without the instructor present.  Holding yourself accountable (not allowing half hearted technique) just like the instructor would if they were standing beside you.  If you aren't repeating your draw, body position, grip, trigger control, sighting, etc... perfectly the same every time, you are creating new neural pathways and inducing "training confusion".

Quality perfect practice includes:

- A clear objective for each session (e.g., draw efficiency, recoil control, accuracy at distance)

- Use of objective tools: shot timers, performance logs, scaled targets

- Perfect Repetition of correct technique with purpose, not just "I shot 400 rounds today!" 

- Progressing: progressively smaller groups on smaller targets, longer distances, faster times

- Post-practice analysis/self-diagnosis and correction

Without guidance from prior training, most practice sessions turn into "shooting" or "plinking". You can’t reinforce correct technique if you were never corrected to begin with.

Shooting: Casual or Recreational Firearm Use

Shooting is simply the act of firing a gun. There’s no structure, no performance metrics, no diagnosis, no intentional correction, just pressing the trigger and sending rounds downrange. It may be entertaining, but it does little to develop skill beyond being familiar with recoil and noise.

Examples include:

• Plinking

• Mag-dump after mag-dump with no performance goal

• Static paper shooting without accountability

• Group outings with no defined purpose

This is what most people are doing when they say they’re “training” especially if they want attention by showing off their latest gear, burning through mag after mag of ammo with no idea where their rounds are landing or why they are landing where they are. No standards. No evaluation. No diagnosis and correction, just noise.

Why It Matters

Mislabeling casual shooting as “training” just leads to lying to yourself about where your skills really are. It camoflages the gaps in your skills and slows real and sustained development. You can spend years “train train training”, spending untold hundreds if not thousands of dollars on range fees, ammo, equip. or a new gun (which surely will help me be a better shooter) without ever improving, if no one is guiding your technique or holding you accountable.

If you’ve never had your grip rebuilt, your draw efficiency assessed, or your visual processing measured, if no one has ever forced you to think about and justify why you are doing what you do, you’re probably not trained, so much as you are experienced at shooting the way "you’ve always shot.”

Get some Instruction, and then when you practice - Make sure you are...

• Purposeful - Going to the training location with a purpose and/or plan
• Progressing - Making the drills a little harder/or "less slow", to push your skills further
• Perfection - Repeating correct technique perfectly to create a Neural Highway out of a Neural Pathway (muscle memory). Too many neural pathways create training confusion.... and of course self-diagnosing and correcting.