The “Doubles Drill” is one of my “go-to” handgun training tools. Two of my respected shooting partners—a retired FBI HRT member and a regional law enforcement firearms instructor—often employ the Doubles Drill as part of their training routine. Their regard for the Doubles Drill is such that they spend approximately 25% of their range time/ammunition on it.

What is the Doubles Drill?

They each pay homage to Ben Stoeger’s books and videos for bringing it to their attention several years back. I think we all accept that professional competition shooters are the highest skilled “pistoleers” in the world. After all, it’s what they do for a living—expending time and ammunition that most just cannot imagine. Ben Stoeger fits that description.

So, what is the Doubles Drill, and why is it so well thought of? Let’s start with the why.

The Doubles Drill maximizes your range time by giving you an opportunity to self-analyze during live fire training. Likewise, it dissects grip and vision skills.

Proficiency with a handgun is one of the most challenging shooting skills and starts with how you hold the pistol. Your grip is your connection with the gun. It is one of the most important things to get right if you want to shoot quickly and accurately.

Is your grip consistent, correct, and durable?

The majority of aiming any pistol—with a red dot or iron sights—is achieved through kinesthetic awareness. Kinesthetic awareness is the ability to perceive and understand the position, movement, and actions of one’s body parts in space.

Effective use of a handgun depends on repeatable and proper grip. Here is some advice that sounds basic but is crucial—pay attention to your grip! Tracking sights up/down during multiple Doubles Drills only reinforces the importance of grip.

The Doubles Drill also develops visual precision and visual aggressiveness. Vision is a key ingredient for operating a handgun with speed and accuracy. We have to “see” what we need to “see” in order to pull the trigger when we need to.

All of this sounds like unobtainable shooting Zen, but it can be developed with training and practice.

Setting Up the Doubles Drill

To set up the drill, start with an IPSC-style cardboard target at 5 yards. Then, load eight or more rounds into your magazine, keeping the round count even.

With the Doubles Drill, start by looking at a small spot where you want the rounds to go and aggressively force your eyes to focus there. I suggest placing a piece of tape on the target to focus on.

The Doubles Drill starts from low ready, not from the holster. Commence with shooting pairs, pulling the trigger as fast as you can. Include a second or so pause between pairs—the pause length is unimportant. The pause is so you can track the pairs’ split times on your shot timer.

The goal on target is two rounds impacting close to each other. When you start pulling the trigger as fast as you can, problems regarding your grip and focus will show up even at a short distance.

If your splits are consistently .20 seconds or faster with groups staying uniformly clustered, move back three yards and repeat. However, if groups exhibit characteristics such as low left, high right, et al., the Doubles Drill is telling you important information about your grip technique that needs correcting.

If your grip index is off, you need to be slower with your split times to maintain group size/accuracy when dealing with recoil.

An Awareness Exercise

The Doubles Drill is an awareness exercise, not an outcome-based drill. Split time standards and effective target engagement distances will change as you develop skills.

The Doubles Drill allows shooters to develop better shooting awareness to address deficiencies in grip and vision. With the Doubles Drill, you are assessing how the handgun reacts in your hand during recoil.

Once you learn the fundamentals of shooting your pistol accurately, you need a way to judge if your shots are getting the job done. The Doubles Drill trains you to “predict” your effectiveness based on experience. It forces you to really pay attention to the “sights” as you’re firing the gun fast.

The caveat here is that you are not gaining a proper, pristine sight picture between shots. Rather, you are watching the sights lift so you can predict where your rounds are landing based on training experience.

Refining Your Skills

With most firearms training—competition, tactical, overall proficiency—the goal is to refine skills to the point you are not thinking about how to do it. It just happens.

Imagine you are competing in a USPSA match where the majority of targets are engaged twice. The Doubles Drill helps predict if your shots are good based on reading your sight’s movement without checking downrange results.

However, if you sense rounds are off target, you can apply a makeup shot at the speed of recoil. This is an important advantage.