“See what you need to see.” It’s become a mantra for teaching performance shooting, especially competitive. It’s a lesson that’s hard to learn, but once you do it carries benefits for you far beyond the ability to shoot fast and accurately.

I remember a friend of mine who’s a USPSA grandmaster class shooter talking about how at a certain point in his shooting career the sights started to look different. After I had been a master class shooter for a while, I understood what he meant, because I found myself experiencing the same thing. After enough repetitions spent at the ragged edge of my ability, I started to be able to interpret the input from my sights far more effectively at speed.

Vision drives your shooting. Everything from driving your eyes to the correct spot on the next target, to ensuring you see a correct sight picture for the target difficulty before pressing the trigger, to watching the sights lift prior to shifting the vision away. Vision drives movement. From looking at the spot you need your foot to stop on before initiating movement to looking at the empty magazine well to guide the magazine in during a reload. Vision drives more than just physical skills though.

Vision is more than just sight. Vision is awareness. The ability to process visual information at high speed while under a demanding cognitive load. That is a mental skill that can be trained and developed. And it’s a mental skill that is the single most important attribute for managing violent physical conflict. Awareness drives your tactics and your decision making. And it doesn’t matter how well you can shoot, how well you can fight, if you make the wrong decision. The OODA loop concept is over-quoted and often misinterpreted, but Boyd had it right. Observation and orientation are the keys to winning a fight, whether between athletes in the ring or fighter pilots in the sky, and everything in between.

So if our vision is so crucial how can we develop it? And I’m not referring to mechanical acuity. This isn’t so much about 20/20 vision as it is about interpreting the information our eyes give us. And interpreting it at high speed while performing difficult physical tasks at a subconsciously competent level. How do we train that skill?

Historically, tactical athletes show improvement in perceptual speed through exposure to their event. Runs in the shot house, real world hits, bouts in the octagon. This works, and the difference in performance is marked between experienced practitioners and neophytes. There is a ceiling to this improvement however, and here is why. There is no “overspeed” component to the experience you accumulate.

The best way I have found to improve perceptual speed is action shooting competition, specifically the US Practical Shooting Association’s style of matches. Because you are paying attention to data and performance at a pace where thousandths of a second count, your brain gets acclimated to observing at that pace. No, USPSA is not tactics. And that’s actually why you get this benefit, because the pace of a stage is so much faster than the “real thing.” Then when you work a tactical problem, the mental bandwidth you’ve developed by solving problems while shooting and moving at a far faster pace allows you to be relaxed and aware at what would otherwise be your limit speed.

See what you need to see. To make your shot, to process your environment, to make sound tactical decisions. See what you need to see. And learn to see it faster.