Should You Do Blind Shooting Drills?

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Video Transcript


So whenever we shoot drills in our lovely little box maze, people immediately wanna say "you gotta do tactical stuff, any sort of USPSA stuff. Once you have a solid wall and that's, you're gonna die, you're gonna get killed in the streets" all that good stuff… And then people immediately ask "Hey, why don't you do blind drills? Why don't you do drills where you don't know where the targets are?" Because they think that's some really incredible way of testing, shooting skill and proficiency in training. So what we're gonna do is I'm gonna bail from this vehicle with this lovely little MP5K. I'm going to engage three USPSA targets with four or five round each (doesn't really matter) And then we're going to reset the drill. Charles is going to move the cam… the targets—I don't say cameras—the targets to places that I don't know where they are. And I have to maneuver in such a way to engage them safely without hitting obviously the walls or, you know, something I'm not supposed to shoot. So target foreground and background, and we'll see if it's much more difficult or much more beneficial when it comes to training shooting skill. So let's do this.


All right, all three targets moving through here, shooting, getting some good hits. Now let's shoot a blind.


Was what I just did harder when it comes to shooting. And the answer is "absolutely not". This was the easiest shooting you can do. The only thing that's different with this is some decision making, as you're not coming up with a plan beforehand, except for going really slow. If that's an option and keeping your eyes wide open. And in this case, I'm kind of stopping and, you know, thinking, maybe listening (and which in this case, obviously I'm not gonna get anything) but the shooting side with this is super easy. These drills do very, very, very little for shooting in my opinion, for actually building weapons handling skill with a weapon. The only thing I might do is work your… Work your target awareness (Target foreground and background). and how you safely move with a weapon. But other than that, nah it's pretty useless when it comes to shooting skill.


So in my opinion, keep this stuff to force-on-force. And if you're on a flat range, this is a flat range. I've got gravel. There's nothing, these are abstract boxes. If I'm on the flat range, I'm gonna do flat range training, focusing on weapons proficiency. If I'm gonna go train tactics and scenarios and cool stuff like that, I go take force-on-force classes. I go shoot police departments as an OPFOR guy, or I go do stuff with other people or do force-on-force… Or airsoft, even if that's what I wanna do. So be efficient with how you run your drills, how you use your time. I think it's a very wise to separate the two, the two there's a lot of folks out there saying the exact same thing who come from backgrounds doing that. So yeah, but obviously leave a comment in the comments, if you think otherwise, or if you agree, or if you think I'm a pigheaded idiot, I don't mind.