Commentary from Instructor Dave Hebler

“PRACTICING IN SLOW MOTION”

When you’re moving fast, it’s hard to catch flaws in your technique because the mistakes get lost in a flurry of motion. This is extremely bad, since your practice reinforces the bad technique and you’ll never be able to catch the errors and so, isolate exactly what you’re doing wrong. When you try to become faster by pushing yourself to go faster, it doesn’t work; you just get sloppier. What’s costing you time, as well as degrading your accuracy, is wasted motion, lack of smoothness and choppiness in your movements. This assumes, of course, that you’re using efficient techniques to start with and not performing poorly simply because you don’t know how to move. Real speed comes from removing from your technique all extraneous motion and flowing smoothly from one position of the technique to another. This is where practicing in slow motion comes in, because when you’re moving in ultra-slow motion, you can catch your flaws. You can make sure that each and every movement is perfect. Also, when you practice a certain technique by executing it really slowly, your performance will become an unconscious reaction much sooner than if you’d practiced at normal speed. Not only does slow motion practice insure that you execute the movements of the technique perfectly, but by moving with excruciating slowness, you’re acid-etching the technique into your nervous system.

From Handguns Magazine, March, 1998.

I could not have said it better myself.