Feisar wrote: »

As Cass said above though, it's the seeing of mistakes that's the hard part.

Lions? It's the neighbors cat sh!tting in my garden that's the problem!

Cass is making a very valid point. A little bit of skilled instruction can give you surprising results in very little time if it comes down to honing skills and correcting a few errors.

In a past life I done a very thorough professional pistol shooting course. The first shoot we done was a minimal instruction shoot ( not much more than safe handling according to in house SOP’s ) on a torso sized target at 5 meters. All my 25 rounds hit the target but there was no real evidence of any sort of a group. The target looked like buckshot at 40 yards.

At the end of the three weeks I was shooting saucer size groups 50 round drills at 20 meters and repeated that result at refresher shoots for five years.

Feisar wrote: »

Thanks. Been shooting forever but going to get clinical about it now.

If you want to get serious about your technique and really drill down on the finer points then, if you don't have one already, I'd recommend getting yourself a 22LR or a PCP air rifle.

As Cass says above, seeing the mistakes is the hard part so getting someone who knows their stuff to watch on the range is a definite must, but there's a whole other side to things that are far more visible to you* and recoil can make it difficult to interpret them until you learn what they look like.

*which isn't to say that a good coach won't pick up on them, but it can take a really good coach!


Either of the above pretty much removes recoil from the equation and provides the best view of what you're doing during your shot, with observable results. They're also dirt cheap to run so you can fling a hundred rounds in a session without either breaking the bank or losing focus. Once you start getting to know what you need to work on, and what the mistakes look like, then you can start dry firing on whatever rifle you want to do the business with and move on handling the recoil on top of that from there.

As for coaching, the best thing you can do is head to the range and talk to the better marksmen in whatever discipline it is that you're most keen on. Personally I'd advise spending a *lot* of time at short range with the smaller rifle so that you don't have ballistics or recoil to worry about. In my experience and weather permitting, your average CZ with half decent ammo (read: Eley, Lapua, SK, RWS.. not S&B, CCI, Winchester etc..) will one hole all day at 50m - so if it's calm and they're not staying well under an inch, chances are you've got work to do.

When you're happy with your results there then switch to the bigger boomstick and take the time to apply what you've learned from the rimfire in the presence of the recoil; then move on to reaching out from there.

In the future then when you find things going awry, you'll be able to dryfire most of your way to a solution because you'll know what to look for.

Be warned though - drilling down will expose you to what can turn into a very expensive appreciation for things like fine triggers, adjustable stocks (or worse yet 'custom'), expensive optics, and the inevitable allure of a custom rifle. So start saving some of that beer money.