Most range days make nobody a better shot

Watch a public range on a Saturday and you'll see a lot of ammunition being spent and very little skill being built. Someone sets up at a bench, fires groups at a hundred yards until the barrel is hot, looks at the target, and goes home.

That's a pleasant morning. It isn't practice.

Go with a plan and write it down

One thing you're trying to fix. Not four. Something specific: a consistent trigger press, or getting steady off sticks, or a first-round hit from field positions.

Write it on the target. Write what happened next to it. A range notebook is the single biggest difference between people who improve and people who repeat themselves.

Confirm zero, then leave the bench

The bench tells you what the rifle and the ammunition can do. It tells you almost nothing about what you can do, because it has removed the thing that limits you — your own stability.

Confirm zero in a handful of rounds. Then get off it.

Everything after that's field positions: sitting, kneeling, prone off a pack, standing off sticks or a tree. This is where the shot actually comes from, and it's where nearly everyone is worse than they believe.

Fewer rounds, more attention

Twenty deliberate rounds, each with a called shot, beat two hundred fired in strings.

Calling the shot means saying where the sights were at the instant the trigger broke, before you look at the target. Then look. When your call matches the hole, you're actually seeing your sights. When it doesn't, you're flinching and you've proof.

Let the barrel cool. A hot barrel walks, and then you're chasing a group that's telling you about heat rather than about you.

Dry practice is most of the improvement

Unloaded, verified, verified again, no ammunition anywhere in the room, muzzle pointed at something that would safely stop a round.

Ten minutes, several times a week, working the trigger without disturbing the sights. It's free, it's available in February, and it fixes more than any amount of live fire because there's no recoil to hide behind.

The flinch that live fire builds is the single biggest thing standing between most hunters and a clean shot. Dry practice is the thing that removes it.

Know your actual maximum

At the end of a session, work out the furthest distance at which you can put every round into a vital-sized circle, from a field position, cold, first shot, in wind.

That number is your maximum range in the field. It'll be shorter than you want. Respect it anyway — the difference between a clean harvest and a wounded animal is almost always a shot somebody took past their honest number.

Bring someone better than you

Twenty minutes of a good shooter watching you'll find things you can't see in yourself, because the errors that matter are the ones you've stopped noticing.

It's also how the whole thing gets passed on.

Follow your range's rules and the four safety rules without exception. Firearms law and storage requirements vary by jurisdiction.