Hard Target Focus When Shooting - Is Anyone More Accurate?

gwhysow

gwhysow

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The best way it was ever explained to me is that you can utilize a strong optical focus on the target, while allowing for a mental focus on the front sight. I personally cannot group worth a hoot when I have a hard sight focus, even at distance.

Though I have a moderately experienced shooter, the whole thing drives me nuts. You hear front sight, front sight, front sight.

Outside of the speed and transition advantages, does anyone here shoot more accurately with a hard target focus?
 
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Im really not the guy who's advice should be listened to, but my personal experience so far is this

get sight alignment with natural POA
then note what my sight picture looks like while focused on the reticle.
At this point I will start to weld/preload/grip/re-adjust/etc Keeping this burned in my mind, I maintain focus on the reticle/posts, and note the way it moves etc.
I try to keep the peripherals maintaining sight picture and focus on the reticle/posts to do that. Everything else will go blurry. but I keep all the blurry bits looking how my sight picture did originally. This was a new practice from literally last night. and it was the only time I've had POI be within 1/8" of POA. It was also the only time Ive ever been able to stack 3 rounds on top of each other. I still sent a lot of fliers to kill my groups. But again I'm learning from the ground up.

My understanding is one of the reasons you want front sight/reticle focus is because its something you have control over. If you're not focused on that, you really don't know where you're aiming. Unless you've built up enough practice its become second nature. Even then.
 
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Definitely not for me. If the FSP is not crystal clear, where I can see that everything is lined up with equal gaps, ("equal height, equal light"), then my shooting becomes a bit more random.
 
Also 2 more points that helped me a lot.
1. having a clear contrasting target to aim at helps a considerable degree. Those blue shilouettes with red centres are next to useless. The aim points are ambiguous. I found drawing a small dot on my target thats slightly bigger than my front post at distance works well. This also allows me to draw lots of targets on the sheet. Sometimes I use the back of the target. So its just white and pen/felt
2. put a small white line on your front post at the top centre. gives something fine to focus on. I used a white paint pen, and a toothpick. drew about a 1/32" or 1/16" line vertical from the front sight dot, to the top of the post.
 
See how sharp the front sight sight is in the video.
[video]http://www.starreloaders.com/edhall/SP10rdString.mpg[/video]

 
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When shooting for accuracy all my best groups have always been when I focus my vision on the front sight. This is the popular way to do it and is the one written in all the "right" books and mentioned in all the better videos.
 
Took me a while to change old bad habits (focus was the target) but not I focus on the front sight and it's improved my accuracy big time.
 
gwhysow said:
The best way it was ever explained to me is that you can utilize a strong optical focus on the target, while allowing for a mental focus on the front sight. I personally cannot group worth a hoot when I have a hard sight focus, even at distance.

Though I have a moderately experienced shooter, the whole thing drives me nuts. You hear front sight, front sight, front sight.

Outside of the speed and transition advantages, does anyone here shoot more accurately with a hard target focus?
Click to expand...

Are you referring to optical sight or iron sights?

If iron, i can't imagine a good result other than a focus on the front sight.

I wear glasses that focus at that distance. i could not focus on the target if I tried.
 
gwhysow said:
Irons.
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The person you got the advice from is clearly the odd guy out in this. All I can suggest is to try it for yourself both ways.

I know that for myself my slow fire accuracy groups would become pretty close to double the size if I focused on the target instead of the front sight.

Even in rapid fire multi target matches I find that if I maintain my focus on the front sight I can shift between targets faster and more cleanly and get less misses or penalty hits depending on the match. And trust me, my eyes work HARD at wanting to focus on the targets. And when I let them my scores suffer immediately in a very noticeable way.
 
BCRider said:
The person you got the advice from is clearly the odd guy out in this. All I can suggest is to try it for yourself both ways.

I know that for myself my slow fire accuracy groups would become pretty close to double the size if I focused on the target instead of the front sight.

Even in rapid fire multi target matches I find that if I maintain my focus on the front sight I can shift between targets faster and more cleanly and get less misses or penalty hits depending on the match. And trust me, my eyes work HARD at wanting to focus on the targets. And when I let them my scores suffer immediately in a very noticeable way.
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^^^ This

The video linked to a few posts above is great. Keep the front sight post in focus, line up the tops of the front and rear posts, and equal light width on each side of the front sight post with the rear posts. Then it's up to your trigger finger to behave, and not let your brain induce some physical movement in anticipation of the recoil.
 
Huge difference from the self defence crowd to precision target shooters. You have to decide which route you want to go.
Shooting 10's or throwing out a cloud of lead in the same postal code as your target.
 
I have no trouble obtaining front sight focus in slow fire, I just find that calling my shots with that hard sight focus becomes more disperse. With a hard target focus, I find my gun indexes consistently in relation to my head and eyes, and then I'm able to grab a peripheral awareness of my front sight.

I'll stack shots at 3, an inch at 5, a tennis ball at 7, and a softball at 10. Thats at a decent clip as well. If i try to a hard front sight focus with blurred target, I'll end up all over the place, as my front sight completely covers my target area.

I don't want to be that guy that rewrites how he should be doing things, but when the wrong thing works for me, how wrong could it be??

All kidding aside, it is rather frustrating. I should also throw in that I'm cross dominant...my eyes that is. Haha.

I just can't seem to tighten things up at 7+, and it drives me up the pole.
 
I'm not cross dominant but due to some astigmatism in my right eye I use my left for the clearer view. So for whatever reason I'm shooting with the same tilt of the head as you are.

For rapid shooting that's pretty good. And if it's working for you then great. But I think it'll get in your way if you start looking at shaving things down to a tighter group.

You say your sights are in the way? Does your gun have a white dot and you're putting the dot right over the center so the blade covers the target? If so try using the blade instead of the dot. For that style the top line of the blade should be splitting the black center of your target and the bullet hole ideally will hit with a hole which is again half covered by the top line of the blade.

There's another style called a "6 o'clock" hold but that relies on using the same target size and same distance all the time because you're essentially sighting along and then shooting along two sides of a triangle with half the bullseye dot being the other leg of the triangle. So it's generally only used for very specific match bullseye shooting or by those that rely on luck to hit what they aim at.

If you try the "split the bull with the top line of the blade" idea there should not be any change in the sights setup. You're only lowering your gun in a parallel way from looking directly at the dot to looking at the top line. So technically the bullet will hit about 1.5mm lower than before in a perfect world.
 
gwhysow said:
I have no trouble obtaining front sight focus in slow fire, I just find that calling my shots with that hard sight focus becomes more disperse. With a hard target focus, I find my gun indexes consistently in relation to my head and eyes, and then I'm able to grab a peripheral awareness of my front sight.

I'll stack shots at 3, an inch at 5, a tennis ball at 7, and a softball at 10. Thats at a decent clip as well. If i try to a hard front sight focus with blurred target, I'll end up all over the place, as my front sight completely covers my target area.

I don't want to be that guy that rewrites how he should be doing things, but when the wrong thing works for me, how wrong could it be??

All kidding aside, it is rather frustrating. I should also throw in that I'm cross dominant...my eyes that is. Haha.

I just can't seem to tighten things up at 7+, and it drives me up the pole.
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It seems like you have good natural ability to keep the pistol lined up, and that makes short shots work. For longer shots, you *must* focus on that front sight post. The tiny deviations in sight alignment will send bullets all over the place with longer shots. Toss a bore sighting laser in a pistol and try it out at 20 yds. You'll see just how little movement it takes to send bullets a foot off target.

For practicing short distance shooting with a FSP focus, pay attention to the target shape you're aiming at. You need the Goldilocks-sized aiming point, because it will be blurry. When I'm shooting at 10+ yds and going for precision, I cannot see a thin line on the target when I'm looking at the FSP. I need something larger. Not too large, because then it won't be precise enough.

For shot calling, you must be able to see the FSP to see what direction it moved in as the trigger broke. Esp if you are shooting rapidly. If you are looking at the target, you really don't know where the gun is aimed when shooting at longer targets.

btw, I'm cross dominant too. I simply close my right eye and turn my head to the right a bit so I can sight with my left eye. I did this a few weeks ago when practicing for a match. This was at 60 ft. There is no way I'd be able to do this by looking at the target. I needed to look at the FSP and make sure everything is lined up.

60ft_Target.jpg
 
 
Try the small mark on your front post, and turn your head. Don't tilt it.


gwhysow said:
I have no trouble obtaining front sight focus in slow fire, I just find that calling my shots with that hard sight focus becomes more disperse. With a hard target focus, I find my gun indexes consistently in relation to my head and eyes, and then I'm able to grab a peripheral awareness of my front sight.

I'll stack shots at 3, an inch at 5, a tennis ball at 7, and a softball at 10. Thats at a decent clip as well. If i try to a hard front sight focus with blurred target, I'll end up all over the place, as my front sight completely covers my target area.

I don't want to be that guy that rewrites how he should be doing things, but when the wrong thing works for me, how wrong could it be??

All kidding aside, it is rather frustrating. I should also throw in that I'm cross dominant...my eyes that is. Haha.

I just can't seem to tighten things up at 7+, and it drives me up the pole.
Click to expand...
 
When my focus on the front sight gets blurry, which it can do after a few mins due to age, I fall back to using the Force, and groups go to heck. I wish I could be accurate without focusing on the front sight, but I can't, short of optics.
 
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