“The essence of fighting is the art of moving at the right time.” - Bruce Lee

Pace. This is an aspect of shooting that I often see misunderstood and applied incorrectly. And if we are to develop the highest levels of skill at performance shooting, the pace at which we shoot absolutely has to be intuitively understood and correctly applied to a particular shot at a subconsciously competent level. Without this unconsciously competent mastery of pace, our shooting will never find the appropriate instinctual balance between speed and accuracy required of us.

Speed and accuracy are conflicting goals. To maximize them is always a balancing act between doing too much, and shooting too slowly; or doing too little, and not shooting accurately enough. To perform this balancing act correctly requires a true understanding of what needs to be done technically for a particular difficulty of shot.

What happens most often, is a shooter thinks of going “faster” or “slower” and doesn’t change how they execute the component tasks involved, and this almost always leads to errors. Especially because subjective judgement of the passage of time is notoriously inaccurate under psychological pressure, even for highly skilled individuals. Instead, changing the technical response based on the demands of the shooting problem at hand changes our speed. Proper pace is a byproduct of correctly applied technique.

I find it helpful to conceptualize shooting pace as three broad categories. Like everything else, these weren’t invented out of thin air. Two of the three are used by USPSA Grandmasters Ben Stoeger and JJ Racaza in their classes, where they refer to them as “attack” and “control,” or “predictive” and “reactive,” respectively.

These categories as I use and teach them are deliberate, reactive, and predictive. For me, looking at it this way is invaluable for my shooting. Remember though that this is a way of conceptualizing a spectrum of technical solutions for shooting, not just multiple choice options exclusive of each other. What differentiates these categories is the combining or separating of the component tasks that make up the act of shooting, and level of care taken when performing them.

Deliberate shooting pace, which is the only one of the three that can be done successfully using solely the conscious mind, is when each component task is separate and distinct from the others and performed with meticulous care. Each task can be “fixed” during execution if needed, dependent on shooter skill of course. Think of group shooting, or extreme examples of low-percentage, high-risk hostage taker shots. This is more akin to how a bullseye competitor shoots than the “typical” shot requirements in an armed encounter.

Moving up the spectrum with our pace from deliberate, we move into the reactive category. Reactive shooting pace is the category between the two extremes of deliberate and predictive. It is very much the middle ground between combination and separation of our component skills, and has the widest variance of the three. It is also the pace that the overwhelming majority of the shots we take as “tactical” shooters require.

When shooting with a reactive pace, we combine more and more of the component tasks involved. Combining finalizing the grip with establishing sight alignment, or recoil mitigation with trigger reset and prep, as examples, offer significant time savings without overly affecting accuracy. The tasks we don’t combine here are sight picture and trigger press with recoil mitigation. We react to the sights being “right” for a particular shot difficulty with the appropriate trigger press. Unlike the deliberate pace, we try and eliminate any lag time between the appropriate sight picture and the appropriate trigger press, but the one still distinctly follows the other.

The final, and fastest, category on our continuum of shooting pace is predictive. In predictive shooting, we begin our trigger press while the sights are still returning in recoil to our point of aim. This allows us to shoot much faster, but requires us to master the predictive timing required. It also has the highest incident rate of error between the three, and so needs to be used selectively in the actual application of our shooting. Predictive shooting is how competitors burn down an El Presidente at blistering speed, and how top tier tactical shooters blaze on a FAST drill or Gabe White’s Turbo Pin Standards.

Truly understanding the variables that are adjusted to create your shooting pace, and understanding how to apply them based on the shooting problem you are faced with, are vital to the development of high levels of shooting skill. Study this deeply, and your raw shooting skill will improve, but even more importantly your mistakes will lessen during the application of that raw skill under stress.