Someone picking up a shooting timer for the first time usually expects one thing from it: to be told how long the shot took. The logic is fair enough - there is a stopwatch, there is a shot, the stopwatch should catch it. That is exactly what a shot timer does, and that is how it measures your result.
A par time works the other way around, and it confuses people until they realise the job is different. It measures nothing. It sets a border.
What is a par time, and how is it different from a shot timer?
A shot timer answers the question "how long did it take". It listens, marks the moment, and afterwards you look at the number and decide whether you like it.
A par time answers a different question - "did you make it". You tell the timer two seconds. It gives you the first beep, counts those two seconds and gives you the second one. Everything you finished between the beeps counts. Anything past the second beep does not. There is no number at the end, only yes or no.
The difference looks formal until you start training at home. Then it decides everything. Measuring makes sense when you have something to compare against and somewhere to grow on the number. In dry fire you are usually after something else: running the whole sequence without once falling out of the window, and repeating it until the movement no longer asks you to think. A border does that. A number at the end adds very little.
There is a practical side too. Sound is unreliable in dry practice. The click of a striker is quiet, it differs from pistol to pistol, and every room swallows it differently. A par time does not depend on sound at all - it runs on the clock. It does not care whether you train with a real firearm, an air pistol or an airsoft replica, or whether your flat is noisy or silent.
How do you set a par time instead of inventing one?
The most common beginner mistake is taking a pretty number out of thin air. You hear somewhere that a draw should be a second and a half, set a second and a half, and spend the evening losing.
It works in the opposite order. First you measure yourself honestly. Set a deliberately generous window - one you make without hurrying - and run a few repetitions calmly, cleanly, paying full attention to what you see on the sights. That is your current truth, and it may be unpleasant. It is not there for pride, it is there as a starting point.
Then you cut one or two tenths of a second. Not half a second, not "let us double it" - tenths. At the new setting you run a series, about ten repetitions. If the movement stays clean and you are still inside the beep, cut another tenth. The moment you start spilling past the signal, or catch yourself snatching and cutting corners, you stop. That is today's edge, and the work happens on it, not beyond it.
The method looks slow. It is the fastest one there is, because every next step is built on a movement you already own instead of one you have already broken.
What par time counts as normal?
Reference numbers exist, and they are worth knowing if only to see where you stand.
On the draw to the first shot it runs roughly like this: around two seconds is where someone who has just started lives, a second and a half is a confident intermediate level, and a second or faster is advanced. Plenty of competitors work below a second, but that is another league and another amount of time invested.
And now the caveat, without which those numbers do more harm than good. They depend on the conditions, and the conditions move them a long way. A draw from an open competition holster and a draw from under a garment are different exercises with different numbers. A target at three metres and a target at twenty are as well. A far target asks you to hold the gun longer and align it more precisely, and the window there stretches by nearly double.
So you cannot borrow someone else's number as your own. There is only one honest way to use it: as the direction you are travelling from your own measurement. Your number is the one you produced yesterday, and today's task is to land a tenth faster than it.
It also helps to understand how the window stretches as the drill gets harder. A single shot from the draw on a far target is packed into about two seconds early in the sport, and into a second and a bit at a level already considered strong. Add a reload and two more shots to the same sequence and the count runs to four or five seconds, and around three and a half for strong shooters. The gap between those numbers is the price of a reload, counted in seconds.
Which leads to a practical rule for home work: do not set one par time for the whole session. Every piece of the sequence has its own window, and they improve at different speeds. The draw responds quickly, the reload more slowly, and the transition between targets holds out longest of all.
What does it mean to outrun the gun?
This is the main trap of dry practice, and almost everyone falls into it.
There is no recoil at home. The gun does not jump, the muzzle does not climb, nothing has to be brought back down onto the target. Because of that you can spin a sequence up to a pace that is physically impossible with live ammunition. The timer will keep telling you that you are inside the window, the movement will feel polished - and on the range it falls apart, because out there the work between shots exists and at home it never did.
There is a second half to the same mistake, smaller and worse. With the second beep closing in, the finger finishes the press on its own, just to make it. The sights at that moment can be anywhere. Formally the window is met. Actually you have just rehearsed a miss and filed it into muscle memory.
The rule is simple and strict: you take the press through to the break only when the sight picture is one that would have put the shot in the Alpha. If you could not get there in time, then you did not make it. Let the repetition fail - a failed one is more honest than a fake one. This is where trigger control is either built or quietly destroyed.
If you catch yourself pressing for the sake of the beep, put the par time back a step. You lose nothing except an illusion.
Why must the start delay be random?
There is always a pause between pressing start and the first beep. It looks like a detail, and it decides whether you are training reaction or fooling yourself.
If the pause is always the same, a person starts counting it very quickly. Not deliberately - the body does it by itself. You are already moving a fraction before the beep, because you know when it is coming. The time comes out pretty and there is no reaction in it: you started on an internal count instead of a sound.
A random delay breaks that. You do not know whether the beep arrives in one second or in five, and the only way to start on time is to genuinely hear it and answer. That is what happens at any real start, where the command comes from a person rather than from your own counting - the same reason the standby command exists at all.
So the random delay is worth switching on straight away and leaving on. It makes practice less comfortable and more honest.
How do you build a par time session at home?
First: work by time. Set one or two minutes on a drill and spend that whole time doing it without counting runs. Counting repetitions quietly turns into a race to close the list. Working by time gives you no such race and keeps attention on the movement.
Second: keep the rest between repetitions real. Between runs you have to get the gun back into the holster, check the grip and set your stance again. If the rest is shorter than that, you start rushing the part that should be calm.
Third: take one movement at a time. The draw on its own, the reload on its own, the transition between targets on its own. A par time is good precisely because it cuts practice into short identical pieces, and progress in each of them shows up as a single tenth.
And fourth, the pleasant part: over a month of this work times fall by whole seconds, especially on longer sequences that used to run on "however it goes".
In our app the par timer sits in the Tools section and asks for nothing at all - no account, no microphone access, since it listens to nothing and runs entirely on the clock. You set the par time, switch the random delay on, choose a number of repetitions or an endless loop, and decide separately whether you want sound or vibration is enough - the last one saves you when the house is asleep and practice still has to happen.
And when you want not a border but the exact time of every click and the splits between them, the timer with sound detection is waiting in the same app. That is a different job, though, and it is not the one to start with.