Revolver training par notes

One of the great advantages of modern training in the firearms industry is that there is a considerable volume of information available for shooters. If you’re trying to set metrics for your improvement, there are top tier shooters and trainers that post par times for drills and skill tests.

cougar magnum (300x225)

But what if you’re a revolver shooter? I know, the obvious answer is to ditch that archaic gun in favor of a design that slightly less than 200 years old. However, there are shooters out there interested in power-leveling their revo skills, and it’s not easy to find information on good par times for some revolver specific skills. In the interest of helping, and creating good information I’m going to be sharing a lot of revolver training notes here on Gun Nuts through this year of the wheel. That way, in 3 years when someone else gets it in their head to go shoot revolvers a bunch, they’ll at least have somewhere to start.

We’ll look at a few standard drills over the course of the year:

  • D2 @ 10 yards (draw fire two shots from concealment at 10 yards)
  • 1r2 @ 5 yards (fire one shot, reload, fire 2 shots at 5 yards)
  • Bill Drill at 7 yards from concealment (draw fire 6 shots)
  • Dot Torture (increasing distance as necessary, currently 5 yards)

We’re going to run every drill from consistent concealment with an IDPA OWB holster concealed under a vest. That will give us the ability to compare times at the start of the year to times at the end of the year. Here is a list of the current par times for each drill, with the format of Drill Name – Total par: split breakdown.

  • D2 @ 10 Par – 175: 1.50/.25
  • 1r2 par – 3.75: .25/3.25/.25
  • Bill Drill par – 2.75: 1.50/.25/.25/.25/.25/.25
  • Dot Torture Current Distance to Clean: 5 yards

One of the things I’ve ALWAYS struggled with is a slow first shot from concealment. 1.50 first shots from an IDPA concealment garment is pretty slow, and I should realistically be looking t be closer to 1.25 or 1.20 on the reg. That being said, one thing you won’t see me practicing is one-shot draws from the holster, because I believe those can give you a false sensation of your speed. If all you need to do is take one shot, you don’t need as good a grip as you would if you’re drawing to actually start a course of fire.

Hopefully, providing these drills and par times from training sessions through the year will provide future revolver shooters with a good place to start to get some par times to work with. I’ll be the first to admit my times are on the slow side, and I could definitely stand some trigger time to work my skills up. One of the great advantages of a revolver though is that any drill I can do in live fire, I can simulate in dry fire. Endless trigger pulls!

Good luck in 2014, and train strong.

6 Comments

  1. I shoot the IDPA classifier every week as my progress yardstick. I just bought my first revolver and shot my first classifier with it. That sure showed me what I need to work on. Everything! I do the classifier every week with a regular group and have found it very valuable for tracking progress. I never realized how much fun a revolver is and look forward to mastering the speedloader, grip, draw and everything else.

  2. thank you. While this will not complete me as a human being it is really helpful. Seeing as I am old fashioned and like to shoot revolvers.

  3. I started in semi autos but have recently switched to revolvers and carry one daily. Thanks for the info, it’s a good place to start.

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