IN PRAISE OF STANDARD EXERCISES
IN PRAISE OF STANDARD EXERCISES
I J Larivers
(Originally published in Man Magnum magazine)
The International Practical Shooting Confederation has undergone myriad changes since its inception at the Columbia Conference in the United States in 1976. Starting out more or less as a fusion of the philosophies of men like Col Jeff Cooper in the States and Gerry Gore and Tony Weeks in southern Africa, and tempered by the truly practical realities of the Rhodesian and South African bush wars. It has gone on to become arguably the largest shooting sport discipline in the world, and is certainly responsible for the lion's share of new innovations in handgun technology over the last three decades. As Col Cooper said 32 years ago, it is the Formula 1 of shooting sports.
Over the years it has followed the modern trend of trying to be as PC as possible. Penalty targets are now called that, or no-shoots, though occasionally the dreaded word 'hostage' escapes the lips of an old-timer. Newcomers to the sport may ask why the IPSC Classic target has A, C, and D scoring zones and where did the B go? In hushed tones with furtive glances cast in all directions it is patiently explained that the B zone was the outer scoring zone of the head. I can't really find fault with any of these changes; I am just content that I remember the good old days.
These days gun owners are becoming as endangered as rhinoceroses, and concessions to PC certainly have their place. In fact, I have oft thought that IPSC should replace the word 'practical' in its name. What are firearms practically designed to do? Rather use something a little more innocuous, like 'action'.
Other changes, however, I feel incorporate cardinal errors in marksmanship fundamentals. The original IPSC target, like just about all other targets, made use of concentric rings as scoring zones while the modern target features disproportionately long scoring zones, thereby penalizing errors of windage allowance far more than those of elevation. But it is what it is, which is a challenging, dynamic, active discipline that is one hell of a lot of fun. It is no longer 'combat' shooting, or even 'practical' shooting, but rather the ultimate game to be played with real firearms.
Respected Pretoria gunsmith Roger Stockbridge was a member of the British team that contested the IPSC world cham-pionships in Salisbury, Rhodesia in 1977. In 2005 I had the pleasure of shooting in the same detail with Roger's son Guy at World Shoot XIV in Ecuador and of watching Guy's brother Austin, the reigning Modified Division world champion at the time, in action. Back in South Africa, one topic that came up in Roger and Rita's kitchen around a few bottles of fine ale was how tight and difficult a lot of the shots in Ecuador had been. Roger smiled and commented sagely that this was because no one in South Africa shot standard exercises any more. Whether it was mere coincidence or not, there was a 'standards' event in just about every leg of the South African nationals for a long time after that. And we started doing them again in Zimbabwe, too.
IPSC has had a love-hate relationship with standard exercises for more than a decade. They're in, they're out, they're back in, and now they're out again, seemingly for good. As, under the current rules, are all Virginia Count scored events whereby specific actions can be stipulated and fixed times set. Odd, when one stops to consider that two of the cornerstones of the discipline, El Presidente and the Mexican Defence, are nought other than ingenious standard exercise courses.
Standards are somewhat like old-style police and military service and qualification matches. They test and improve all of the basic drills, but sadly they are denigrated by the Formula 1 breed of go-faster shooters who dismiss them as pedantic and dull. Without one's time being a deciding factor, there is less reward for high-tech firearms and a much more even playing field exists. Even the old and the decrepit, a class I find myself rapidly approaching, are competitive providing they focus on the foresight and squeeze the trigger.
A course of fire like the old-style standards - a series o0f strings at different distances in different times with maybe a dozen shooters on the line at a time - does seem a little sedentary if you have the latest state-of-the-art Open Division racegun, and perhaps its greatest 'shortcoming' is that it is worth 120 points and that those points depend on 'A' zone hits - newer and better sights and compensators and recoil paddles and recoil-spring guides and tactical rails don't give anyone the advantage over someone who shoots 'A's. At the 1977 world championships in Salisbury, one of the biggest complaints from the visitors was that the shoot had seemingly been designed around the high-capacity Browning 9mm, but if you look at the results, you will see that match winner David Westerhout was the only shooter in the top, maybe ten competitors, who shot a Browning. Which clearly proves that if the shoot was 'designed' around anything, it would be the major power factor .4SACPs. It's always nice to have some sort of excuse, but Dave won because he shot 'A's, and that depends a lot more on grip, sights, and trigger control than it does on magazine capacity or power factor. QED.
My club, Harare Gun Club in Zimbabwe still shoots regular standard exercises. We hold standards as separate club events, and our shooters shoot better because of them. Standards reinforce the basics, while not requiring a lot of expensive equipment.
We have taken the concept a little further, and intersperse the traditional standard exercises as seen above with a more modern variant. There is certainly no reason why a standards course of fire as a training exercise cannot resemble a conventional stage in a match, with one person a time shooting and using various range props to make it a little more interesting. If anything, our experience has proved that it hones the basics, the draw, acquisition of a sight picture, trigger control - various start positions and different shooting positions, to an even higher level of efficiency. Props such as tables, chairs and barricades can be used, so that the practice is also more in keeping with what the shooter would expect from a stage in an IPSC match.
One of the problems that our club has faced since the beginning of time – and we are the oldest pistol club in the country - is getting the newer and weaker shooters to do any sort of formalised discipline at all, let alone something that seems as 'daunting' as standards. Of necessity, we have to try and achieve a balance in the timings. If we cater for the weaker shooters, the stronger ones won't improve as they should and the newer shooters will be intimidated by times that will benefit the more skilled; but standards are flexible enough that the same course(s) of fire may be repeated, simply changing the times.
If the standard exercise is run as a stage, in a set time, or Virginia Count, instead of a series of strings, it is easier to achieve a workable sort of balance.
An example would be a target group comprising an array of three targets with a penalty target in the middle. The shooter engages them from behind a wall with three windows, two at normal height and one at kneeling height. Within a stipulated time, say twenty seconds, the competitor must draw, and engage each target with two rounds from each window with a mandatory magazine change in between windows. The emphasis here is on magazine changing and firing from the kneeling position, and of course the basics of composing each shot.
This takes them out of the realm of competition and returns them to the domain of training where they belong, and you can have a shooter traversing a fifty metre range firing prone, kneeling, from behind barricades and at targets with differing scoring zones.
Another area where standard exercises really come into their own is in training individuals who may need to be armed, such as peace officers and security guards, but who have neither the resources nor the inclination to pursue shooting as a sport. We all know that shooting is a perishable skill, and that to attain and maintain any level of proficiency a person must not only do the 'dry' drills, but put in a lot of range time with live ammunition. This is particularly true of folks in those vocations where an issued firearm is merely a tool of the trade and there is no real interest in shooting. For some time now, I have been training members of certain government departments and security companies in basic marksmanship, and in the end, whether we are talking about three rounds or thirty, the format comes down to one of standard exercises.
The more proactive departments and companies take this one step further and host annual skill-at-arms meets. Invariably the courses of fire come down to x number of rounds fired in y time at z distance. In this scenario, standard exercises have a two-pronged implication: firstly, a set course of fire can be practised ad nauseum until students become polished performers, with a bit of gamesmanship creeping in here in aid of winning a trophy, and secondly, in training the courses can be varied and unknown to the shooters before the drill, which keeps them on their toes and makes them think on their feet.
Back in the late 1980s Zimbabwe's National Pistol Association brought the Australian Olympic pistol coach Tibor Gonczol out for a week to provide training and semi-nars for local shooters. The ISSF disciplines were much more in vogue north of the Limpopo then than they are now, sad to say, but the instruction was open to everyone from any discipline. Needless to say, the top Olympic shooters were all there, and to my everlasting regret I was not - a thrice-cursed penance called 'work' got in the way. But a few of our wiser Practical Pistol shooters did manage to attend. The following weekend on the range I was gleefully told in detail what I had missed out on. Though no two shooting disciplines could be thought of as more dia-metrically-opposed than ISSF and IPSC, the basics of a properly executed shot are still the same and we can all benefit from periodically returning to basics. There is no doubt that our Practical shooters who attended those lessons shot better as a result.
While courses of fire like the IPSC Classifiers and IDPA's 5 x 5 Classifier are really nothing more than standard exercises, it would be nice to see standards come back into competitive shooting more formally.
PHOTOS
The modern IDPA target is pretty close to the original IPSC target, an very practical.
There is no better format for training armed security guards than Standard Exercises.
The late, great, Ray Chapman, conversing with Rhodesian PM Ian Smith in 1977.
The Zimbabwe Professional Guides Association uses Standards to train and qualify apprentice professional hunters and guides.
A number of shooting clubs use IDPA's excellent 5x5 Qualifier following basic training courses for new members.
Another form of standards was used to train Zimbabwe National Parks anti-poaching units in the Zambezi Valley recently.
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