Well, I don’t work up there anymore, my kids are older (and busier), time is extremely short and I’m really only able to get out someplace once per month, if I’m lucky.
However, the muscle memory I gained by shooting 1000 rounds per month for a couple years is still with me. Now when I do go shooting, the first thing I do is to pull from at least a low ready position and run through a bunch of center of mass drills to make sure I haven’t picked up any bad habits and can still hit the X-ring when I need to.
Here’s a pic from my last session. Two mags, fairly quickly at 7 yards with one quick mag change. Previous to this, I hadn’t touched a trigger to shoot in at least two months.
The rest of my session includes several different drills. The one I like the most is filling the back of a silhouette with 2” circles, numbering them randomly, and then shooting the circles in numerical order. Then I might shoot even numbers, then odd numbers, then prime numbers, then backwards even numbers….. Whatever I can think up. There are a lot of creative drills that a shooter can do in an air conditioned room shooting at paper.
Someday, I’ll end up joining an IDPA club but with schedules and kids and budgets being what they are, not for a couple more years. Do you guys have any idea how much a couple young teenagers who happen to be top level swimmers eat????? You don’t wanna know.
The point of my story is not that I can do the “fist sized hole” thing because with real shooters going after a paper target, ragged holes aint no big deal. Rather at some point, we all need to get a little training and then take what we learned and drill, drill, drill. When that happens, muscle memory is then developed and will stay for years. In my case, I only need to shoot a few times a year to maintain a level that I’m happy with.