Stance, grip, draw, sights, trigger, magazine change - everything we have covered so far describes the work inside a single target: how the gun comes up, how you see what you need to see, how the shot breaks. The trouble is that a lone piece of cardboard only lives in technique drills. In practical shooting there are always several targets, and the transition from one to the next is the one movement almost nobody trains on its own.
That is the gap this guide closes. What happens between the last shot on one target and the first shot on the next, and how the whole thing gets built at home dry.
Shooting lives between the targets
Look at your own training through the eyes of a stopwatch. The shot takes fractions of a second. Then comes the pause: the gun travels toward the next target, the eyes hunt for it, the hands hesitate, the muzzle overshoots and comes back. That pause repeats as many times as there are targets in front of you. Add them all up, and you will see where your time actually lives.
Transitions look so simple that they never register as a skill. What is there to train - you turn your hands and that is it. So the shooter pours everything into a faster draw and a cleaner press, then walks the road between targets however it happens to come out. The good news is that this is pure motor work, and motor work gets built at home, without a single round.
Your eyes lead the gun, not the other way around
The main rule of a transition: the gun always arrives where your eyes are looking. Never the other way around. You do not drive the muzzle toward the new target and then go looking for it - you look first, and the gun follows on its own.
The easiest way to feel this is a computer mouse. When you move the cursor to another icon, you do not hunt for the cursor and drag it across millimetre by millimetre - you look at the icon, and your hand delivers the cursor there without your involvement. A pistol runs on the same link, and it runs one way only: eyes first, steel second.
Your gaze does not crawl across the wall, sweeping the space between targets. It snaps: it leaves one point, locks onto another, and all of it happens before the muzzle starts moving. And you are not looking at the whole target either, but at one small point, the centre of the A zone. The difference is enormous: looking at "the target" delivers the gun somewhere into the cardboard, and looking at a point delivers it to a point.
This is exactly where the mechanic breaks for most shooters. The eyes stay glued to the front sight or to the target they have just shot, the gun loses its guide, and it starts living a life of its own: overshooting the new target so you have to bring it back, falling short of it, or dragging you back onto the old one as if to deliver an extra shot there. All three failures have the same cure - give the eyes their job back.
A transition is not a movement of the hands. It is a movement of the eyes, with the hands following.
Where one shot ends and the next begins
The question sounds theoretical and costs whole seconds. Here is the answer: a shot ends not when the trigger breaks, but when you have seen what you were supposed to see - the confirmation that the shot went where you sent it. After that, your eyes are free and they leave for the next target.
Let them go earlier and you get a shot with nobody watching it: the press is still running while your gaze has already flown off, and the hit turns into a lottery. Hold them longer than you need and you hand the transition to your competitor, or, if there is no competitor, to your own result.
The other half of the answer is about the hands. The muzzle does not need to be forced. It feels like the harder you shove the gun, the sooner it arrives, but overdriving works against you: the muzzle overshoots the target, you brake, you haul it back, and you lose the very time you were trying to win. Speed in a transition comes from the eye, not from the arm. The hands simply follow a decision that has already been made.
What actually turns the gun
Your arms, shoulders and the pistol work as one rigid structure - the same triangle you assembled in your stance and your grip. The job of a transition is to turn that structure as a whole, without taking it apart.
When the targets sit close together, up to about forty-five degrees, the rotation happens at hip level. The upper body and the arms stay as one piece, the work is done by the waist and the pelvis, and the triangle simply travels with you.
Once the angle goes wider than forty-five degrees, the hips are not enough on their own. Then the legs join in: the twist runs through the outside knee, and the whole body turns toward the new target.
What you must never do, at any angle, is reach for the target with your arms while the body stays put. The moment the arms leave on their own, the triangle breaks: the grip drifts, the stance skews, the gun arrives on the target in a geometry you did not build, and the next shot has to be assembled from scratch. It does not get faster. It only gets dirtier.
When to press on the new target
The answer depends on how much of the target you need to see. Up close, out to roughly seven metres, a full sight picture is not required: the moment the muzzle crosses the imaginary line between your eye and the centre of the target, the shot is there for the taking. You can see the target, the gun has arrived on that line - work.
The farther and the smaller the target, the more you have to see before the shot, and the closer you get to the full sight picture you use on a calm single shot. That is the fork the shooter resolves on every target: close in, shoot on arrival; far out, give yourself the time to see.
A wall, five targets, and scale
At home, all of this gets built on a wall. Download the targets from our Materials section, print them, and hang up a few - five is plenty. Do not hang them in a neat row: put them at different heights and at different spacings from each other, so you get a range of transition angles instead of memorising a single one.
Then comes the interesting part, which is scale. A one-third scale target seen from three metres looks to your eye exactly like a full-size target at about ten. Step back to five metres and the same target hands you fifteen live metres. And if you print a one-sixth scale target and stand five metres from it in your room, you get thirty metres of distance. Thirty metres, without leaving your flat.
So "there is no room at home" is an excuse. Your room holds any distance you want. The only question is what scale you hung on the wall.
How to measure a transition
Until a transition is measured, it does not exist: the feeling of "that was quick" lies every time. You measure it with the same tool you use for everything else dry.
The app has Free Practice for exactly this - a mode with no limits on time, shot count or targets. The timer shows every click, the running time and the split, the gap between neighbouring clicks. From there it is simple: the split between two clicks on the same target is your shooting speed, and the split between a click on one target and a click on the next is your transition time. One number you cannot lie to yourself about.
A benchmark to push against: a wide ninety-degree transition - two targets in the corner of a room, two clicks into each, starting with your hands relaxed at your sides - runs in about 1.6 seconds for the whole sequence. On a flat wall, where the angles are tighter, the sequence comes out quicker, and there your best reference is your own split: take it today, and tomorrow work against yesterday's number.
The second instrument is the camera. Stand the phone to the side so your whole body is in frame, and the app records the run from there. Video shows you what you cannot feel from the inside: whether you reached with your arms or turned your body, whether the stance drifted, whether you are forcing the muzzle and overshooting.
Last in order but not in importance: run the targets both ways, left to right and right to left. The body does not remember transitions in general, it remembers a specific route, and the shooter who always works in one direction discovers this at the worst possible moment.
What comes next
At home you build the mechanic: the eyes leave first, the body turns the whole structure, the gun arrives at a point you have already chosen. That is motor work, and it is built dry, through repetition, without a single round and without the cost that comes with it.
That mechanic becomes shooting at the range, with an instructor who watches you from the outside and fixes what is only visible on the spot. A session at home does not replace the range and does not try to: it shows up to the lesson with the movement already built, so you spend the expensive time shooting rather than learning how to move.