I did a little El Prez dry fire practice yesterday. Speed mode, 3.5 second par time, simulated 8ish yards.



Self diagnosis: I think I'm doing a good job of getting my head around to the targets, getting my body turned, and getting the gun out and up quickly. It looks like I'm bringing the gun too far into my body during the reloads. It also looks like I'm not always watching the new magazine go into the gun. I also noticed myself cheating sometimes and not getting a full 2 trigger presses on each target before transitioning.

I'd love to get suggestions from anyone else, though.

Thanks!

Looked great to me. I wish I was that quick on reloads. Only thing I saw was some moderate sweeping. On occasion I could see you not "stop" on target but sweep through. Overall I'd say very good.

In my experience, setting an aggressive par time like that builds bad habits.  At one point, I dry fired like that and pushed everything to meet a par time per Ben Stoeger's Dry Fire book.  There's no way you're shooting 2A on each target at that par time.  

The biggest thing that dry firing unrealistic par times on drills like that did for me, was establish visual impatience in live fire.  The reason it establishes impatience is that you're ingraining a schedule in your head of how long that should take.  When you do it in live fire, you start to feel like you're "behind schedule" and start pushing shit beyond your capabilities.  Feeling "behind schedule" takes you out of what I call "ninja mode" or "boss mode."  You can't let go and flow when you are consciously trying to make something happen.

I really started to progress into a higher level of shooting once I approached dry fire as realistic as possible.  Visualizing the recoil, visualizing realistic splits, and focusing on pushing transitions.

I don't dry fire with a par timer at all anymore.

Your draw and reloads look awesome.  I would also recommend making dummy rounds and fill those mags up for weight if you're not doing it already.  Hard to tell but those sound like empty mags.

ETA-El Pres is one of the only 99 series classifiers where a 100% is pretty easy.  Even in Open, all alphas in 5 seconds is 100%.  

Are you familiar with Steve Anderson's three "modes" of practice?  In the video, I'm in "speed mode" where my only focus is letting my body get used to what it feels like to go that fast.  The thought is that as your body gets used to going faster in practice, your "normal match" speed increases.  Speed is my biggest point of emphasis right now; however, I always end my dry fire sessions with a drill or two in "match mode," where I'm calling all of my shots and making up any that need it, as well as trying to hit my reloads 100%.  In these drills, I don't use a par time.  The match mode practice keeps me from carrying over that "go as fast as possible" feeling into matches.  In the video, I did notice myself sweeping through the targets sometimes, which I've been working on remedying.  I noticed some improvement in a subsequent dry fire session, but I also noticed other things that need work.

I use dummy rounds in my mags.  I put 4 or 5 in the mags that I drop and I fill up the mag that goes into the gun (max reloadable, not total max capacity).

I use El Prez (and other 6-reload-6 drills) in practice a lot because it involves many of the basic skills you need to score well in USPSA.  I also do more single skill specific drills as well.

Thanks for your input!

In case anyone is interested, here is a video from one of my most recent dry fire sessions.

I'm familiar with that theory.  Although, I can't listen to his podcasts anymore.  The Van Halen is too annoying for me.

Again, there's a fine line between understanding how fast, fast feels and building bad habits.  What's the value in dry firing a 3.5 second El Prez?  Nothing but bad habits IMO.  Even Todd Jarret's personal best is like a 3.71 and that's not even with A zone hits.  

I think you'd be better served setting that par time to 4 seconds and shooting all A's.  Push transitions, not splits.

Getting good at this game requires shooting fast alphas.  Shooting shitty points fast or shooting good points slow will win B class at most matches.  If you truly want to perform at an M to GM level, you gotta shoot alphas fast.