Eric Gambill Shooting Log

Shot steel challenge at ITPSC yesterday. It was obvious that my holiday break had me a little rusty on the gun handling skills. I was sloppy all day and my runs on 5 to go were disgusting.

http://www.itpsc.net/1stsunSCJan2013.htm

Lesson learned/remembered: Just because your sight picture/shot calling can be a little loose on one stage doesnt mean it can on the next. Also, if you are confirming hits on steel by sound or the sight of them moving....your losing.
 
Anybody who is familiar with Anderson's books knows about the "Burkett Reload". I do this drill just about every practice because it focuses on seeing the mag into the magwell which is the most important part of the reload. Every once in a while I feel like I need to keep myself honest, or just see where my progress is. I do another drill for this:

This is going to be a full reload, sight picture to sight picture. Set yourself a comfortable par time that you think you can beat easy. Start with the sights on the A zone of a target. When the timer beeps, perform a reload and get your sights back on the A zone of the target. You have beaten the par time if you have an acceptable sight picture in the A zone before the par beep goes off. Once you know where your at on this you can start adjusting par times to push yourself faster. Pay attention to the repetitions where you make a mistake and how much time it costs you. Consistency is what we are striving for here. I do this in dryfire but it works equally well in live fire. I stole this drill from somewhere, I just dont remember where. I feel like I made it up but I'm pretty sure it came out of one of the competition books I own.

Another dryfire drill your you. Set up two shooting boxes about 5-8 feet apart. Have a target in front of each box at least 10yds or simulated 10yds (for you guys who use mini targets). Start with the gun up on target in the box you choose to start in. On the beep, move to the next box and get an acceptable sight picture on the other target. This is a short distance move so I like to work on keeping the gun up in my shooting grip and the sights aligned. Whenever I leave the box I transition the gun to the next target immediately and keep it there. This is always hard for me because I feel like I need to break the gun down to be able to move quickly. The other thing I work on is slowing down earlier than you think you need to. There is a point in a move where you start hitting the breaks as you come into a shooting position. Work on doing that earlier than you think you need to and pay attention to the sights while your doing it. It seems to allow me to get a more stable sight picture and break the shot earlier as I come into position. The reason I say you need to use 10yd or further targets is because you get better feed back from the sights. You need to be able to see your sights bouncing around in a smaller A zone so that you can assess what is working and what is not. This drill is all about finding out what works to get an accurate shot off asap when you come into a position.

This drill is very similar to other box to box drills other than I take out everything but the skill set you are working on. No draw, no reload. Just move from box to box. Once you figure out what works well for you....you can start throwing in a reload between boxes. That complicates things and shows you how quick you need to get a reload done so that you can be up and ready to fire when you come into the other box.
 
Had the monthly USPSA match at ITPSC Saturday. I didnt really get comfertable all day. I felt foggy and not focused on what I was doing. Felt like I didnt put up a very good match. I shot almost 93% of the avail point with no misses/penalties. That seems like an improvement to me....to have what I felt like was a bad performance and still come out with those numbers.

Im to the point now where I feel like Deltas are a miss. I shot one on a stage this weekend and I remember looking at the target during scoring thinking "what the hell is that?. Its just ugly. I wasnt paying attention on that shot
 
Dry fire is plugging along. I feel like I've made good gains from my focus on gun handling drills and now I'm going to start using all my other drills. Worked some movement and barricade/port drills today. I havent started weekly live fire yet, probably going to pretty soon.

Ripped the grip tape off my gun last week and it hasnt felt right since. I just dont get as strong of a grip without it. I was going to buy some of that precut stuff but I came across a 8x24" piece of industrial step grip tape at Lowes. This stuff is so tacky it chews my hand up during dry fire, I love it. Cost me $5.00 and its enough to re do the grip probably 10 times.
 
Busy, busy week ahead of me. Gotta get the shop in order for our Dryfire level 1 training class from Steve Anderson this friday. Seth and I also have to find a way to get some stages pre-set this week, we've planned an awesome match. Steve is going to shoot the match with us at ITPSC Saturday, then run his live fire class for us on Sunday. I'm very interested to see what suggestions he has for me but I am also super excited for Seth and Adam. I think its going to up their game a lot.

Got a 100% classifer that should post this month. Thats going to move me to around 92% and some change. Then we are planning on having a classifer match at ITPSC in march. Making GM has always been a personal goal of mine and if I make it, I look forward to training harder so that I can keep my head above water in that very deep talent pool.
 
Three days with Steve Anderson.

When Seth first called me with the idea about having Steve come down, I wasn't all that excited. I didn't doubt that Steve could help me in many ways, I just had never paid for shooting instruction before and I didn't know if I wanted to do it now. The deciding factor for me was that I knew I needed something to get me a little extra edge this season, something to take me from finishing Top 5/Top 10 overall to being a contender for Production Division at a major.


First we had the dryfire class Friday night in my shop. The big focus was aggressive movement and a sense of urgency in every movement I made. He made a couple tweaks to some of my techniques. Steve is really big on letting your body learn what it feels like to go as fast as you can. He noted that I was forcing myself to call all Alpha hits in dryfire, which he said may be limiting my body from going max speed. He had me work draws to an "acceptable" sight picture on the target instead of a for sure Alpha. By the time we were done, he had me down to a .4 second draw at 5 yards. At that fast the freeking beep on the par time doesnt even stop between beeps! The funny thing is, my acceptable sight picture at that speed was aligned sights at the bottom of the A zone, good enough for me. My biggest gain came from the turn and draw technique he teaches, it is really efficient. After working Seth, Adam and I for a couple hours, we put the guns down and broke out the beer. We sat for a couple more hours talking about mental game and what our shooting and training goals were. It was worth just as much as the dryfire class.

Saturday was the match at ITPSC. Steve asked us if we wanted him to coach during the match or just observe for the class. I opted for him to observe because I wanted him to see what I was doing right now. I had a decent match with no mikes or penalties: http://www.itpsc.net/3rdsatmatresultsfeb13.htm

That night we had another get together at Seth's house. It was more time talking about shooting and I gained more valuable insights.

Sunday's class started at 10am. Steve started with the same dryfire tuneup for the other guys in the class. Even though we had the dryfire tuneup friday night, we all participated to get more reps on the tweaks and changes Steve had made for us. We then went into the livefire portion of the class, which I'm not going to line out here because the man makes money of what he teaches. I'll tell you the focus of the class for me was that Steve wanted me to get moving and keep moving. Something I used to do back when I shot open in 2007, but I had let it slide some since I have been shooting production. The funny thing is, Steve told me exactly what my high school baseball coach told me 17 years ago....."unhitch the plow boy!". I move very aggressively, but I tend to plant sometimes and I lose time there. He helped me change into rolling through positions instead of stopping at shooting positions.

So in summary: If you ever get a chance to take a class from Steve Anderson....do it. His work does wonders with B and C class shooters but he had plenty of good material even for a Master class shooter. He does a podcast almost daily, heres what he had to say about the class down here in Duke, OK:

http://andersonshooting.libsyn.com/yeeeeeeeeeeee-ha
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nqi7F7_DfDE&feature=share&list=UUxtkHXHqKqAKTN5yaEi3RHw

I wanted to do a break down of a stage I shot in the match Saturday at ITPSC. Stage 3 was the only one I got on video so here it is:

This stage was a fairly quick stage that I like to call a "port to port" style stage. You see these a lot at majors, especially the Double Tap Championship. At the start position, I had a mini popper, large popper, a plate and a open paper at 7 yards. I drew to the mini popper because it was the easiest target to draw to. The inside targets were tight to the edge of the wall which didnt allow me to get started moving out of the position like I usually want. I could have started my movement if I had drawn to the inside targets and worked my way out but as close as I was to the fence due to the start position it would have been a funky draw. The second port was just two open paper. I really wanted to "roll" through this position without coming to a stop. The ground was a little soft in the shooting area and my cleat caught on my outside foot as I came into position. This caused my sight picture to move past the port after I had taken my first shot. I estimate that probably cost me a full second. I reloaded after this port with a very smooth, quick reload and my sights were up ready to fire on the third position.

The third position was open paper, large popper, open paper with a plate hidden behind the popper. I shot paper, popper, paper and transitioned back to the popper. I had to wait on the large popper to fall out of the way so I could get to the plate. While this is a good thing, its also very frustrating and I almost started shooting just to get it out of the way faster but I probably would have only gotten one shot off before the plate was available. I reloaded out of this port with another pretty smooth and quick reload which allowed me to get my gun up on target before I got to position four.

On position four, there were two open paper. I made a slight mistake here in that I pushed into the port too far. I rolled through this port good, never came to a stop but if I had stayed out of the port more I would have had a better transition to the targets in position 5. If you look, you can see me pull my gun back out of the port before I transition. If I would have stayed back out of it, I could have started shooting at the first available target in pos. 5 before I even got to the fault line. This cost me about half a second.

Position 5 was a mini popper, two plates and a open paper. I called a miss on the first plate I shot at but transitioned anyway and cleared the rest of the targets. I came back to it to finish the stage. Cost me about 3/4 of a second.

Overall I felt good about the stage, just some minor mistakes. These minor mistakes add up over the course of a stage though. Those mistakes I lined out cost me an estimated 2.25 seconds....exactly how much time Steve beat me by on the stage (My time: 15.18, Steve: 12.93). I dropped three charlies in that mix which was 95% of the available points so I was good there. Overall the transitions were good other than the one from the last plate to paper in pos. 5, that one was kinda sluggish.

If anyone has any feedback or critique on something I missed, feel free to comment. =-)
 
Some observations from todays dryfire:

I was working a drill with three 30 yard (simulated) partial targets. Left was a target with a noshoot covering 1/3 of the A zone. Middle was a hardcover with top one third available and right was a hardcover that was split down the middle vertically.

First, it takes a razor sharp front sight focus to call shots on targets that hard. It almost felt like I was group shooting. I also noticed that when I was transitioning, it was actually faster and more accurate to keep my focus on the front sight during the transition. The targets were only setup one yard apart, at that distance its a very short transition. We usually work on snapping the eyes to the A zone of the next target when transitioning the gun but in this case it was not the best (fastest) way to call A zone shots.

The third thing I noticed occured on the third target, the one with the hardcover split down the middle. The hardcover was on the right side of the target and it was completely blacking out the right gap in my sight picture when I was trying to make A zone shots. I started transitioning into the C zone, aligning the sights then ticking it over a little to get the A.

Overall, I felt like this drill really worked my sight picture and shot calling ability in dryfire. I'm going to try it in live fire pretty soon.
 
Little over a month until my first major, The Cowtown Classic. Its time to start hitting the live fire.

Went out this last weekend for my first live fire session of the season. Worked on a couple El Pres style drills and bill drills, some SHO/WHO. Threw in some no shoots for difficulty. I felt really slow during the session and I'm pretty sure its because I went to the range after working all night.

Initially, my live fire sessions are all going to be based on Stoeger's live fire book and his "10 drills you should master". I want to get my ability to stand and shoot on a GM level. Right now, my average classifer is between 86-90% nationally. Thats my match run, cold. Classifers are a test of fundementals and shooting skill. I think this is my main weakness area right now is execution of the fundementals and accuracy at speed. I dont think I need a whole lot of work on movement or positioning right now.

I'm not going to be practicing classifers really, maybe some of the harder ones with penalty targets. Mostly I'll be working the drills from the book....with a lot of repetitions.

Just to illustrate what I'm talking about with the whole bring my average run up thing: On Dec. 14 I posted that I had set a new personal record of 1.76 on the bill drill. The other runs were all in the 1.80's. This weekend I was running 1.74/1.75 seconds average on that drill. My dryfire work this winter took my personal best to my average run.
 
Gonna keep this short because I hate typing on my phone.

Live fire today with Seth at ITPSC. We worked two drills:

#1- 5yd tgt, 15yd headshot, 5yd tgt. 2rnds each.
#2- 7yd tgt, 15yd tgt, 25yd tgt. 2rnds each.

We did 12 reps on drill #1. My first run "cold" was 2.60 secs with 28pts. My other reps all hovered around this time. I noticed that when I pushed on this drill, my transitions to the headshot were not as crisp and I would drop shots. Visual patience is key on this drill and I noticed I wasnt paying enough attention to the first target. I was drawing to the C zone and also sweeping it A/C trying to rush to the headshot.

Next we did 6 reps freestyle, 4 reps SHO/4 reps WHO on drill #2. My initial times were 3secs freestyle, 4 secs SHO, 5 secs WHO. All with decent points. I was a little sloppy with my shot calling on this drill. I really noticed it when I started catching a couple deltas on the SHO/WHO strings. I didnt see a huge difference in time running from near to far as opposed to far to near (freestyle). More visual patience lessons on this one as it was easy to sweep the middle target if you got in a hurry.

I feel like I improved today.

Im impressed with the improvements Seth has made in the off season. 2 years ago he would have trouble getting 2 hits on a 25yd paper freestyle (with a custom STI). Now hes hitting 25yd WHO shots with a production glock. Congrats to him on his first M classifier this past weekend.
 
Been practicing pretty hard. I upped my dryfire to twice a day. I do gun handling and reload drills in the morning after work then transition drills and mini stages after I wake up.

Live fire is all about repetitions right now. I focus on shot calling.

At this point, I dont fear any target a match can throw at me.

I have also been working with captians of crush grippers to improve my grip strength. I saw huge improvements in the first 3 weeks but developed some pain in my strong hand wrist and had to stop for now. I treated it with ice and a wrist brace and the pain went away in 3 days. I'll start it back up when I think its fully healed.
 
Steel Challenge today @ ITPSC. Had a lot of fun and I didnt really take it very serious. Had some gun issues and ammo issues so I wasnt really competitive anyway. The one thing I did see today was very strong shot calling. Autopilot was engaged and I remember thinking to myself that I hit these plates faster than I thought I could.

I really wanted to make it up to OKC gun club this weekend. Its been a while since Ive been up there. Ill get up there soon.
 
Worked movement drills today in dryfire. Did some shoot on the move drills and some setup drills. I attached a pic of the target array I used. Im going to start doing that so I can remember what hardcover/no shoot setups I have used.

I can't honestly say I learn something every day that I dryfire. Sometimes I do, sometimes I dont and sometimes I remember something I had forgotten. Today was a lesson on the different types of movement available to me. IMO, there is two different types of movement we do in USPSA. Movement that gains ground and movement that doesnt. Both are very important. On the array pictured, I found that my smooth/fast runs with the best sight pictures came from a combo of both. I would shoot the first target during the first two steps. The middle target is really tight so my feet would pause during those shot but my upper body, hips and knees were still moving. I would then transition to the third and hit it within the first step and a half after.

I dont know if that makes any sense written out but it worked really well for me considering the dificulty of the targets.
 

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Been plugging along with the dryfire workouts this week. Nothing really special to report, though I think my extreme overuse of hardcover and no shoots on my targets is paying off well. I feel like I am calling shots faster.

Our annual classifer match is this weekend. I believe I'm going to see a good improvement in my match ability to stand and shoot. My consistency and fundementals are well above where I was at this time last year.
 
Had our annual classifier match at ITPSC last weekend. I actually thought we were going to have to cancel it due to weather. The wind was blowing so hard that we had to rebuild each stage as we shot them. It was snapping target sticks in half and sending targets flying into the field =-/. Wasnt really the optimum conditions to shoot drill type stages with a lot of hardcover/no shoots. We like to joke at ITPSC that every target is a moving target (because of the constant wind) but this was a little more than we were used to.

All excuses aside...

I was disappointed a little with my preformance. I had 3 mikes on one stage, the first recorded misses for me in competition since last years nationals (Oct. of last year). I also felt like I left a lot of points out there. Out of six classifier stages, I only got 3 that will actually post for a %. A 95%, 91% and 86% by classifiercalc. We'll see if thats actually what they come out too.

I've been working hard every day in dryfire. You know your doing it right when you break a sweat lol. Only 8 training days left until we head down to Cowtown Classic. I'm glad its finally here, the winter break felt like forever.
 
Been fighting Bronchitis in my left lung for a couple days now. Finally went to the Doctor and told him I need to be fixed in 48 hours. A breathing treatment, 2 injections and 3 prescriptions and he assures me Ill be good to go Friday morning for The Cowtown Classic.

I only missed one training day. The others have been rough, I felt like I was in slow motion. It was kinda cool to do things in slow mo for a couple of days. I really picked apart my movement technique.

2 days to go!
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxU5zrrTI7Y&feature=youtube_gdata_player

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eneoibAndco&feature=youtube_gdata_player
 
The one armed bandit is still working on video from The Cowtown Classic but I'm ready to write about it. First off, this was an awesome match. I will attend this match every year I am able. The stages were very "IPSC" meaning 5,6,7 shots then a sprint to the next position. Targets were not really grouped together which tested the shooters transition skills. The facility was basically built for action shooting so the bays allowed stage designs that were very spread out. I can see this match becoming one of the biggest and best in the country in years to come.

I have mixed emotions about my performance. I was very happy with my movement and stage planning. I felt like these two skills really shined at this match. My accuracy, not so much. I had four mikes at the match:

Mike #1- Didn't give a mach 3 swinger its due respect
Mike #2- Tried to shoot 11 rounds on a stage with an unloaded start....
Mike #3- Lost a calibration on a popper that I hit dead center
Mike #4- Shot a paper target on what was basically a dead sprint, second shot went over the shoulder when my foot hit the ground

I finished 6th overall (4th Master) in Production. The 60 stage points I left out there due to the mikes cost me a 3rd overall (2nd M and wood) finish. I'm not unhappy with this by any means. I know how I got beat, by points. If you wanna play this game at the top you gotta shoot the Alphas.

and not miss.... :sarcastichand:

Since I've shot a major for him I guess the cats out of the bag. Jeremy Moore from The Shooter's Source offered me a sponsorship a couple weeks ago and of course I accepted. I'm excited to represent The Shooter's Source and humbled that anyone would want me to shoot for them. Thank you Jeremy.

Busy month coming up. I have the Annual National Police Week Shootout next week here in Altus. I hope to bring home the top shooter overall trophy for the 3rd year in a row. Double Tap Championship is up in 4 weeks, it looks like its going to be another good one.
 
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