You know what's not mediocre, putting out content from the bathroom. Max efficiency. That's why Ben is the GOAT.

“3 seconds. Why not 5? I thought we were serious.” LOL. Good shit Ben.

"nah, the bullet's gone, dude" and "if you take more time, you're just gonna take more time.. people still miss in slow motion" were fucking gold

One thing is certain: if you don't push your limits, you will never get better.

Same with my former instructors, I would go train and shoot beyond my ability to see where I was falling apart. One in particular would ALWAYS make it a point to come out and say, "you still shoot like crap, you can't miss fast enough. Slow down and get your hits," then walk away without a discussion. Fast forward to quals and I'm getting 98-100% in half of or less time as everybody else. That "instructor" told me, "you still need to slow down, you're shooting too fast." I stopped going to the range and started competition shooting after that.

Thanks for confirming that my frustrations aren't crazy. I plan on getting better on my own and crushing it at some point so I can kinda guide conversations around the shooting training part with "Well this works and obviously what you're doing doesn't." Overall I think the huge stick isn't as good as a carrot and stick and honest conversations about how it's actually supposed to be done. I'm definitely going to be more diplomatic than "This is a clown show" lol. This is the only single part of the whole team that I've been struggling with and am annoyed by. I mentioned at one point a Pass/Fail with A zones, or even going to bullseyes since the goal is "Accuracy", but for some reason what we have is what we've got and we're practicing to this standard. You nailed it on the "shooting sorta proficiently for someone who practices a bit". I don't get to practice as much as I'd like, and I don't think I'm some kind of pistol wizard like others out there, as I know I have a lot of work to do. Hopefully one day I'll scrounge up enough money to make a class with you.

When i started shooting IPSC. i missed Alot, like you do.. everybody kept telling me to shoot slower, i would always respond with No i need to learn to shoot fast, not slow. I am now national champion 3rd year in a row.

I feel personally attacked. 🤣🤣🤣

Anyone can call themself "an instructor."

I work church security as a licensed PPO in Texas. Our qual is the FBI qual. First stage is 3 shots from concealment draw, while moving off the X in 3 seconds. If you are practiced with your draw and movement of your concealment shirt or jacket, you are using about half your time just to get the gun on target. There's just no time for slow steady shots. Round accountability is important, of course, but what is great about the FBI qual is that it starts at 3 yards and ends at 25 yards, and you are given more time the farther out you are from target (just as you would be in a real shooting). By the time you are taking your 25 yard shots, you are using your time effectively, but learning to retain accuracy as well. Short version, talk your team lead into a better shooting standard for qualification.

Looks like he’s filming in the bathroom next to the shower lol

“Slowing down just makes me miss slower.” That’s a new/inexperienced shooter problem all day. If your accuracy does not increase with reduced speed, your fundamentals are bad. Ben himself has demonstrated this in a previous video with a class he conducted on the range.

Good stuff. Sorry I missed you this weekend. Didn’t see you were coming until class was full

Since that looks like a shower curtain and you may be recording in a bathroom, let me be the first to thank you for not flushing during this video. My earbuds would’ve exploded😂.

Thank you for the great video content, really enjoying these, brilliant! Had a similar issue recently where I was criticised for missing shoots (2 IPSC targets and 6 swinging clays suspended on string in-between). Total was 11-13 shots each run but time was 10 seconds, closest time to me was double that but still took heavy criticism for going too fast...

Flip the script on him! Hahah I love it

I had a similar experience this past weekend at a glock match. I shot 8 strings of plate rack and failed to nock down the final plate on the final string. The RO asked me, "Do you know about trigger reset?" I said, "Yeah, but I'm trying to break the habit of riding the reset right now." He continued, "because you're definitely slapping the trigger right now." Honestly though, it was just a funny exchange. I walked away thinking this guy probably isn't going to explore trigger control beyomd pinning the trigger, and I'm sure he thought i was some idiot who didn't understand what he was talking about. Sometimes it's easier to just play the fool.

I recently attended a class where the instructor repeatedly told me to slow down, but being pressed harder uncovered issues that would have taken months to identify otherwise. One is a vision problem (strabisimus) that I had not previously realized was affecting my shooting.

this guys is exactly where I am - the moment i go slower I miss slower -- hugely frustrating - when I transition my shots are normally a A or close C - but the follow up is at longer distances more often than not a mike or delta and I am having a hard time correcting the problem - but everybody tells me to slow down but it seems if I slow down I lose the aggressiveness to really take the stage on .. this is not an easy sport!!

When I was justlearning to shoot and trying to get advice from people all over, one of the more common pieces of advice I got was "Slow down to speed up" or "slow is smooth smooth is fast" and both of these are true and crap at the same time. I don't think I need to explain this as 99% of the people reading this will already understand that. When I shot my first stage match, i met a M class USPSA shooter and when I wasn't happy with my hits, I talked to him about my performance and said "yeah I should probably slow it down I'm rushing too much." He responded by saying "No, don't slow down. Speed up your processing." and explained that I was absolutely not "going too fast", but rather my fundamentals were understood just not mastered and refined. By shooting more confidently and thinking more about seeing my target and sights faster, I shot better AND faster. So when somebody shoots a stage in training and hits half charlies and half alphas in a mediocre time, do you tell them "ok lets slow it down and try to hit 90% alphas" or do you say "don't slow down, speed up your processing"? I think one way to figure that out is determine if the shooter is somebody who doesn't understand fundamentals and won't improve by speeding up the processing of something that isn't there, or if they ARE somebody that understands the fundamentals but isn't performing. I've seen success in both ways with people I've shot with, and it works pretty well for them. I think it is more important for people to understand how to train correctly and efficiently than it is to simply practice reps

My grip and trigger control is dog shit but I have been trying to be consistent with dryfire I need to read my dry fire book

Missing slow really sums it up

There's a lot of bad "instruction" and unsolicited advice out there. I don't know why everybody has to an effing expert on everything these days. Congrats, you're mediocre at shooting (that's not nothing, competition is stiff in dynamic shooting), but that doesn't mean you're qualified to teach. Over here in Europe it's usually bulls eye shooting fudds running the gun clubs claiming you need to be good at their 25m bulls eye game before even considering switching to IPSC. "Speed comes with precision." That's BS, of course, IPSC is a totally different sport from Olympic shooting and you need to do IPSC and train for IPSC to be good at it. Usually the source of such bad advice is ppl peddling their stuff. They don't actually want you having a good foundation for IPSC, they want you to join their bulls eye league and remain there. Same for such "instructors" as at that church. If all I got in my store is a (slow and deliberate) hammer, I'll claim a hammer is the solution to everything.

All “test”/qualifications are games; understand the rules and play to win. No qualifier I’ve ever had to shoot was an accurate analog for prevailing in an actual gunfight. Unless the rules are being subjectively applied to penalize particular individuals and reward others, I don’t see the problem. Are there better and worse qualification test? Absolutely! However, none are perfect. The same is true of instructors/team leaders. Hopefully they were chosen based on some standard of merit but, in a volunteer organization like a church, security team leaders are often selected based as much on relationship and trust as they are on actual skills and qualification. Hopefully they have the personal humility and self awareness to recognize that we all have opportunities for improvement and we (almost) all have something valuable we can contribute. Leaders who feel undermined or attacked are more likely to resist constructive criticism and double down on their position. Leaders who feel confident in the support of their teams are much more likely to accept input and feedback.

I saw an improvement is rapid shots as I improved my stance more than anything. Plus using a tool that doesn’t have too short or long slide and a well fitting grip. Good wrk👍

I shoot handguns with a friend of mine who is in the camp of shooting painfully slow (IMHO) but accurate as possible while I am in the camp of shooting fast He shoots in 2 gun and 3 gun competitions and I shoot purely for practical self defense purposes With 9mm Luger, at 15 yds he is 4/5 on a 12” paper target. I am 2-3/5 at the same distance and target, only much much faster. We didn’t use shot timers to scientifically quantify times but in a shoot out I think I’d win because I’d already have most of my 2-3/5 shots on target while he has just gotten off one round. He fails to understand the “time is of the essence” concept. He’s shooting for groups. I am shooting for getting as much lead on target in the shortest amount of time. Also I can see when I miss, the splash in the dirt berm behind the target and I am mostly missing high or low (mostly low) while aiming center mass but not by much (even if it’s left/right). In a self defense scenario this would in fact be a hit on the target, although slightly higher or lower than intended, further increasing my hit probability in a real life scenario. I’m not missing so big that it would necessarily be a miss on a human size aggressor just on a small paper target He calls it spray and pray, I call it shooting fast with less tighter grouping. My philosophy is “time is of the essence”, get the most lead down range in the shortest amount of time, get as many hits, even if they are ugly imperfectly placed hits as possible Incapacitate and neutralize the threat quickly. It doesn’t have to be a sniper assassin brain/t-box/spine or heart/lung or pelvic girdle shot, any citizen self defenders gut shot or otherwise hit will change the aggressor’s attitude. As long as I am not hit and it lessens the likelihood of rounds coming my way.

In groups like this the “instructors” have no more a clue what to do than the other people most the time. A test is a test. Can you do it right now or not. I don’t think a test should be used in personal practice that way. You can shoot the same course of fire but the mentality of how you shoot it changes. I’m going to push it to see where I can get away with things in practice. Sounds like they might be using the wrong target for what they are doing. I’m not against penalizing a miss if it’s actually a miss and not just you put a round half an inch into the C Zone. If we are training for reality that is still an effective shot. If you want the accuracy standard to be higher than make the target smaller. I look at it the same way that Ben has talked about leaning around barriers. “If you want me to lean put down a fault line”.

CSAT, Combat Shooting & Tactics, owner Paul Howe former Delta

I still suck, but found that I didnt start improving until I shot faster. Weird that

I had to do a qualification where we were just shooting at paper plates at 25 yards. The instructor allowed some guys to wear all of their military style gear and shoot fast with their .40 caliber Glocks. They ended up shooting the left target stand completely obliterating it. I can understand if the instructor has had that experience and maybe wanting shooters to slow down if he doesn't know them so they don't keep destroying his targets. 😂

Csat is Paul Howe class

Question and I’m not challenging Ben. I have no problem if the qual is very serious/strict where one miss is a fail (the AirMarshal qual is kind of like that). But the mentality should be completely different when doing a qual versus training. So please let me know if the following thought process is wrong: If the qual I need to pass is, let’s say, 3 sec bill drill all A’s, then I should in my training be able to shoot the bill drill much faster (say 2 sec) with allowing myself the C’s and may be D’s. Assess why and work towards better faster and more accurate. But then I should be able to switch my mentality and be able, on demand, to shoot a 3 sec bill drill all A’s. What I’m trying to say is that if the qual is a certain time 100% accuracy, then the shooter should be able to shoot much faster in training with probably less than a 100% accuracy. So, I disagree with the mentality of “slow down and get your hits” but to achieve the 3 sec bill all A’s, I should be training at speeds that the 3 sec bill drill should feel way too slow to me. Any qual I aim to pass should be so easy for me that I should pass it on my worst day. And frankly, if one cannot shoot all A’s at 20 yards at “slow for them” speed, then the problem is not the speed. The problem is that they cannot shoot accurately for whatever reason that they need to address.

I'm not sure I'd call the slow down and aim guys toxic like the guy writing the message says, but I DO completely understand the mind set. It's a test. Pass the test, know what you'd ACTUALLY do if you have to do it.

Sounds like the instructor is afraid of someone doing better than him so he intimidates the shooter to the point of failure

We have something similar at one of my clubs here in EU. I just take the time penalitys and know that i was 8secounds faster with if it where not for the time penelties.

This guy's on a different level. It's inspiring, isnt it?

Do we need to take up a collection And get the guy to your class?

I have never seen a church that is that stringent on the church security requirements. Wild.

I went to a well known range near Las Vegas. The mantra they used a lot was “slow hit beats a fast miss.” While I see the point I also have to ask, why not get a fast hit? It’s like this institutional inbreeding states that the only way to get accurate shots is to go slow. The reality is that you just have to train and learn to shoot fast. It’s simple but not necessarily easy

As Ben says, slower is NOT helpful. Never think "slow down." Think, I need to be deliberate and take more care to hit. That often results in about the same time. It is much easier to teach a fast shooter to be accurate than it is to teach an accurate shooter to be faster.

Starting from this, I’m curious to ask: can an instructor actually make you worse? And if so, how can you recognise it happening versus “It’s worse because it’s a new technique but it’s going to get better”?

Ben - unrelated question, but do you have any advice on dealing with frustration when practicing and training? I’m trying hard to build the basics (e.g. consistent grip that doesn’t slip, trigger control, keeping my wrists locked, and remaining target-focused). When it all comes together, it feels magical - I shoot faster and more accurate than before. But, man, am I struggling while chasing that feeling and I can’t help but get mad at myself or frustrated with the process. I know it’s a good idea to take breaks, but what else can I do? Perhaps I need a mindset change?

Ben for VP 2024

Is that a shower curtain in the background? Travel must suck.

I'm very mediocre, even I think that CSAT sounds stupid. But I guess, it's a different sport.

Are they telling him he's too fast or are they telling him he's too inaccurate?

Ben, I’m curious to know your thoughts on mediocrity as it pertains to the training paradigm of tier 1 operators like Delta. Perhaps this is a question better targeted for someone like Matt Pranka, but I know that you’ve worked extensively with these organizations. In interviews with former operators and well known trainers like Shannon Smith, they have spoken about their extremely strict accuracy standards, even leading Shannon Smith to say, “They’re way too accurate,” as a criticism about what he believes holds them back from full potential. Although groups like Delta, SEAL Team 6, HRT, and others are lauded for their pistol prowess, as someone who worked with them, and does not believe in an “accuracy is king…period” paradigm, do you believe that these organizations are missing the boat in the development of full potential, at least in a somewhat similar manner as the church security team or larger training community that says, “accuracy is king?” I hope that you select my comment as a topic. Thanks.

Doesn’t this sum up IDPA?

Some valid complaints, and some invalid. Just telling students that shooting slower will solve the problem is not a good approach. That part I can agree with. However, "Why are non-competition program not scoreing me like competition" is just invalid whining. Some situations do have more risk of non-"A zone" hits than some other situations. "3 seconds? Why not 5?" is something to think about. However, same question can be asked to IDPA or USPSA. "I thought you are 'practical" shooting. You're not serious?" And, in the end, how to penalize inaccuracy compared to actual self-defense in reality will always have some degree of arbitrary decisions involved. Agancy trainiers' goal is, more often, not about making the best shooters. It is to get a set number of group of students to perform certain level of task. So, yes, their mentality or approach would be different, and I would not expect something like a poice academy or any CCW class to be a "push your limits" type class. This is neither a criticism nor justification of their approach. It's just reality. And, another reality of the matter is that the students they get on average is probably not even half as motivated as ones you get who paid you to teach them. In the end, my conclusion is that I cannot rely on any agency traning, or most private sector instructors for that matter, to push my limits, and it is my individual initiative to do it.

If the man who commented needs this explicit version scrubbed, I can edit out the swear words so you can just present this in the next church security team meeting:)

Sure, we laugh at the fudds, but the guy needs to works on slow fire. You should be able to be more accurate by spending a bit more time on a shot. Ben doesn't shoot every target at the same pace. You should be able to hit an A zone at 20 yards, if not, find out why.

So there's a qual required for the "church guardian team"? What if you can't qual or just don't wanna be on the team? You can't simply carry in that church? I thought this was America. Agreed the instructors are fudds but just do you and carry that thing.

Consider the demographics. A lot of these folks consider themselves "good shooters". In reality, they are short on the fundamentals. I'm shooting low left, "gotta adjust my sights". They can't get 5 "A" hits in a row slow fire. Most (IMO) need a better fundamentals foundation and THEN they can build accurate speed. JMHO

I would say the first thing he needs to do, is find a different Church,, 😂

I think a baby is worth 5 seconds.

Typical LE mentality here. A's and Close C's win gun fights. If they thought about it they know, but they've been taught "speed is fine, accuracy is final." And to have a clear front sight, slow and steady squeeze. And they are actually most often very good at their wrong techniques they've been taught and then regurgitate. They make tests and standards around what they can accomplish. They want to keep the shirt and all that comes with it - easy OT, free ammo and hanging around guns.

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