If you really want to improve your tactical shooting skills then you’ve come to the right place. In this article I’m going to review some research based tips to improve your tactical shooting. We’ll discuss some methods to improve your mechanics, as well as your shoot no shoot target discrimination. Keep reading for more.
The first thing you should be asking yourself is why should I listen to this dude? If you’re my wife you won’t listen to me, and you can stop reading. If you’re interested in becoming a better shooter, I can tell you that I have some qualifications in this area. I’m currently a USPSA Carry Optics master class shooter, and a police officer. In another life I was an officer in the Marine Corps and I’ve deployed to Afghanistan.
Most importantly I won’t just be relying on my personal experience. Readers of this website know that I lean heavily on research for many of my articles. You can see that in my fitness programs, as well as my analysis of self defense shootings, and more. Here’s a quick overview how to improve your tactical shooting skills.
How to Improve Your Tactical Shooting Skills: Overview
- Competition shooting is key for mechanical skill development
- Force on force training builds durable shooting performance under pressure
- Gaze control is key for use of force decision making
- Stress inoculation can put you years ahead of the competition
- Physical fitness is a strong correlate to high tactical performance
Before we go any further, I think it’s important to quickly review what exactly tactical shooting is. In my opinion, it’s a bit of a loaded term, that evokes a lot different concepts with different people.
When I refer to tactical shooting skills, I mean the fundamentals needed to shoot in a tactical scenario. This can be in training, or in real life. Tactical shooting requires more than pure shooting mechanics. It will require target discrimination, and decision making.
In my opinion a dad working on his concealed carry draw with a shot timer, is just as tactical as a Delta Squadron taking down a bad guy on a hostage rescue. The only difference is the scope of performance needed, and the amount of New Balance shoes worn on target.
In the next section we’ll review some awesome research that shows us the current problems with tactical shooting for police officers, SWAT teams, and special operations forces. If you like this kind of article, then you should join the email list below.
Tier Three Tactical Email List
Tactical Shooting Skills: Research Review
It should come as no surprise that most police officers are not good shooters. You can see this reflected in many different studies. In my review of these shooting statistics, I came to the conclusion that most police officers have a single target hit rate of 30%, in a gunfight.
I think there are several reasons for this. First, many police shootings start with the officer being ambushed by the offender shooting at them. For obvious reasons this is going to greatly degrade anyone’s ability to shoot quickly and accurately.
The other elephant in the room is that police officers just aren’t good shooters. Most officers shoot less than 100 rounds of ammunition a year. They are often taught just the basics of sight alignment and trigger control, at slow speeds. Even officers that make a special effort to shoot on their own dime are likely shooting a few hundred rounds a month. This isn’t enough to be more than basically competent.
Before you guys think I’m ragging on my fellow officers, I think most civilians would be worse. If you don’t believe me, go to any civilian shooting range and see what’s going on there. Let’s just say trigger control is the least of their problems!
The good news is that research demonstrates that there are several methods to improve your defensive shooting skills under these high stress situations. In the next section I’m going to review these methods so we can improve our own tactical shooting skills.
Research Tips for Tactical Shooting
In this article entitled, “Negative Consequences of Pressure on Marksmanship May be Offset by Early Training Exposure to Contextually Relevant Threat Training: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,” we can see a wealth of great shooting information.
If you’re new to reading research, a meta-analysis is a review of all published scientific studies on a particular topic. They are some of the most reliable sources of info because they don’t just rely on one experiment.
In this meta-analysis the authors reviewed 10 studies that compared shooting performance in high stress situations and low stress situations. All participants in these studies were either police officers or military personnel, with formal tactical shooting training. They were all placed in a threat response drill, which yielded interesting results.
High Stress Shooting Accuracy
The authors were able to make several determinations. First, they found that mean shooting accuracy during high stress, force on force training, was reduced 14.8%. This was moderated by experience. Shooting accuracy in high stress real-world scenarios was improved 1.1% for every year of service, on average.
They also found that officers improved the number of accurate shots, in high stress situations, by 10.6% after a period of training, in these types of scenarios.
Gaze Behavior Under Stress
The authors noted that several studies showed that higher performing officers had longer periods of aiming, and more focused gaze control. Readers of this website will remember that I’ve written about this phenomena called Quiet Eye before.
Experts in many sporting fields demonstrate more accurate gaze control and Quiet Eye. The authors here noted that experts looked at hands, and waist regions more often. They also closed their eyes less often, compared to less experienced officers.
If you want to work on your own gaze control, you should try my free gun detection training video below. See if you can get a perfect score.
Tactical Shooting and Experience Levels
The authors also recognized that expert level performance began around 10-13 years of experience. They found that these officers had an accuracy of 81.4% compared to novices at 54.2%. Moreover, they made more accurate shoot no shoot decisions compared to new officers.
They found that the experienced officers had a 13% error rate, compared to 58% for new officers. Of note, these errors were in high stress situations, with role players shooting paint marking cartridges at the officers.
This meta-analysis shows that experience matters, but the best experience is an accumulation of training time in high anxiety shooting conditions. The more time you can practice making decisions, and shooting against combative opponents the better your performance.
In fact, the authors noted that for those studies that had a high stress training program, the equivalent performance improvement was worth 9.6 years experience.
Now that we’ve covered some great research on force on force training, let’s review another piece of research on physical traits relevant to tactical shooting skills.
Physical Traits to Improve Tactical Shooting
This study entitled, “Factors Influencing Marksmanship in Police Officers: A Narrative Review,” examined the physical characteristics that predicted high performance shooting.
They found that grip strength was a significant predictor of shooting performance with a pistol. That trait alone predicted 7% of the variation in marksmanship accuracy. It’s important to note that several of the studies had folks work on improving grip strength with no significant improvement.
The authors stated that once you have sufficient grip strength, above 80 lbs, you don’t receive a statistically significant performance improvement. I will say that I think that’s only applicable to standard police shooting, which does not require long strings of rapid fire. Try shooting a 2 second Bill Drill with an average grip, and let me know where that gets you!
Next we’ll review our final study that looked at successful traits of SWAT officers, as it related to shooting performance.
SWAT Officers Shooting Performance
In this study entitled, “Relationships Between Physical Training and Marksmanship Performance in Law Enforcement Officers” we see three key traits that predict shooting performance.
Like other studies, they noted that experience within police special operations improved performance. SWAT officers with 6-10 years experience demonstrated more accurate shooting in their testing.
SWAT officers with the highest scores on their rifle and pistol shooting test regularly competed in competition shooting matches. Surprise, surprise! They were also more likely to use their department gym, and regularly engage in physical fitness training.
Now that we’ve covered a lot of research on how to improve your tactical shooting performance, let’s discuss some of the key points, so you can improve your tactical shooting skills.
How to Improve Your Tactical Shooting Skills
As we mentioned in the beginning of this article, tactical shooting goes beyond the mechanical skills of manipulating your tactical rifle, or pistol. However, these basic firearm mechanics are the foundations upon which all the other advanced skills rest upon.
To improve your overall tactical performance, you need to be able to manipulate and shoot your firearm subconsciously. This is critical. When you’re looking for potential threats in a training scenario, you need to focus on that task. If you have to remind yourself to move your gun into a low-ready position, or what sight picture you need for an engagement, then you’re taking bandwidth from your situational awareness.
In this section I will review some training methods I’ve used, and found success with. I’ll cover some tactical shooting drills and force on force exercises. Let’s get to it.
Firearms Training
The majority of your firearms training should be dry fire. This is where you can work on your weapons manipulation and vision control, without worrying about recoil. It creates a solid foundation for proper training later on. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need fancy drills to build your manipulation speed, and accuracy.
If you want a realistic pistol shooting standard, then you should check out the Tier Three Pistol Standards. All you need is eye and ear protection, two USPSA targets, and a shot timer. Fair warning, they are close range and fast.
Dry Fire Training Tips
I recommend picking a focus for your training for several weeks to a month. Currently, I’m working on hammering my draw to first shot time, and target transitions. These are my two biggest weaknesses. This means that I spend roughly 80% of my dry fire training sessions on drills that work on those two goals.
For tactical shooters, I think working on a fast and consistent draw is important. If you read my article on draw speed, you’ll know that it can be beneficial. Please note that in my analysis of self defense shootings, drawing quickly wasn’t always an advisable tactic. Often times concealing your weapons draw leads to success.
The reason you want to focus on a fast draw is because it carries over to other manipulations. It’s also better to be able to draw a pistol quickly, and not need to, then need to, and not be able to. I would also recommend drawing while moving. This is very common in self defense shootings, and other tactical scenarios.
The next biggest area for improvement is transitions. You need to be able to look to a small spot on a target and transition there quickly. For beginner shooters, you don’t need to muscle the gun over there. You need to move quickly and precisely. Think of moving a mouse to click on a tab. You don’t force your finger to go fast.
For even more dry fire training tips check out the book, “Dry Fire Reloaded” by Ben Stoeger (Amazon Affiliate Link). It is my favorite book for dry fire as it gives you excellent goal times to shoot for. It really builds your pistol manipulation skill set.
Lastly, my biggest tip for dry fire is to grip the gun hard. You must replicate how you would actually shoot, otherwise you’re wasting your time. Next we’ll cover live fire training.
Live Fire Training Tips
For most shooters I think shooting once a week is enough to build a lot of skill, provided you engage in realistic dry fire training a few times per week as well. The most beneficial drills are doubles drill, and longer strings of fire like the Bill Drill. These teach you to track your dot, or front sight predictably.
Shooting on the move is also very important to work on. The research is clear, moving and shooting makes you a harder target to hit. Ideally a range session would start with basic static drills such as: draws, reloads, and doubles. It would then move towards more difficult skills like moving and shooting, or one handed shooting.
The most important tip is to have a concrete goal to work on. Otherwise you just won’t make progress on your range days. If you want a great training book for rifle and pistol, I would look at, “Practical Shooting Training” Amazon affiliate link). It’s full of great drills that work for competition and tactical shooting.
For tactical shooters working on both rifle and pistol, a good rule of thumb is to spend roughly 70% of your time on the pistol, and 30% on the long gun. The skills that make you a good pistol shooter will easily translate to rifle. They don’t work the other way around.
My last tip for live fire training is to shoot competitions. I thinks USPSA (pistol shooting) and PCSL (rifle and pistol) are the two best formats for tactical shooters. Please note that a shooting stage is not a training scenario, it is simply a test of shooting skill, which is what you are there for.
While you’re at the match, take note of the top performers. Most of the guys that are Masters, or Grandmasters, will do one on one lessons. In my opinion the fastest way to improve is to get one on one training from a top performer. I was a B class shooter until I did this, and I made Master in a little over a year, taking lessons from a local Grandmaster. It works.
Now let’s cover some scenario based training, under high stress conditions.
High Stress Scenario Training
The research is very clear. High stress tactical scenarios improve real world performance the most. Most of the time this is simple force on force training, with simunitions or airsoft. I think taking a course from a training company that focuses on force on force is a great idea. It takes some experience to set up scenarios that are realistic.
Once you have some idea of how this training works, you can also train this informally. Go buy some airsoft guns and have at it with your friends. There’s also nothing wrong with doing paintball or more formal airsoft games.
Many people in the tactical community look down on these guys, but I think you would certainly learn some valuable lessons. Just keep in mind that not all aspects of these games carry over to real world training. That doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable. Mike Tyson boxed with gloves on, but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t knock you out without them!
Force on Force Training Tips
Ideally this type of force on force training has some ground rules, to keep it realistic. One of the most important rules I implement when I run this training, is good guy up or down scenarios.
In some runs, I will tell the officers that if they’re hit, they are to take a knee exactly where they are. In other scenarios they are to continue as if they aren’t hit. This allows officers, in a team environment, to experience the realities of casualties during a run.
It also keeps them from a common training scar, where they stop if they’re shot. You should continue on if you’re able. Don’t learn to be a casualty! Next we’ll talk about fitness for tactical training.
Tactical Fitness
The research made it clear that being fit is correlated with superior tactical performance. Like anything else, the level of performance you need to achieve will dictate how hard you should be training. At a minimum, I believe everyone who carries a firearm for self defense, or professionally should achieve a reasonable level of strength and aerobic capacity.
For men that would be a bodyweight bench press, and a 1.5 x bodyweight deadlift. As for aerobic capacity, I think men should be able to run a mile in under 9 minutes. If you’re not there that’s ok, I have a ton of free resources to get you there.
For those looking to prepare for a tactical fitness test you can try this 9 week program. If you’re new to physical fitness you can try this beginner program. For advanced athletes you should try this 8 week hybrid training program. It will build your strength, as well as conditioning. You can also check out the full program below.
Now that we’ve covered how to improve your tactical shooting, let’s review some of the key points, as we finish this article up.
Final Thoughts
The most important thing you need to do is work on your consistency. There is a lot work to do here, if you want to improve your tactical shooting to the next level. That doesn’t mean you should try to do it all at once. For the vast majority of readers, you should work on your physical fitness and raw shooting performance, in a competition setting.
If you improve those two elements, you will be miles ahead of everyone else. For more advanced shooters, you can work to improve your skills and abilities in force on force training. Remember, the ability to shoot quickly and accurately is important, but being able to determine when to do so is even more important.
If you have any comments or questions about this article put them in the section below. Now get out there and get training. Don’t forget to join the email list below.
Any links to Amazon, Brownells, Buds Guns, Palmetto State Armory, Primary Arms, Optics Planet, or other manufacturers are affiliate links. That means that we receive a small referral fee if you purchase from them after clicking on their link. It costs you nothing, and helps keep the lights on here. Read this for more info. None of these products were paid for recommendations. Thank you for the support. It helps keep the lights on here. Be sure to follow the fundamental firearms safety rules before engaging in live fire or dry fire training.
