Gun School: Tim Herron's Practical Performance Class

This weekend I was near Fort Wayne Indiana for Tim Herron's Practical Performance Class hosted by Condition Red Response.

To say the class is excellent in terms of the detailed instruction and absolute flood of information and analysis you receive to increase and improve your shooting performance is an understatement.

Tim is a USPSA Grand Master and it shows.   To say he is both fast and accurate in shooting is an understatement. 

He also has an excellent teaching demeanor and is able to convey a lot of complex information broken down into understandable parts, as well as a very sharp eye to detect issues with each student's shooting and point out immediate techniques for improvement.

He explained USPSA's often confusing concept of Hit Factor in the simplest way possible - it is simply the number of points you collect per second on a stage.  He also talked about how the classification system worked, and discussed stage planning.

Yes, there was indeed a stage in the class. First time we ran it cold and  I sucked.  We then worked on all the techniques to learn to shoot better and faster as well as identify how to better plan and read a stage, and improve our overall shooting technique with tailored instruction to each student based on what Tim observed as we ran the stage.

In short, I was definitely in the bottom quarter of the sixteen shooters there in terms of ability walking into class.  Wonderfully humbling. This was good as it gave me a lot of room for improvement, and some improvement did indeed occur, not to mention the desire to further improve. 

There were some really exceptionally good shooters attending - some A and B class and many other proficient shooters, all very friendly and willing to exchange information and everyone supported each other during the class.  So, I learned a lot from not just Tim but my fellow classmates as well.  I did improve quite a bit on subsequent stage runs becoming both faster and more accurate both.

Carry Optic Pistols dominated the firearms choices present with SIG 320s being the majority.  We had a few Glocks, some 2011s, one Walther PDP, a Canik, and an Open gun, and some iron sight-only pistols as well. The SIGs ran impressively well and I may just look into one moving forward as they offer some definite advantages over the Glock -- except in the area of magazine cost where Glock has pretty much everyone beat. The experienced USPSA shooters highly recommended the SIG 320 and had lots of good suggestions.

Among many other drills over the two days, we did the rectangle drill, Blake Drill, and a barrel drill.  This specific barrel drill was designed to teach shooting on the move as well as transition flow and it was quite challenging. 

Lots of movement on the second day and my hip was telling me it was getting annoyed.   It certainly didn't help my speed any.

Tim diagnosed an issue with my grip and my shooting improved remarkably from that one small observation and change.

I left the class with a ton of practical drills to use to improve my shooting, and  a much better understanding of how to do better, and of USPSA shooting itself which is really helpful.

I highly recommend Tim's class if you want to learn how to shoot faster and more accurately -- as well as on the move -- whether you participate in an action pistol game or not. There's measurable improvement after spending two days in class alone and he gives you the methodologies to improve further on your own  -- which is the hard part to keep the work up to have the improvements stick.

Practical Performance is a great class with a great teacher.