Lets hear about your F.A.S.T. Drill tips, techniques and equipment that have helped you lower your time.
The obvious ones: Wear OWB Kydex, use the slide stop/release do not slingshot, wear a vest as a cover garment if youre really just doing it for competition.
Ive also found that dropping the weapon to the new mag, not bringing the new mag to the weapon can cut time a bit. Bob Vogel demonstrates this rather well. Certainly not a viable option when SA is priority, but again an effective competition-oriented technique.
Naturally… The best tip I can give for anyone looking to get under 5 seconds is… Buy ammo, shoot the drill over and over and over and over… Any others you guys have? Thanks for the help.
IIRC my best time was 3.87sec, when I do it I like any USPSA/IDPA stage, not shooting it more than once.
Neat drill but I think it’s backwards. Shoot it backwards and you’ll see some interesting results. It’s hard to slow down.
At this stage of development, I don’t worry about shaving time off of the shooting portion, because I burn up too much time in between the shooting portions. So, draw time and reloads are my focus.
I’ll shoot the 3x5 portion under a 2.4s par, currently; was 2.6s, three months ago. I won’t move a par down until I can meet/exceed it more than 80% of the time, so record-keeping is a damned good idea…which it is under any circumstances, not just for this.
I’ll occasionally do a specific 1-reload-2 variation from the ready, on top of other such practice. 1 round to 3x5/reload/2 rounds to circle. Reloads are where I’m…let’s call it “wildly inconsistent.” Still breaking that one down and rebuilding; trying for consistent 2.3s. It’s proving to be challenging.
Most recent “official” time was 6.57, as of late summer/early fall of last year; before that, 8.34. Currenlty making consistent 6.1s and have even managed 5.9X 3-4 times. The steady improvement shows that I’m doing SOMEthing right, but I have almost no idea what that might be…
I won’t shoot the FAST itself more than two times per session, as my cold-drill. So, I might shoot it as many times as 4 in a week…usually still only 2. The “T” stands for Test, and I treat it like one; doing the FAST as a whole, over and over, is essentially training to the test (one only needs to look to public schools to see how well THAT works, in the long run…:rolleyes: ) instead of developing the skills independently and using FAST, or similar, to see how well one brings them all together and makes them bump into each other like molecules.
Dammit, Robb, you and your sub-4s… I hate your face.
Forgive the rant, but I’ve seen so many people chase times on this drill at the expense of prioritizing their range time that I have little use for this “drill” anymore.
It’s one thing that people practice over and over again in the hopes of having something to brag about. I would much rather people chase scores on a more comprehensive measurement like the Paul Howe Standards, the FAM TPC, the Hackathorn Standards, the 700, the 10-8 Pistol qual, etc. Those at least encompass a wider variety of skills and manipulations, and you have to be “on” for more than one string of fire.
Fixating on 2 shots, a slide lock reload, and 4 more shots just doesn’t seem to me like an efficient use of my range time and my focus.
Like others have said, use it as a benchmark if you want to see how you’re progressing on the skills that are incorporated in this one string of fire… stressing over your time on this is just falling into a trap that your score on this particular drill matters.
If you are a good shooter, your times will reflect that. Gaming a drill over and over hardly benefits any body.
Re the OP looking for tips, I would offer the following
Keep your eyes on the front sight and perhaps the magwell, never the target. If you take the time to look and see if you got your head shots (“eye sprinting”) you are wasting vauable fractions of a second. This also true to a lesser extent on your body shots.
Smoothing out the reload is where I could consistantly make up the biggest chuck of time followed by faster splits. My personal best is 5.26 from AIWB with a G35 and a closed front garment. That was with a 2.26 reload.
Grant said
“… many believe that you should be MOVING while doing this drill.”
Could this not also be said for:
The El Presidente
The Bill Drill
Portions of the Hackathorn Standards
IMHO, the FAST is simply a shooting snapshot in time and a way to
benchmark yourself against yourself and or others re that test. No more and no less.
Yes and no. If some of those drills were in real life, I gurantee that I would be moving. In drills where there are a number of sections to cover every part of being able to fight with a gun, no on movement.
I love the FAST drill. It offers an easily repeatable, measurable set of data points that encompass a wide range of shooting tasks. It is simple to track your progress and set up to allow you to develop practice plans and see where your game is lacking.
When used in conjuction with other base line tests you can get a very good “whole shooter” picture for someone.
People need to drop this idea that the FAST drill is a method of engagment when shooting someone. Understand the difference between a drill designed to target a task and actually shooting someone.
If you can incororate movement into a drill like this and still maintain the ability to measure and track progress let me know how.
Like with many “gun games” bad habits can be developed that are viewed as a big negative in the defensive training world.
Habits form when you practice something over and over (in order to compete against others in an effort to win at something). These habits can be both good and bad I think.
Like JimD stated, don’t shoot this drill over and over to get better at mag changes or your draw stroke. Choose specific drills to that focus on those parts.
Tracking progress in a moving drill can be done, but not in the same way as you would with the traditional method of shooting a drill that is commonly shot stationary.
I concur with your position completely. Indeed, I suspect if you told someone to come to the range rigged up how they typically are in the world between their gun/gear selections and having them shot a 3’s drill (3 yrds, 3 ft step off the X, 3 shots , 3 sec time or less, all in a 3 inch circle), a FAST, an El Pres, a Bill Drill and 6 rounds at 15 and 25 for group, you woud have pretty good measure of the shooter.
You can’t add movement to a standards drill, because people will just game the movement to get the fastest time and the best hits.
The closest I’ve come is to incorporate an abbreviated Bill drill into a stage where the shooter was expected to move off the “X” for about 7 yards, then engage other targets from around the far end of a short wall. I required 5 shots to be fired at a target while moving, but only the best 2 hits were scored. It was telling. You had some people who couldn’t break out of gamer mode, who took baby steps while dumping 5 zero’s on the target before really moving out to cover. You had others who moved a lot faster and still got very good hits, but still used slower and more clumsy movement to spend more focus on the engagement itself than moving off line. Everyone who actually focused on movement discovered that at least at close range, they had better accuracy than they expected.
I won the stage by drawing and firing one handed over my shoulder as I turned and ran directly towards cover as quickly as possible. Had all 5 shots been scored, I’d have been down 5 points. However, all 5 shots hit the target and two of them were down 0, therefore I was down no points and gained cover much more quickly. If I’m attacked at close range, I’m at least equally focused on not getting shot as I am shooting the perp.
As for the F.A.S.T. drill, it’s a decent basic drill. It focuses on speed at close range without shooting wildly. At 7 yards and in, points down should never be acceptable on a basic drill. So besides equipment, my recommendations would be , shoot fast, don’t miss and stick the reload.
Agree. This is why you have to remove the “gun game” mentality out of it. Meaning that I compete against myself. So if one run is clean, then I pick up the pace and move faster. Still clean? Do it even faster until rounds are thrown out.
Sorry gentlemen, perhaps we ought to have a FAST thread in the Competitive Subforum and one here.
I understand it is a Test. I will sometimes shoot it as a Test- That is, once, twice at most during a range trip. I can also appreciate its value as a drill and I enjoy competing with friends over it. I believe there are many out there like me who understand the difference between memorizing the muscle memory required to get under 4 seconds and what you would actually do in response to a real threat. I am sorry if I did not make my understanding of the difference clear in the OP.
My sincerest apologies for shooting a particular string, I didnt realize it would be so offensive. Ill stick to El Pres for fun from now on…
Just the basic strategy of focusing training on where you need it.
For my case, anything after the second shot is cake. It’s the second shot itself that I’m working on, which is of course a sight tracking issue, which in turn exposes the quality of my grip on the draw. I’m having a hard time fishing through my concealment to get a consistent firing grip.
I got my advanced pin and did NOT shoot the drill more twice a range session between doing woefully and then getting the pin months later. I like to shoot it at the beginning fo a range session and at the end and thats it. I got better at it by working my draw, press out, reload, and rapid fire. In other words by doing the fundamentals; which this is excellent at testing.
