Why a Real Program Beats Random Range Days
Most people get to a live-fire range once a month, maybe once a week if they are lucky. Ammo is expensive, range time is finite, and the default behavior — load mags, send rounds, leave — burns both without producing measurable improvement. Building a training program around real skills means deciding what is actually being worked on before driving to the range, and structuring practice so each session produces useful information.
Lucas Botkin’s general approach is to spend most range trips on basic fundamental drills — shooting paper, watching accuracy, isolating to one variable at a time. That might be reloads, an off-line-of-attack movement, sight presentation, or just the draw. Periodically, those isolated skills are stitched together into something like a USPSA-style stage to see how everything performs under integrated demand. The point is that the integrated test is rare; the isolated work is the bulk of the program.
Move Hard Skills Into Dry Fire First
Live ammo should not be where draws and reloads are first developed. Brantley Merriam’s structure puts dry fire two to three times a week minimum, ideally five to six, before any live-fire session. The math is straightforward: 500 rounds of ammo equals 500 draws on the range, while a thousand draws at home cost nothing. By the time the shooter gets to live fire, the draw is not a question being investigated — it is already developed and just being confirmed under recoil.
This shifts what live fire is actually for. Range time becomes the place to verify that dry-fire pace transfers, to work skills that cannot be replicated dry (recoil control, grip under fire, shot calling at distance), and to gather data on what the sights are actually doing.
Show Up Prepared
Before the first shot, the admin needs to be done:
- Mags pre-loaded
- Targets and pasters on hand (paste alphas as well as non-alphas — the location of the alpha hit is information)
- Shot timer with battery
- Ear pro with battery
- A specific plan for the session
The Sharpie-over-bullet-holes shortcut destroys the data the target is supposed to provide. Skipping the alpha pasters means losing the ability to see whether shots are favoring one side of the A-zone, which is one of the more useful diagnostic signals available at typical practice distances.
Three Categories of Practice Session
Merriam splits range practice into three distinct session types, and which one is appropriate depends on where the shooter is in their season and what problem they are trying to solve.
Fundamentals practice. Stationary, simplified, and focused on grip and visual process. Used at the start of a season, after a long break, or when something foundational has gone sideways. Drills here are not testing draws or reloads — they are testing whether the gun returns to the same spot, whether the trigger can be pressed at speed without disturbing the sights, and whether the grip holds up. Three representative drills:
- Trigger control at speed — fully loaded gun, one close target, randomized par on the timer. On the beep, smash the trigger and watch what the dot does. Run variations on the wall, just touching the trigger, and completely off the trigger. The hits on paper only tell you where the sights were; the sights themselves are the primary feedback.
- One-shot return — present, fire one shot, observe whether the gun returns to the exact spot being looked at. A dip below means too much input. No return at all means the eyes were not locked on a specific point.
- Doubles drill (Ben Stoeger / PSTG) — four pairs of distinct shots with a discernible pause between pairs. Use the pause to evaluate the pair, decide what to change, and run the next one. The point is the process, not the group.
Skills or small-drill practice. This is the bulk of a serious program. The shooter arrives with one specific skill identified — fighting tension while shooting aggressively, throttle control between near and far targets, keeping the grip consistent at distance, eye speed on transitions — and builds a small four-to-eight-round drill that isolates it. The same physical drill can be run multiple times with a different mental focus on each iteration. The MX8D, for example, can be run focused first on aggressive close-target shooting without trigger freeze, then again focused on eye speed between targets, then again focused on accepting only the sight picture each target actually requires.
Distance work belongs in this category. Targets at 25 yards expose grip inconsistency that 7-yard shooting hides. The skill being trained is not “shooting accurately at 25” — it is keeping the same grip used at 7 yards, pressing the trigger slightly more carefully, and trusting that the gun returns to the same spot regardless of how high it tracked in recoil.
Pre-match practice. Reserved for the weeks leading up to a major match. Built around one-attempt strings: longer courses of fire shot once, with no makeups, and graded on that single run. Then change shooting positions, target arrangement, or engagement order, and shoot it again — once. This trains stringing good runs back to back under conditions that actually resemble a match, where there is no second take.
Keep Drills Small Enough to Repeat
Twenty-round drills do not survive a practice session. Four to eight rounds per repetition is the working range — enough to express the skill, few enough that the shooter can run the same drill ten or fifteen times in a session and actually develop consistency. Higher round-count drills like the three-target transition with a reload (12 rounds) get used sparingly, and can be cut down by shooting one round per target or substituting dry fire on some of the targets for a given rep.
Build Stages Occasionally to Stress-Test Everything
Isolated practice produces isolated competence. Periodically — Lucas’s approach is “every once in a while” — those isolated skills need to be loaded into something resembling a USPSA stage: multiple positions, reloads on the move between positions, a mix of paper and steel poppers, real movement. This is not the place to learn anything new. It is the place to find out which of the isolated skills survive integration, and which ones quietly fall apart when the shooter has to manage everything at once. Whatever falls apart becomes the focus of the next several isolated sessions.
What This Looks Like Over Time
A program built this way has a rhythm. Dry fire most days of the week. Live fire weighted heavily toward fundamentals and small-drill skills work, with the specific skill chosen based on what the last integrated run revealed. A periodic full stage to verify the pieces still combine. Pre-match practice when there is a match coming up. Ammo gets spent on things that cannot be trained any other way, and the rest of the development happens at home — for free, with the AC on, in unlimited reps.