“Technique is the religion of the dangerous trades.” - Thomas Harris

Performance shooting is at its heart both an athletic pursuit and a martial one. But like many other skills that are derived from conflict, without objective analysis of performance data, it’s easy for technique to become affectation. There are countless examples of this in institutionalized firearms training. Everything from reloading your pistol high in your “workspace” so you can keep your eyes on the threat to slingshotting the slide because the slide lock lever is a fine motor skill, to many other inefficient and overly stylized techniques.

Suboptimal techniques persist because of two things. The first is a seemingly rational theory justifying why they should be done that way. The second is a lack of objective data to base technical choices on. Anyone old enough who is a martial artist watched this play out in the competitive fighting world with the rise of MMA. Prior to the popularity of the UFC, a lot of stylized and inefficient technique was thought to be effective because of theory. Martial artists now have much more objective evaluation of technique available to them as common knowledge, and as a general rule, now train like athletes.

In the tactical shooting community, the persistence of inefficient technique is a bit puzzling for me, and here’s why. Performance shooting is one of the few endeavors where literally every piece of available data is easily quantified and collected. If you have a shot timer, cellphone video, and targets you can easily measure every variable affecting performance. This does a lot for us in our efforts to master our craft.

The first thing this does is validate technical choices. If an emergency reload is truly an emergency, then the difference in time between using the slide lock lever and slingshotting the slide matters. If you’re reloading an empty weapon in the open and under fire, the slightest technical edge matters, much less a difference as large as this one. If pinning and holding the trigger through recoil were effective, it would produce splits as fast and shot groups as tight as resetting during recoil does. But it doesn’t, so that technique should be retired.

Another thing that data does is allow individual technical expression. My grip on a pistol looks drastically different than another shooter’s might look, based on individual differences in physiology and psychology. The appearance of a technique doesn’t matter, only it’s effectiveness. And the only way to accurately judge technical effectiveness is through objective data.

The last thing that easily collected performance data does for us is allow us to direct our training efforts efficiently. If every piece of data is observed, we can correct deficiencies and improve strengths in a systematic and deliberate fashion. The cliche that behavior observed is behavior modified is as powerful as it’s true. A shooter who can tell me with confidence what their draw would be to a particular target is in my experience, a shooter who already has a fast and accurate draw. Keeping track of the data fuels improvement.

So collect the data. Don’t be afraid of technical experimentation and validation, embrace it. Find out objectively what works best, and adopt it. Use the data to drive your training, take it and make a roadmap to follow. Find the shortcut for your learning curve. If you put the work in, and stay objective, you will get better.