One-Box Workout – Hone Skills with One Box of Ammo

Going to the range to simply burn ammo is fun, but that does improve your technique as much as deliberate training.

One-Box Workout – Hone Skills with One Box of Ammo Pistol Drill

Deliberate training involves analyzing your shooting and isolating different shooting skill sets to identify shortcomings and strengthen weak skills. Gun Talk Media takes us through the “One-Box Workout.” This drill is a simple pistol training regimen that can be accomplished with only one box of ammo and at a standard shooting range.

You’re a beginner once, but a student for life

The Importance of Deliberate Practice

Practice does not make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect. The more rounds you send down range, the more you ingrain that particular technique into your brain – be it good or bad technique. If you simply hang out the range and burn ammo without deliberately focusing on working on certain skills, then you’re likely entrenching bad habits that will make you a worse shooter.

This can easily be rectified by a deliberate training regimen. Spend time to focus on specific techniques, analyze your results, identify poor technique, and work to fix shortcomings.

How to Analyze your Shooting

The obvious way to analyze shooting is to look at the target. But good results on a target varies depending on your drills – groups for two handed pistol shooting will look different than groups for one handed weak side shooting.

The best way to analyze your shooting skills is to go to a class where a proficient instructor can analyze your shooting and provide feedback. That gets expensive quickly, so training with a buddy who watches you shoot and/or filming your training sessions is an excellent (and cost effective) way to review your technique.

Dry Fire at Home

Finally, it’s important to dry fire at home. For every one live fire round you send down range, dry fire a hundred times. Dry fire is a widely under appreciated technique, but the key to becoming a top shot.

Written by - always a student, sometimes a teacher.

I don't consider myself a competition shooter - I think of myself as a performance pistol shooter. I am all about performing at as high of a level as possible. Towards that end, I am obsessive about learning how to perform. I spend a lot of my life learning from the best across the entire firearms world and even into other areas of performance and other sports. I am a USPSA Carry Optics Grandmaster, currently working towards my second GM title in the Open division.

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