Super fun day on the range yesterday with a great bunch of like-minded folks. Based on the forecast from Friday night, I was anticipating having to deal with thunderstorms. Thankfully, the storms stayed away, but it ended up being a super hot and humid day. I was pretty wiped out after the class.
Some takeaways from the class:
1) It's always good to "test" out your equipment, including your gear, in shooting courses. Not really a new point, but something I noticed many times yesterday. I had moved around some stuff on my belt and found that I need to move one pouch as it would dig into my stomach here and there. Many other shooters also had new rifles or gear and you are able to learn more about them in that environment than one would at Koko Head.
2) When training new techniques, especially ones that require "unlearning", need to spend time doing the steps deliberately and then gradually speed up. Even then, sometimes the old habits creep back in, but something that I have to force myself to slow down and do things deliberately as opposed to trying to speed my way through it. When I try to speed my way through things, I often revert back to old habits or fumble it as a sort of "in between". Slowly breaking old habits and building new ones. But just have to give it time.
3) Was able to try new things from other shooters' guns as well on my own gun. Love the Geissele trigger. The BCM grip with more vertical angle didn't really jump out at me either way. Will likely stick with what I've got for now. Didn't get to give the ambi safety a fair shake, but I didn't really notice the lever on the right side when shooting. I thought it would bother me, but didn't really notice when I was shooting.
4) It's good to have video of yourself shooting. You are able to see for yourself what you do and lots of times you don't realize what you're doing, or not doing. An example from yesterday was keeping the gun in your workspace for things like loading, reloading, etc. That is something that I noticed from when I shot IPSC more, that I thought I had the gun in my workspace during reloads, but many times the gun would end up much lower. Something that many shooters yesterday didn't realize they were doing, especially when their focus was more on shooting the course of fire than the reload itself.
5) The AFAB on my Colt has spoiled me some. When I was shooting another AR to try the trigger, I noticed that the muzzle was jumping a lot more, and thus the dot was jumping around a lot more. That gun had a BCM comp, which is closer to an A2, at least relative to the AFAB. Had to be more disciplined with body mechanics to keep the dot from jumping around as much. Then when I went back to my gun with the AFAB, it was like the dot barely moved.
6) I've recently been shooting with an EoTech EXPS 3-0. Before that, I had been shooting guns with either an Aimpoint CompM4s or T-1. When I was shooting guns with the T-1, I found that the smaller viewing window bothered me some when we were doing shooting drills that require transitioning between targets. I had never noticed that before, so I assume it was because my eyes were now used to the EoTech. Something I'll have to keep in mind for future range days.
7) Need more time with the AK. More on that in the other thread. . .