“Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding.” - Burt Rutan

Testing yourself is a vital part of training. It creates the feedback loop for informing your future training. Testing is how you diagnose the areas of your performance that need improvement or modification. You then take that data and use it to focus on exactly the areas you most need to improve. Without valid and accurate testing, your skill will stagnate in practice and improvements will grind to a halt.

What makes a test valid? How do we construct them so that they give us an accurate and detailed conception of where our skill level actually is under stress and on demand? There are a few hard and fast rules we need to follow.

The test needs to be relevant and understandable. A slow fire B8 at 25 yards is an appropriate test for pure marksmanship fundamentals, but does not measure shooting at speed. The USPSA classifier “Can You Count” with targets at 6 and 10 feet measures weapons handling and trigger speed but doesn’t challenge accuracy. Both are good tests for specific skills, but you have to understand what is being tested.

The test needs to induce stress. Skill degrades under pressure, so to get an accurate measure of your true skill level, you have to be tested under that pressure. How do we create that stress? We can do this in several ways, ideally a combination of them all. The test should be final. In other words, no re-shoots or do-overs. Performance on-demand, not the best of several runs. The test should have consequence. There has to be a penalty or reward. This can be created as simply as performance rankings. The pressure to win is real and tangible. The test should be public. Knowing that others can see your results is an immense stressor.

The test needs to create measurable and applicable data. The more relevant data points you can collect about your performance, the more detail you can then apply to your future training. On a FAST drill, as an example, I want to collect not just my overall time, but my draw, splits, and reload times. I can then take this data, and isolate my deficiencies in practice in order to improve efficiently.

Seek out tests. Go after the “tactical” performance awards. Get classified in USPSA and IDPA, and steel challenge. Learn how good you actually are, on-demand and under pressure. Then use that knowledge to get better.