What We Learned At Sig Sauer Academy

Back in March, we ventured down to New Hampshire to train at the Sig Sauer Academy. It’s a 130-acre shooting training facility, aptly described by one of their instructors as Disney for guns. Rightly so.

We loved it. It was some of the best training we’ve ever done, anywhere. The instructors were consummate professionals who could walk the talk. If you can, go. Tell them we sent you!

Hot tip: you don’t actually need to be a professional to train there.

Due to Sig’s progression system, and it being our first time at the Academy, we were encouraged to start somewhere near the beginner side of their pistol courses. We worried this would be a little dull for us, but they wanted us to experience their take on the fundamentals before progressing to more dynamic training. It turns out this was a great decision.

We found mountains of value in re-visiting old concepts thanks to the clarity and precision with which they were presented, drilled, and tested.

Since returning, we’ve been incorporating the lessons we learned into our personal training. We won’t go into great detail about the exact nature of the training (it’s not our place to share Sig’s ideas), but rather we’ll share some broad ideas fomented by the trip — ideas that are inspiring us at the range these days. We hope you’ll find them useful and inspiring too.

It’s big. We needed a map on day 1.

Plan your range visit

We found the fellow students were a mix of beginners, intermediate, and advanced shooters. The one thing everyone had in common was the hope to walk away with a clear idea of how to improve their current set of skills. When we did our exit polls at the end of each day, every single participants said would say, “Now I have things to work on!”

A simple concept that emerged is to consider your range time as your training time. “Of course it’s my training time, that’s obvious!” Sure, but really, how intentional are you? Do you choose something to work on ahead of time? Do you think about what drills will make you better the night before? Do you get to the range with a specific plan for improving a skill? Or are you ‘winging’ it?

For example, maybe you choose to work on faster sight acquisition ahead of time. Maybe the night before you look up a couple of videos on how to drill that. That gets you thinking about it in your car on the way to the range. And even if you only spend 10 minutes drilling some sight acquisition techniques, then you’re incrementally improving in an intentional way.

Give your range visits purpose. Go in with a plan. It’s a good reminder for beginners and advanced shooters alike. It definitely was a good reminder for us.

The value of dry fire

Mastery is a product of repetition.

But ammo is expensive.

Sig reminded us that most of the skills you need to build to shoot well actually don’t involve firing live ammunition and can be practiced dry (without live ammunition). What a magic solution the ammo expense problem!

Look for opportunities in your training to dry fire 10 times for every one shot you take on the range. If you’re trying to maintain that kind of ratio, you’re getting a massive amount of repetition for your money. We’ve always been proponents of dry firing (pay extra attention to safety at home), and this was a solid reminder to get back to those dry clicks.

When you’re as confident as Jamesan, you don’t need a target that can actually show your hits.

Training close up can enhance distance shooting

Keeping in mind we were training pistol skills, one of the most useful concepts to lean into was to train more at very close range. We spent 95% of our training time at about 3-5 yards from the target.

After spending so much time close, we backed up to 10, 15, 20, then 25 yards. The skills we were building up close translated perfectly to longer ranges. This runs in opposition to the conventional wisdom, which is: if you want to get better at something, you should practice that thing. In other words conventionally you need to practice at 20 yards to get better at 20 yards. That’s not always true.

It’s counterintuitive but if you want to be a better runner one of the things you need to do is train your core muscles. If you want to be a better distance pistol shooter, spend time mastering your trigger pull at 3-5 yards. Don’t feel like you’re neglecting your long range by training close for the majority of your time. You’ll definitely need to back up and practice at distance, but a lot less. When you do finally back up into the longer range, you’ll be surprised by the results.

Train To Raise Your Bar

The last comment we’ll make about this trip is that it gave an old concept new relevance: we revert to our lowest level of training under pressure. The struggle, the challenge, the joy of shooting is in increasing that lowest level with time and effort so that your minimum level of well-practiced skills is just that little bit better – to give you the edge at competition or on the hunt.

We’ll be back at the Sig Sauer Academy in the fall.

P.S. We tried some things you can only try in the US: a Suppressed P320 and a fully automatic MCX. Oh, and don’t be alarmed. Jamesan’s now had that tooth fixed. Knees and mouths don’t mix!