What’s the best distance to practice at for self-defense? (It’s not what you think…)

I see this almost every time I go to a range during public hours…

The debate of how far out to put the target.

Put it too close and it doesn’t look very “cool.”

Put it too far and it would be embarrassing to miss.

Should I put it at 21 feet because of the “21 foot rule?”  First off, there is no 21 foot rule.  Tueller didn’t call it a rule and he’s refuted that claim numerous times since.  Second, 21 feet is kind of an arbitrary distance that the FBI came up with in the 1930s for the average length of a residential hallway…it was a time when cops used revolvers and the sights sucked.

Should I put it at 11 feet since half of law enforcement fatalities happen within 11 feet?

Should I put it at 9 feet since an “average” self-defense encounter happens within 3 yards, lasts 3 seconds, and 3 rounds are fired.

The answer is a little simpler and a little more flexible than you may think.

There are a couple of distances that are important.

The first distance is 6-10 feet.

6 feet is about as close as you can get to a hanging paper target without the muzzle blast from normal self-defense rounds moving the paper too much.  6-10 feet is close enough that ANY gun/ammo combination can shoot 1” or better groups.

Drilling holes flat footed at the 6-10 foot range is an indication that you can align the muzzle properly and press the trigger without disturbing muzzle alignment.

Any flyers or problems that show up here will be magnified with distance, stress, speed, and movement.

Grip, stance, breathing, and follow-through all help, but muzzle alignment and trigger press are the only two things that are vital.

This SEEMS like it should be simple, but what I’ve found over time is that only about 10% of shooters who carry regularly…including military, law enforcement, competition, and concealed carry permit holders…can actually shoot a 5 round 1” group at 6-10 feet with perfect lighting and no time constraints.

If you’re in the 90% who throw an occasional shot at 6-10 feet, it means is that you’ve got some of what I call “low-hanging opportunities for improvement” that will be magnified with speed, distance, movement and stress.  Work that you do here gets incredibly HIGH leverage results and will impact all shooting that you do, regardless of the gun, distance, or speed.

Once you’re drilling holes at 6-10 feet…then what?

It depends on what phase of learning you’re in.

Whether you’re building a basic skill or trying to make it resilient.

If you’re trying to build skill, you want to aim for a distance where you’ve got a 75%-90% success rate, regardless of the size of the target, speed of shooting, stress level, or speed of movement.

That may be slow fire at 5, 25, 50, or even 100 yards, rapid fire, shooting while moving, or whatever combination of speed, accuracy, stress, and movement that puts you in that 75%-90% success range.

That means that you’re hitting your intended target 7-9 times out of 10 and the misses tell you where the edge of your performance envelope is.

At first, you want to focus on perfection and a 99%-100% success rate, but once you’re dialed in, you want to start expanding your performance envelope.

For IDPA, “success” might be -0 hits.  For USPSA, it might be A-zone.

BUT, depending on what you’re doing, you might need/want to relax your definition of success.  As an example, if you’re shooting at 50 yards, shooting fast, or training for self-defense while moving laterally off-the-x, you might call success anything in the -1 or B zone (reduced silhouette)…or it might be ANY hit on target.

But the goal should always be to make precise hits faster, fast strings of fire more accurate, and do it under more and more challenging conditions.

The way you want to structure your practice is to start with drills where you’re shooting at a 99%-100% success rate, push conditions until you’re at 75%-90%, and then end with 99%-100% again.

I like to think of it as a sandwich.

Start with a sure-thing, push it, and then end with a sure-thing.

As we cover in Praxis, this will optimize learning speed and give you the most bang-for-the-buck for your training time and training dollars.

If you’ve got the skill built and you’re working on making it resilient to stress…by whatever means of stress inoculation you happen to be using…then you might want to push things to the point where you’re only succeeding 25% of the time…but you still want to dial stuff back to where you know your performance envelope where you can succeed 75-90% of the time and end with a win.

How’s this play out at the range?

Start with a few rounds at 6-10 feet with sterile conditions, push time, distance, speed, movement, and stress until you’re in the 75-90% success range, and then end with a few reps at 6-10 feet again.

As you see, no matter how fast-and-cool or how tactical you want to be, it all comes back to a solid foundation of the fundamentals…muzzle alignment and trigger press.

Get those down as a solid foundation and the sky is the limit.

Skip over them in an attempt to get to the “cool” stuff quicker and it’s like driving a sports car with the parking brake on and a clogged air filter…it’s simply impossible to shoot up to your potential.

And that’s why shooters at all levels…from new shooters to guys retiring from tier I and special mission units go through our training and report dramatic improvements in performance.

If you are looking to build skills that you and your loved ones can depend on in a pinch, you really need to  go the Praxis Dynamic Gun Fight training >HERE<  There’s no other training like it and no other way to build this much life-saving, threat-stopping skill, this fast.

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23 Comments

  • rod vanzeller

    Reply Reply June 24, 2023

    In a real survival situation, the heart rate goes above 145, fine and complex motor movements degrade to inapplicable.
    Training for any type of competition does not transfer to a real life attack, just like sport fighting does not transfer to being attacked by a violent criminal.
    Fairbairn and Applegate had vast real life experience with these situations and survived to develop training that transfers, these type of training is almost opposite of just about every thing being thought in most classes. Starting with trigger finger isolation method.
    They advocated starting at 10 feet point shooting with one hand.
    What is your opinion on this?
    Thank you in advance for your answer.

    • Ox

      Reply Reply June 25, 2023

      Great questions! I agree AND disagree with each of your points. It all depends on context 🙂

      1. Grossman and others advanced a theory in the 90s that high heartrates led to decreased shooting performance. Since then, we have benefited from tremendous advances in portable diagnostic equipment and we’ve found that the issue is not the heartrate, but the level of sympathetic arousal…specifically, it’s a function of how much oxygen and glucose are making it to the prefrontal cortex as opposed to being used up by the brainstem, cerebellum, sensory cortex, insula, and amygdala as well as how myelinated the skill is.

      As an example, I regularly run and get my heartrate up over 170-175, stop, and immediately shoot fast, 1-hole groups with my compact or subcompact pistol or 1″ groups with an airsoft pistol. My ability to write clearly and precisely is diminished, but my ability to shoot quickly and precisely is not. I am not alone in this…several groups have hooked up scenario based training participants with chest harness heart rate monitors (no lag like a wrist monitor) and recorded temporary peak heartrates of 200-220 while still getting good hits. There is a VERY big difference between people who’s heartrate spikes and then quickly recovers compared to those who spike and do not recover.

      On the other end of the spectrum, I can’t count the number of inexperienced shooters I’ve seen whos performance drops off a cliff when their heartrate is in the 120-140 range. I vividly remember early classes I took and competitions I attended where I was wearing a heartrate monitor and I would regularly have the shakes and see my performance completely implode with my heartrate in that range.

      2. On transfer between sport and reality, we really need to parse the problem and define things well. I agree/disagree with what you said. What we’ve seen from people who train for competition and end up using firearms in real world situations is that the psychomotor training actually does transfer quite effectively. This can be good or bad, depending on the quality of the training because bad habits transfer just as easily as good habits.

      Here’s the issue…the visual decisionmaking and cost/benefit analysis skills that we need for the real world are not trained for competition. That complete lack of training transfers over to real world situations. The lack of contextual training causes lags in response that we interpret as the psychomotor skill not transferring, but really it’s another set of issues that’s the problem.

      In sport fighting, we are trained to look for and respond to the most common attacks that are likely to happen within the constraints of the rules of the game. In the real world, if we are fed a visual cue that we’ve never seen before, we’re going to have to interpret it, assign it meaning, develop a response, and execute a response on the fly in real time. That takes time and causes us to be behind the curve. The EXACT same response that we used in sport fighting may be appropriate…if it were started earlier…but the lag causes the psychomotor movement to start too late and be ineffective…or be the wrong movement for the real world. As an example, there’s a story of a guard in Iraq or Afghanistan who stopped someone, took them to the ground, and executed a perfect arm bar…pop and all. The problem is that the bad guy was playing a different game, somehow pulled the pin on a grenade with his other hand, and killed both of them. The psychomotor skill transferred quite effectively…he just practiced the wrong skills with the wrong rules and the wrong context.

      3. Fairbairn and Applegate were legends and I owe them a lot. I’m friends with both Michael Janich and Damien Ross who have carried their torches forward. Since then, ammo has changed, guns have changed, sights have changed, and training methods have changed. If you look at the context that they were teaching in…they had no usable sights, almost no time to teach, the students didn’t have time to do individual training after the instruction, and the people they were teaching had a really good chance of needing to use the skills within the next 2-7 days. If that is the situation someone is facing, then I would lean on the techniques of Fairbairn and Applegate. But, if you have usable sights, better ammo, and time, it is much more effective and efficient to train a hybrid approach that uses point shooting, front sight focus, as well as other, intermediate levels of sighting refinement.

      • rod vanzeller

        Reply Reply June 25, 2023

        Thank you for the reply.
        Would you agree that aerobic elevated heart rate is different from elevated heart rate due to adrenal dump?
        And this difference does not affect performance the same way?

        • Ox

          Reply Reply June 26, 2023

          I would absolutely agree that a heart rate increase due to exertion is different than a heart rate increase due to a sympathetic response.

          The short answer is that there is not a simple relationship between heart rate and speed+accuracy with a firearm at self-defense distances and precision requirements…and this is something that anyone with an h10 heartrate strap can test today. You might have one person who has no drop in performance at 180bpm and another who has a huge drop at 140bpm. That person with the 180bpm might have it because of exhilleratoin and excitement and the person with 140bpm could have it because of fear, dread, and a sense of overwhelm.

      • rod vanzeller

        Reply Reply June 25, 2023

        By the way have you seen the Colion Noir video interviewing a guy who survived a gun fight?
        He describes in detail how his training failed under adrenal stress.

        • Ox

          Reply Reply June 26, 2023

          That would be interesting to watch. Do you have the link?

          • rod vanzeller

            June 26, 2023

            Thank you for the replies.
            Agreed, it makes perfect sense that every one is going to be different depending on many factors, I think the best approach to these issues is a personal approach on what works best for each individual.
            Thanks for being patient with my questions.
            I don’t have a link to Colion Noir particular video I mentioned, however if you go on his you tube channel I think it was about 12 videos ago.
            What happened aligns with Applegate’s information perfectly.

  • Tom

    Reply Reply August 17, 2020

    Ox:

    Totally off the subject, I am certain I am not alone in this, … I am soon to be 70 years wise. You ought to put together some training specifically for us old geezers. Exercises to help us stay in shape and that would stretch the right muscles and ligaments so that we can shoot better on the move, etc. It’s not as easy as it was a few years ago. Help us out!😎

    Thanks!

    • Ox

      Reply Reply August 18, 2020

      Excellent idea, Tom 🙂 As far as movement and neurological drills for shooting on the move, we cover those in http://DynamicGunfighter.com. For a host of more specific challenges, I’ve got a series of videos that you get access to in http://UpgradedShooter.com

    • George Porter

      Reply Reply February 5, 2021

      Ox , I’m at a dimly lit range,maximum minimum at the range is 25ft, how can I get 3 inch groups at 25ft,HELP!!!!!!!

      • Ox

        Reply Reply February 5, 2021

        Great question, George.

        Let me make sure I understand correctly.

        The ONLY distance you can shoot at is 25’…no closer and no further?

        That’s going to be a little bit of a challenge because of how the eye works. Ideally, we’d want to bring the target WAY closer to eliminate variables, get dialed in, and then stretch the distance back out.

        Let’s eliminate variables by paying close attention to what your sights are doing when you dry fire. If your trigger press is moving your sight alignment all over the place in dry fire, it will move it all over the place in live fire as well.

        Once you’ve got your trigger press nailed in dry fire, move to an accurate pellet or airsoft gun, if possible. A decent airsoft pistol with high quality bbs (not cheapo ones) is more than capable of 1-2″ groups at 25′. (to eliminate variables, try shooting it while sitting with the butt of the pistol resting on a rest, sandbag or backpack)

        As of today, we are out of stock on our Self-Aiming Splatter Targets, but I’d suggest drawing something similar to this for your target: https://splattertargets.com/ You could even use 2 strips of black electrical tape to make an X on a white paper…you just need something that you can see when it’s blurry and your front sight is clear.

        Again with live fire, start from a supported position to eliminate variables.

        Let me know how it goes!

  • phil

    Reply Reply June 28, 2020

    i totally get the joke about walking on the “moon”.
    man, you hit it on the head. thanks.
    phil

    in reply to Matthew Meadows.

  • Alan

    Reply Reply April 8, 2020

    Having suffered both metric and imperial system’s arguments, think of the US manufacturers whose profits would increase with out having to build their products for export with an imperial system.

    The US is on the monetary metric system which changed from pounds back when Moses played full back for Jerusalem.

    I have started moving with my practices and so far have been very successful.
    A point that always seems to be glossed over is distance.

    For Pete’s sake practice where it’s needed. Home defense…my longest area is 25′ from living to front door. My home’s most weak point is the large glass windows in the living room. 15′ from my first defensive spot.
    From bed to the door it is 15′.

    So guess what distances I practice on ??

    In addition check your local legal requirements as I believe any intruder outside and/or at long distance is a lawsuit unless you are taking fire. Then a retreat would be more sensible.

    Your bullets always have a lawyer attached. Remember look at what/who that’s behind the target.

  • Degrave

    Reply Reply March 10, 2020

    When are you going to switch to the metric system and stop all that nonsense?

    • Ox

      Reply Reply March 11, 2020

      Never 🙂

      • Matthew Meadows

        Reply Reply April 6, 2020

        Lol, There are two types of countries on the face of the earth: Those that use the metric system, …and those who have walked on the moon!

        • Ox

          Reply Reply April 6, 2020

          BRAVO! 🙂 ‘Merica!

        • rod vanzeller

          Reply Reply June 25, 2023

          Von Braun was metric. The non metric navy failed

      • Johnny Crumpton

        Reply Reply July 9, 2020

        good reply since most americans don’t know the metric system

      • Just1Saddletramp

        Reply Reply July 13, 2020

        My Dad had me train to be efficient with a pistol at 25 yards. His theory was that, most of the time, anything further than 25 yards was not an immediate threat and if you could hit a target at 25 yards you sure could hit it at 7 yards

        • Ox

          Reply Reply July 13, 2020

          25 yards is a great distance to practice at, but you really want to be doing the majority of your shooting closer-in if you’re training for potentially using a firearm to defend yourself or a loved one.

          1. A threat at 25 yards causes a completely different psychological response than a threat at 7 yards and that creates different time demands.
          2. Vision is incredibly different at 7 yards than at 25 yards. There are visual aspects of shooting at 7 yards that aren’t optimal at 25 and vice-versa.
          3. If you plot self-defense shooting distances, the vast majority are within 10 feet…partially because of the nature of violent crime and a predator closing distance and partially because home construction limits the distances that we can see. Shooting within 10 feet on an attacker is dramatically different than at 21 or 75 feet.
          4. Most self-defense shooting situations involve movement and it’s a completely different prospect at 25 yards than 7 yards and (again) very different than 3 yards.

  • theburg2014

    Reply Reply January 24, 2020

    When training for self defense i train shooting 8-10 feet. Both hands. Dominate hand only. Weak hand only. For target shooting I shoot at 25 yards.

  • Teresa

    Reply Reply November 5, 2019

    4 to 6 feet.
    My practice is at 3 – 5 yards
    5 being in the center line to Stitch ’em up
    Strays are decreasing

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