A shooter trained for a month using only dry-fire drills and improved their IDPA classifier score from 36.68 seconds to 28.43 seconds, jumping from Marksman to Sharpshooter. Raw shooting time dropped to 24 seconds with just four points down, proving dry-fire alone can produce real gains.
It says we're live. Hello, replay viewers! Since it was not a planned live, there is no way you are here— anyone is here live, I mean, yet. However, I can't help but to go on live because I shot a classifier yesterday and I'm like, wow, that was really bad. So today I shot another one. And so for those of you who don't know, in IDPA, there are these things called a 5x5 classifier. And what does that do? It puts me in a group of shooters. Now, in IDPA, we have Master, Expert, Sharpshooter, Marksman, and Novice. When I started, I was a Novice, and that was in 2010, Monday after Christmas. In 2010, if you'd like to know when I shot my very first IDPA match. Now, I was a novice then, and then I moved up to marksman, and I've been a marksman ever since because my goal for competition was never to win or be the best of the best, but it was always to improve my gun handling skills. And I just finished class with 5 new people. And I will tell them— I told them the same thing. I'll tell you is the beauty of doing competition is it gives you something to practice. All right, so with that, 32 seconds to 41 seconds to shoot this entire course of fire is where you need to be in order to be a marksman. So we started this challenge back in July of 20— July 23rd of 2023. There was a lot of 23s there. I was confused for a moment. Um, oh, wait a second. Sorry, I just saw— oh, look at you! Good evening, uh, Mr. Mike. You're out in California, it's still afternoon. We know better. Anyway, oh, nice to see you, sir. Ah, all right, so July 23rd, so 4 weeks ago, maybe 5 weeks ago depending on how you want to count that because I'm not good like that, uh, my first score was 36 0.68, which led me very solidly in the marksmanship of 32 to 41. Then I did 2 weeks of dry fire. I created a dry fire list for those of you want to see all of the ones. Unfortunately, they're not in order, and I don't know how to make them in order, so maybe somebody knows that. So a week later, I did another one of these. So I had a score of 34.74. So 2 seconds faster when all I did was dry fire and do nothing else, no live fire. This is the only thing I did for live fire. And then yesterday, in a rush, I had some malfunctions while shooting the drill, so I'm not sure exactly honestly how accurate this was. However, it was uh, one malfunction, so I had to reshoot. So this is where I'm not 100% sure of how many points down I had because I didn't do a good job of fixing that, but we're going to say that this is correct. So this is back up to 36 seconds, but it was mainly because I had lots of points down, and I know that I could shoot better than I did, but I was impressed with my raw time of 23 seconds before I added 9 points down, which may or may not have been true. So what happened today, a mere few moments ago? Ta-da! Still only— and I was reshooting it because, like I said, I'm not sure if the 34 seconds was correct or 36 seconds. So I started at 36, I went down to 34. Yesterday I didn't really shoot— I shot it, but I think I goofed it up. But there was lots of points down. There was a lot of things outside of the zero. So today my raw time was 24 seconds. I had 4 points down and my husband was running me, so he told me that the 4 points down were all on string 2 when I was doing it one-handed shooting. So my total time for my classifier today is 28:43. So remember how I talked about mark master, expert, sharpshooter Marksmen. Well, when we look at my category, which is SSP, which stands for Stock Service Pistol, right here— remember I told you Marksman is 32 seconds to 41? What did I just tell you? Oh, 28 seconds. Oh, so I went from Marksman to Sharpshooter after a month of dry fire without doing any live fire. Now, do you still need to do live fire? Yes, because if I hadn't done live fire yesterday I would not know that I, I wasn't doing well. So today I paid more attention and actually paid attention to what I'm shooting at and really focused in on my sights and on my target to make sure that I was hitting it. So this is me being all excited because I've shot 3 classifiers that were Marksman, and today I shot one that's Sharpshooter. Sharpshooter. All right, so Tomorrow I'm off to holiday with my family. Will I see you between now and next weekend? Probably not. I think we're gonna have just family time. So if you missed any of the dry fire stuff, feel free to go back and check some of it out, and I will see you all on Saturday for Sue Silverman's Saturday, if not before. All right, good night all. Have a lovely rest of your Sunday. I really have to think about that. And I'll talk to you later. Bye, everybody.
