S9: Episode 283 - How Many Rounds Does It Take to Master a Rifle? | The Road to Becoming a Rifleman

So if you go with old school thought or you talk about anybody who talks about mastering a craft, regardless of what it might be, flying an airplane, learning to hammer forged steel, learning to sail, learning to become a world-class machinist, gunsmith, How many hours does it take to become a master of your craft, whether it's art or whether it's for work? And the general rule of thumb is 10,000 hours.

So you'll hear that said a lot that it takes 10,000 hours to become a master at something, whether it's playing guitar, playing an instrument, or just becoming a world class in whatever form of work that you do to become what we would consider a master.

But when you talk about 10,000 hours, what does that relate to with rifles? And when you're talking about becoming not just an efficient shooter, but experienced to highly proficient, what does it take to get there? Well, the first thing I want to talk about is the quality of training.

And so when we talk about getting ready to work with and become a world-class rifle, I'm not sure if it's really the 10,000-hour meter that measures our progress, especially when we're talking about mastering a rifle.

But when it comes to rounds fired, I think it's measured by how much you've learned with every shot that you fired.

And so it doesn't take 10,000 rounds to become a great rifleman.

It takes 10,000 rounds worth of lessons.

And so things that you've learned, things that you've grown.

And I want to dive into this really deep because this is really important because you can learn and master rifle very quickly.

It's not necessarily volume of shooting as it is how you approach shooting and how you train.

So the first thing I want to talk about is some of our experiences having shooters come through the shooting school for three days with no experience, none.

Some of them never even touching a bolt action rifle before.

And by the end of day three, they're consistently able to shoot really small dots at 100 yards, and they're able to score above average on our shooting test, engaging targets in a test environment out to 100. a thousand yards.

And in some cases, beating other people in the class with years of experience.

So the first part is, is learning the art correctly the first time.

You'll hear people say this all the time, is that as we get older, we build a huge catalog of bad experiences that we apply to everything that we do, right? It's just, we are creatures of habit.

That's a hard one to break, not impossible.

So maybe that's an advantage to the new shooters is they just don't know what right or wrong looks like.

So they'll just take you for your word and they'll try to follow it by the book and do it by the book.

And a lot of times it works out really, really well.

The other part is the intensity of the training.