I’d like to underscore this point. Practice is practice. When you do things right practice embeds your muscle memory with the right way to do things. When you do things sloppily or worse just plain wrong you are still training your muscle memory but you are improving your ability to do it wrong.

My piano teacher made me play new music very slowly. Painfully slowly it seemed to me. I wanted it to sound like it did when pros played it so I played the parts I could do easily faster than the parts I found difficult. The result was a very choppy sound over all fast here slow there. She insisted I play the easy parts no faster than I could play the hard parts.

I carried her teaching over to my marksmanship training. When I pick up a new weapon I go through my routine with it very slowly. When I can do my routine smoothly then I speed up a little until I can work with the weapon fluidly and without any errors. It is very easy for me to try to speed up when ‘there is just one little glitch’ in my performance and I have to fight that urge.

One last point: Under pressure people tend to revert to their earliest training. This means you may treat the gun in your hands as though it were the first gun you learned to shoot. You might reach for the bolt, which was the first gun you had, when now you are shooting a semi-automatic.

My points are these, don’t allow yourself to imbed any bad habits at any point in your training and train enough today to make sure under stress you really know how to handle the weapon you are holding.

Oh I should have said this at the start. This article was a good read!!