Coming in the first half of 2009!
The DR Performance Practice Deck represents a new way to practice for practical shooting sports. Consisting of 52 basic shooting drills superimposed on a normal deck of playing cards, the deck allows you to have a thorough, fun, and effective practice session while avoiding the inevitable question "Well, what do I do now?". Its small, light, and fits easily in your shooting bag. And, in a pinch (like a long delay between stages at a match), it can even serve as a normal deck of playing cards.
If you're reading this now - the deck is finishing development, and should be going into production in the first half of 2009.
The Idea
One of the common questions I get is "What should I practice?" The right answer, "Everything", is a hard thing for most folks to swallow. Its like a big elephant - trying to eat the whole thing at once is impossible, and its not always obvious where to take the first bite from. In late 2007, I wrote a blog article on the Re-Gun blog that describes how to determine exactly what to practice first. That gets you some specifics on what to focus on, but doesn't really give you a plan on how to work on them. It also doesn't add in general skills practice - you need to maintain that while focusing on the stuff that needs the most work.
Around that same time, I started investigating efficient ways to practice. A thread regarding Motor Learning came up on the Benoverse, and piqued my interest in how to structure practice to show the quickest gains in skill retention (that translates to quickest gains in match placement!). I dug into some research around kinesiology and motor learning, and discovered something interesting - the short of its, psuedo-random practice works better for long term skill retention than hundreds of repetitions of an individual skill (in kinesiology terms, this is referred to as "blocked" practice - ie, a "block" of one skill). This blocked out practice works for learning a new skill's movements and intricacies - once you know the moves, though, moving toward a more random pattern may result in slower gains on each skill in a particular practice session - but you'll retain more of those gains in the next practice session and match.
As I was doing that research, the folks at CrossFit Agoge released their cool Hopper Deck product. A lightbulb came on - a set of cards with shooting drills on them! Shuffle, draw, shoot, rinse, repeat. Pseudo-random practice of general skills. I contacted Alex Taylor at Hopper Deck to seek permission to blatantly steal their idea, and he graciously replied with a lot of great info on how to get started. The rest is... recent history...
1.0 Design Ethics
I rapidly came up with a large number of drills. I wrote down 75 or so, but had ideas for many more. Inventing drills isn't particularly hard (though inventing drills that are useful long term can be challenging). It became apparent that I needed to pare the drills down to 52 drills in some sensible fashion. So, here's what I did.
1.0 is a deck that focuses on basic practical shooting skills. The drills in this deck involve a minimal amount of equipment, relatively short distances, and relatively easy target presentations. This set of properties makes it a sort of "every man" practice tool - its usable in dry fire as well as live fire, the full set of drills can be used on almost any range, and basically every shooter can benefit from the drills as they are written on the cards. The drills can be scaled easily, too, to make them harder as required (more on scaling below). And, its usable for any of the practical shooting sports - USPSA, IPSC, IDPA, pistol for various multi-gun and 3-gun events, etc.
And, I pulled in several drills and target arrays I've found useful from other sources - folks like Max Michel, Jr., Brian Enos, and Eric Stanley.
Hit factor scoring is complex for this kind of thing. Max Michel described a "time plus" scoring system for a few of his drills to me, that I adapted slightly to the scoring system that appears in the deck for use by USPSA or IPSC competitors. It effectively makes each drill a fixed 5 hit factor stage, placing emphasis on shooting good points, but rewarding speed a bit more than IDPA's fixed 2 hit factor scoring. IDPA competitors should use IDPA scoring values to practice appropriately for their game. Other games can pick a system between those two. There is no distinction between Major and Minor power factor, either. What this allows you to do is to track your progress with a simple time number - and it makes it easy to compare your results to other folks who are shooting the same drills.
If 1.0 does well, I may consider developing a second deck with more advanced, involved drills - it could be shuffled straight into the 1.0 deck, giving you 104 drills in one spot. We'll see what happens...
Scaling the Drills
You may recall another blog post that I wrote regarding avoiding "easy" shots in your practice sessions and drills. Most of the drills in the 1.0 deck use wide open targets, and are set at close to moderate distance. For many folks, these are not difficult shots to execute. You can still get an awful lot out of practice on them, even as a upper level shooter. However, should you find yourself shooting 99-100% of points on the drills, at warp speed, you can definitely do some things to make the drills a more difficult challenge.
Distance: back up. This effectively makes the target smaller, and your shots become more difficult because of it. At some point, though, you reach a relatively uncommon target presentation at most of the matches we shoot - and you may run out of room on your range, as well. You can also scale the drills easier if you need to by getting closer - however, I'd encourage even the beginner to stick with the prescribed distances rather than making relatively easy shots easier. Your skill level will quickly improve to where you can make the shots in the deck without much difficulty.
Add no-shoots or hardcover: Another way to scale the difficulty up is to make the targets smaller by adding hardcover over part of one or more targets, or by overlaying one or more targets with no-shoots (non-threats in the IDPA vernacular). No-shoots are easier - you can just use another target and staples. Hardcover takes paint. If you use no-shoots, be sure to assess penalties appropriately!
If you choose to scale, be certain to keep track of that in your notes so that you can compare results the next time you shoot the drill in a meaningful way.
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