Training vs. practice: Improve or maintain?

When you go to the range to get some shooting time, do you go to train or practice? The difference may seem subtle, but there is a clear distinction between training and practicing. If you want to improve your skills, then you should focus on training. If your goal is to maintain your skills, then practice is an effective way to approach that range session.

More than semantics

The difference between training and practicing lies in their objectives and approaches. If we were to use a football analogy, let’s look at the difference between training camp and practice. These are two different animals and involve different goals.

Football training camp is intensive. It’s a period of training where players focus on developing their skills, improving fitness, learning plays and building team chemistry. Receivers are working on their defensive reads and routes. Linemen are working on their footwork and technique. Quarterbacks are working on getting their arms conditioned and fine-tuning their ability to read defensive alignments. The workouts are intense, and every member of the team is working together to get stronger, faster and ready for the rigors of a long football season. It serves as a time to get players into peak physical shape and prepare them mentally for the upcoming season.

Once the regular football season starts, in-season practices are typically less intense than training camp. The focus shifts more toward preparing for specific games, refining plays and maintaining fitness levels while giving bodies time to recover. Practices help prepare players for specific opponents and what they may face during game conditions. Practices are generally much shorter and focused on addressing specific goals and objectives.

In essence, training camp workouts are longer, more intense, and the goal is to prepare players for the season ahead in all aspects, while in-season practices are shorter, more focused and aimed at maintaining performance.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Dry-fire practice is the place to start if you want to work on skill maintenance.

Practice

Since practice is about maintaining your current skills and ensuring they stay sharp, it involves repetitive exercises to reinforce what you already know. Practicing is about consistency and maintenance. Here are some things you can do on a regular basis to keep your current skill set.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Dry-fire practice is the place to start if you want to work on skill maintenance. Dry-fire practice can also help refine and polish your skills, but it’s more about maintaining your firearm fitness. Without recoil masking your mistakes, you can recognize, diagnose and correct your own shooting errors.

Quality dry practice doesn’t take much time. Even better, it can be fun and inexpensive. Five minutes of quality dry practice time three to four times per week is all it takes. Dry practice is about quality, not quantity.

Start with working on a smooth, fluid draw and presentation. With your handgun, make sure you have a firm grip high on the backstrap while disengaging the holster retention devices in one smooth motion. The draw continues by lifting the handgun straight up out of the holster. A bit of advice at this point: If you put slight pressure on the bottom of the trigger guard with your strong hand middle finger, the handgun rotates toward the target with little effort. Less effort, increased efficiency and faster execution. From this point, acquire the desired grip with the support hand and continue extending toward the eye/target line.

Practice at a smooth pace until it becomes natural, then gradually add speed. Don’t try to go beyond 90% of your fastest draw speed. If you try to draw too quickly, things tend to go wrong — such as missing your initial grip, failing to release holster retention devices or spearing the gun toward the target. For a video reviewing additional points of drawing a handgun quickly and smoothly, check out youtu.be/II-OBhxnjwQ.

Patrol rifles and shotguns are easier to shoot well, but most officers struggle with weapon handling. With your patrol rifles and shotguns, make sure to work on your presentations while working the selector/safety switch. That pesky “on/off” switch perplexes many shooters, so practice some turns and presentations while working the selector switch. Don’t cheat by working the selector switch before the presentation. We need to practice good habits.

Training

We have already covered how training focuses on pushing yourself to perform at a higher level and improving your skills. Training is about growth and improvement. It involves structured activities designed to enhance your abilities and achieve specific goals. So here are some ways to push yourself and improve your skills.

First, get to training. In-service training is fine, but if you’re serious about performance improvement and taking your skills to the next level, you need to go to training outside your department. Find a class with a reputable and skilled instructor who can help you develop your skills while pushing you to be faster, more efficient and more accurate. A good instructor will help you identify where you are strong, but more importantly, they will help you address weaknesses. They will push you to the edge of performance so you can see for yourself where your true abilities lie.

Next, get to the range and shoot with people who are better than you. Competition shooting is the perfect place to work on pushing your skills to the next level of performance. There’s a reason high-speed military teams have been training with elite competition shooters. Competition shooting is tactical training, but it will absolutely push your firearms skills to higher levels of performance.

Shooting a match may expose deficiencies in your firearms skills and give you ideas on how to improve. Most law enforcement officers and instructors have never pushed their skills to their limits. How fast can you shoot accurately? While moving? On moving targets? From cover and in awkward positions? At different-sized targets and at distances from 3 feet to 30-plus yards? Competitive shooting like USPSA, IDPA or three-gun matches are an opportunity to practice old skills while developing new ones in a safe environment. They’re not designed to teach tactics, but they will help you develop better firearms skills. Competitive shooting is a test that will expose weaknesses. Those are the same weaknesses you will have on the street under the stress of a gunfight.

The first step to improving your skills is to commit to the process, and the process involves training and practice. Training will help build your skills, and practice will help polish and maintain your skills. Both are important. Once you figure out your goals, you’ll know whether you need to be training or practicing.