Skill Degradation Over Time | Active Response Training

I was talking about this issue with Jeff Gonzales and told him I had another planned gun-free vacation coming up.  He suggested that I test myself  on some standard shooting drills both before and after my shooting hiatus to quantify exactly how much my skill level degraded.  I thought that was a great idea.

On November 29th of last year I shot the following drills cold and recorded my times/scores.

On December 2, 2023, I shot 50 rounds in a special invitation-only handgun instructor class Tom Givens put on.  Soon after that I left the country.  Besides firing a few rounds from the retention position during demonstrations at a late January class I was teaching, I did not shoot any firearm or engage in any dry fire practice until I shot the three drills again on February 14, 2024.  That was 74 days (10 weeks) without any firearms training or practice of any type.

I was actually pleasantly surprised by the results.

The Double & 1 Drill-

Each year I pick one particular drill to shoot cold at the start of each range session.  For 2024, I chose the Double and One.  I placed it in my test because I thought it was a reasonable test of basic combative competency.  It involved several two-shot strings fired from the ready position from three to 25 yards under moderate time pressure.

On November 29th, I ran this drill twice, scoring a 92 and a 95 with all times under par.  The first shots I fired in 2024 were a surprise.  I scored a 97 and a 99 point total.  I did , however, miss the par times on the three yard shots, firing in 1.03 in both attempts.  As I recall, I was around .98 seconds on the first stage when I shot the drills in November.

February 14 “Double &1” targets

After not shooting for 10 weeks, my accuracy actually improved by 4.5% across the two attempts.  I lost about 5% of my speed at the closest stage of fire while maintaining the same par times at the longer distances.  I can’t explain the accuracy  increase despite my lack of training.

Dot Torture

After testing general speed and accuracy on the Double and 1 drill, I wanted to use Dot Torture to test pure slow fire accuracy, sight alignment, and trigger control.  I fired the drill at four yards.  For me, that distance requires a lot of concentration, but I can “clean” it regularly.  It’s at the very edge of where I can make a perfect score when I do everything right and where I can easily go off the rails if I’m having a bad day.

In November, I shot the drill and got 49/50 hits.  Ten weeks later I got 48/50 hits.  Overall accuracy loss after 10 weeks without shooting was two percent.

11/29/23- 49 points

2/14/24- 48 points

Plate Rack

I chose the plate rack because for me it best highlights when I’m in a shooting “flow state.”  To clear the plates really fast, I find that I can’t be consciously thinking about my shooting.  When I do well on that drill, the gun just seems to be floating in front of my face with my trigger finger and eyes working without any conscious thought.  I expected that to be something I couldn’t replicate without regular practice.

If you haven’t seen a plate rack before, it looks like the apparatus pictured below.  There are six steel plates that fall down when hit by gunfire.  The goal is to draw the gun and knock down all six targets as quickly as possible.

I shot the plate rack from a distance of 30 feet away from a concealed AIWB holster.  I made three attempts on each day and recorded my fastest of the three runs.  On November 29th, my best time was 2.84 seconds.  After no practice for more than two months, my fastest time increased to 3.10 seconds.  As I expected, this drill was where I saw the biggest change after an extended shooting hiatus.  My performance degraded by 9% between the two sessions.

Discussion

In discussing this project with friends, they postulated that this data is essentially meaningless unless I detailed the amount of practice I had done within the 10 weeks prior to the FIRST shooting tests.  If I hadn’t fired for a long time before the first test, one would expect the first and second test would be very similar given a comparable time between both training sessions.

I went back to my training records.  In the 10 weeks prior to November 29th, I did five live fire training sessions shooting a total of 654 rounds.  I try to train every week or two when I’m in the USA.  I shot about every two weeks in the time leading up to the November 29 evaluation.  That was lightly less than my 2023 average of shooting about every 10 days but wasn’t a huge departure from the norm.

I saw far less skill degradation than I expected.  Ten weeks without shooting was the longest time off I took from shooting since I became a cop back in 1995.  I would expect that “overlearning” contributed significantly to being able to retain my skills without any practice.  I’ve been keeping records of every round I’ve fired since 1997.  In that time frame, I’ve never had a single year where I fired fewer than 3000 rounds.  In the heyday of my post 9/11 training years, I was regularly shooting between 10,000 and 15,000 rounds a year.  Almost 30 years of nearly weekly shooting practice sessions has cemented my motor pathways.  It’s now fairly difficult to lose significant skill levels.

I don’t know how you may perform on a similar experiment.  I can’t in good conscience recommend my students go 10 weeks without training, despite the fact that my skill degradation was minimal in that time frame.  I would suggest that if each of you are planning long vacations from shooting or having some kind of major surgery that knocks you out of practice for awhile. test your skills both before and after.  Look at the Delta.  I think you might be surprised.

I plan on conducting my normal weekly shooting sessions and firing these drills cold at the start of each one.  I’ll report back when I get back to my November 29th performance level and what it took to get back there.

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