Look, when you shoot at the defense of your life, it's probably not going to be one bullet.

Just do a little bit of research and you'll quickly see that for the vast majority of cases, it wasn't a single bullet that stops a bad guy, it was at least 3-5 rounds on target that brought the bad guy down.

Now having a string of shots together isn't terribly hard. Getting them to all stay in a very contained area, is hard.

At SMT we steadily bring the standard of accuracy up over the course of the time you train with us. A Level 1, 2, & 3 student will have to keep all shots inside of an 8.5x11" sheet of paper area that covers the center mass of the target. But when we move the student into Level 4, 5, and especially the Warrior Mindset, it's now a half of an 8.5x11" sheet of paper (4.25x5.5") center mass and a quarter sheet of paper for a Central Nervous System string.

Here's the thing, in order to meet the time standards for each of those levels, you can't do slow aimed shooting, you have to get faster. By the time you're in Warrior, you have to do .25 splits for each shot in order to meet the time hack.

Houston! Houston! We've had a problem!

For lots of people, that kind of shot pace makes it extremely difficult to keep the bullets within the standard of accuracy.

Well, here's how we train our students to maintain high accuracy through consistent fast splits. Rhythm Drills.

A Rhythm Drill works like this. When you shoot, think about the depression, shot, cycling of the slide and reset of the trigger as the tapping of a beat on a drum. Using that "beat" we can condition our trigger fingers to release shots at a consistent pace. Initially we'll be really really really slow, but as time and conditioning goes on, we'll eventually condition those fingers to speed up, driving our split times down to what SMT calls "Combat Speed" or .25 second splits.

Rhythm Drills can be done Live or Dry, but they will use different tools to achieve the same end goal. In Dry Fire, you'll use a SIRT and a Metronome App. I personally like the one from Silver Dial. In Live Fire, you'll use your carry handgun and a shot timer.

To see how this all works, check out this video.