Live-Fire Drill: DOUBLE RELOAD DOUBLE (FOUR ACES)

Four Aces is one of those exercises that gives you a good idea of what you can do in terms of draw speed and reload speed. The procedure is to draw and fire two rounds into the A zone, then reload, then fire two more rounds. I would pay particular attention to your times at the 7 and 10 yard distances. You will see those distances often on classifier stages.

3 Yards

From really close range like this, you scarcely need to aim. The primary issue here is staying relaxed and then just “letting it happen.” If you rush at all, you are prone to fumble and it is game over at that point. I selected 2.2 seconds as a goal time for this distance. Make absolutely no mistake, that is a seriously challenging time to make and it will take many hours of dryfire training before you have prayer of manipulating your gun that fast.

5 yards

I selected 2.3 seconds as a goal time for this distance. You are still essentially going to shoot without getting a “hard” sight focus. You don’t have any time to waste if you are going to make the goal time.

7 yards

At the standard distance of seven yards, I have selected a 2.5 second goal time. This allows for a 1 second draw, a 1.1 second reload, and two .2 second splits. If you find yourself unable to make that 2.5 second goal time, carefully go through the data from the timer and find the “low hanging fruit”.

Now, I feel like I should point out that some people can go much faster than the 2.5 second goal time. It is possible to get a draw time into the .60s and a reload time into the .70s (I have heard some reported times even faster than that). The sky is absolutely the limit on this drill.

In order to be competitive in the sport, you don’t need some insane reload time like a .75, but you do need to be able to reload the gun in about 1 second flat on a fairly consistent basis in practice. If you can’t do it, you are going to have a problem.

The key to this drill is dryfire training, this is just a “check” for you to make sure you are headed in the right direction.

This Drill is from “Skills and Drills”