The El Presidente Drill: How to Run It, Par Times & How to Score It (2026)

The El Presidente in 60 seconds (BLUF)

• What it is: Face uprange at 10 yards, turn on the beep, draw, fire two rounds on each of three targets, reload, and fire two more on each — 12 rounds total against the clock.
• Who made it: Jeff Cooper, who built it to gauge pistol proficiency for a South American presidential security detail — hence “El Presidente,” or “El Prez” for short.
• What’s a good time? The classic benchmark is a clean run in 10 seconds (all 12 in the A-zone). Solid club shooters break 8s, and top competitors run it in the 5–6 second range.
• Why it’s the decathlon of drills: One run tests your turn, draw, target transitions, splits, a full reload, and recoil control — no single skill can hide.
• Train it anywhere: The turn, draw, transitions and reload are all pattern skills. Run par-time reps with an airsoft pistol or dry fire on a free Airsoft Shot Timer app between range trips.

Ask a room full of shooters to name one pistol drill and more of them will say “El Presidente” than anything else. It’s been on range programs for fifty years, it shows up in USPSA classifiers, and it’s the first thing a lot of instructors reach for when they want to see whether a new student can actually run a gun rather than just shoot groups off a bench. If the Bill Drill is the honest test of your grip, the El Prez is the honest test of everything else.

That’s the whole appeal. Most drills isolate one skill — your draw, your splits, your reload — so you can drill it in a vacuum. El Presidente does the opposite: it stacks the turn, the draw, three target transitions, a reload under time pressure, and twelve rounds of recoil control into a single 10-second window, then hands you one number at the end. There is nowhere to hide, and that’s exactly why it’s survived every training fad since the 1970s.

What Is the El Presidente Drill?

The El Presidente was developed by Jeff Cooper, the father of modern practical pistol shooting, who reportedly built it to evaluate the pistol proficiency of a presidential bodyguard detail in South America. The name stuck — most people just call it “El Prez” now — and the course of fire has barely changed since.

Here’s the standard version. You set three IPSC/USPSA silhouette targets one yard (about a meter) apart and stand at 10 yards, facing uprange — that is, with your back to the targets — hands raised in a surrender position, pistol holstered. On the start signal you turn to face the targets, draw, and fire two rounds on each target. Then you perform a reload and fire two more rounds on each target, for a total of 12 rounds. The classic par time is 10 seconds, and a “clean” run means all twelve hits land in the A-zone.

What makes it such a complete test is that it forces every fundamental to work in sequence, under a clock. As one Gunsite instructor put it, El Prez is “a well-rounded exercise” precisely because a weakness anywhere — a clumsy turn, a fumbled draw, a slow transition, a dropped magazine — blows up the whole run. You can be a great group shooter and still fall apart on your first El Presidente, because it’s not testing marksmanship in isolation. It’s testing whether all your pieces work together when the timer is running.

How to Run the El Presidente

Set your three targets a yard apart and pace off 10 yards. Load your pistol with at least six rounds, get a fresh magazine ready on your belt, and holster up. Start facing away from the targets with your hands up in a surrender position — that turn is part of the drill and part of the challenge.

On the beep, turn into your gun side and be careful not to cross your feet as you pivot — crossing your legs is the classic way to stumble and blow the run before you’ve even drawn. As you turn, your hands come down and your master hand gets a full firing grip on the pistol while it’s still holstered, so that the moment you’re facing the targets you can draw straight out and up to your first target. Fire your two rounds on the first target, then transition to the second and third.

The mental key to the shooting is cadence. A proficient run isn’t six rushed shots and a pause — it’s a steady, even rhythm where the two shots on each target and the transition between targets all happen at roughly the same tempo. Think of it as a smooth “one-two-three-four-five-six,” not “bang-bang… find the next target… bang-bang.” The gun should flow across the array at a pace your eyes can keep up with. Then you reload and come back across for the second string. Many shooters go left-to-right on the first pass and right-to-left after the reload, so the reload lands them back on the target they just left — but shoot it whichever direction feels natural, as long as your reload is quick and your grip re-establishes cleanly.

Run it in strings of three to five repetitions and score every one honestly. A blazing time with four hits in the C-zone isn’t a good El Prez — it’s a signal you’re going faster than your fundamentals can hold together.

El Presidente Par Times: What’s a Good Time?

Here’s the answer most people want first. These are draw-to-last-shot times from the standard 10-yard, turning, 12-round course with all hits in the A-zone:

Level	El Presidente Time
New shooter	15s+
Developing shooter	12s
Proficient (Cooper’s standard)	10s
Solid club shooter	8s
Advanced	6–7s
Competitive / expert	5–6s or faster

The 10-second clean El Presidente is the number Cooper set as the mark of genuine proficiency, and it’s still a meaningful goal for the vast majority of shooters — if you can turn, draw, put two clean hits on three targets, reload, and do it again, all inside ten seconds with everything in the A-zone, you can run a pistol. From there the standard keeps climbing: modern competitors routinely run the drill in the 5–6 second range, which means a draw around 1.3 seconds, transitions and splits in the 0.2s neighborhood, and a reload well under 2 seconds.

Don’t anchor on the elite numbers, though. If you’re newer, the honest win is watching your clean-run time drop from 15 to 12 to 10 seconds while your hits stay in the A-zone. That progression — faster without losing your hits — is the entire point of the drill. A time only counts if the hits back it up.

How to Score the El Presidente

There are two common ways to score El Prez, and knowing both helps you use it as more than a stopwatch game.

Cooper’s original scoring treated it almost like a mini-match: twelve hits on the A-zone were worth a fixed value, misses and hits outside the center cost you points, and the par was 10 seconds. In modern USPSA terms, the cleanest way to score it is hit factor — your total points divided by your time. That single number is the whole philosophy of practical shooting in a nutshell: it rewards you for being fast and accurate, and punishes you for buying speed with misses. Two shooters who both finish in 7 seconds aren’t equal if one dropped four shots into the C-zone; the hit factor sorts them out honestly.

You can also read your hits diagnostically, exactly the way you’d read a group. If your rounds are all in the A-zone, you have room to push the pace. If they start spreading — walking up and out of the center as you transition — that usually means you’re breaking shots as the gun is still moving onto the target, or simply outrunning your sights. The fix is the same as the Gunsite coaching cue: if you’re outside the center zone, slow down and confirm your sight picture before you press; if your hits are stacked in a tight little cluster, you’re being too careful and leaving time on the table, so speed up. The El Prez is constantly telling you which of those two problems you have.

Reading the El Presidente on a Shot Timer

This is where the drill goes from “fun challenge” to “the most efficient diagnostic you own,” and it’s impossible without a timer. A shot timer doesn’t just give you a total — it records the time of every shot, which turns one El Prez run into a full data sheet: your draw (turn plus first shot), five splits and transitions across the first string, your reload time (the gap between shot six and shot seven), and the second string. Suddenly you’re not guessing where your ten seconds went — you can see it.

That reload gap is where the truth usually hides. Most shooters feel fast on the shooting and assume their time is bleeding out of the splits, when in reality a slow, uncertain reload is quietly eating a full second or more in the middle of the run. Look at the gap between your sixth and seventh shots on the timer: if it’s over two seconds, that’s your single biggest, easiest place to find time, and it points you straight at your reload technique rather than your trigger speed. Similarly, if your first shot (the turn-and-draw) is landing past 2 seconds, your draw and turn are the leak, not your shooting. The timer tells you which piece to train next instead of leaving you to train the piece that feels worst.

Train the El Presidente With Airsoft or Dry Fire

Here’s the part most El Prez articles skip: almost none of this drill actually requires live ammunition to build. The turn, the draw, the target transitions, and especially the reload are all pattern skills — and patterns are built through reps, not through burning ammo. That’s genuinely good news, because a 12-round live-fire drill you can only run at the range is exactly the kind of thing most people practice a handful of times a year and never really own.

Dry fire is the cheapest way in. Clear and safety-check your pistol, set up three aiming points on a wall, set a par time on a shot timer — start somewhere realistic like 12 seconds — and run the whole sequence: turn, draw, two “shots” on each target, a dry reload with a dummy magazine, two more on each, all before the par beep. You’re training the identical choreography the live-fire drill measures. The Airsoft Shot Timer app gives you the random start beep and the par-time buzzer for free, so you can run par-time El Prez reps in your living room and actually track whether your reload is getting faster week to week. Pair it with the mechanics in our dry fire training guide and you’re rehearsing match-day movement, not just pressing a trigger.

Airsoft takes it a step further because now you get feedback on your hits too. A gas blowback pistol runs the full El Presidente — turn, draw, transitions, a real reload with a gas magazine, twelve BBs downrange — with real trigger, real recoil impulse, and a real point of impact, at a fraction of the cost and with no range trip required. Scale the distance down to fit an indoor space and the choreography stays identical. If you shoot practical airsoft or Action Air, this is your most realistic off-range rep, and the timer doesn’t care whether the “bang” came from a 9mm or a green-gas GBB — it times your draw, transitions and reload exactly the same. For more on what carries over between the two, see our airsoft-to-firearms training crossover guide.

Variations to Keep the Drill Honest

Once your standard turning El Prez is repeatable, there are easy ways to keep it challenging. The simplest is to drop the turn: start facing downrange and you’ll take time off your clock, which is a good way to isolate the shooting and reload from the pivot when you want to work on those specifically. Going the other way, you can add concealment — run the draw from under a covered garment — which turns El Prez into a genuine carry benchmark and usually adds a second or more to an honest time.

You can also vary the reload. A slide-lock reload, where you deliberately run the gun dry and reload from an empty chamber, is slower and more demanding than a speed reload with rounds still in the gun, so alternating between the two trains different problems. And, as always, distance is the great equalizer: push the targets back from 10 to 15 yards and the same splits that kept your hits centered up close will start scattering them, exposing any grip or trigger control that was only just good enough at 10.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a good El Presidente time?

For the standard turning, 10-yard, 12-round course with all hits in the A-zone, 10 seconds is Jeff Cooper’s classic benchmark for genuine proficiency. Solid club shooters break 8 seconds, and top competitors run it in the 5–6 second range. The time only counts as clean if every hit is in the A-zone — a fast run with hits in the C-zone means you’re going faster than you can control.

Who invented the El Presidente drill, and why the name?

It was developed by Jeff Cooper, the founder of modern practical pistol technique, reportedly to test the pistol proficiency of a presidential security detail in South America — which is where the name “El Presidente” (often shortened to “El Prez”) comes from.

How is the El Presidente scored?

Two common ways. Cooper’s original scored the twelve hits like a mini-match against a 10-second par, with penalties for misses and hits outside the center. The modern practical-shooting method is USPSA hit factor — total points divided by your time — which rewards being fast and accurate at once and punishes buying speed with misses.

Can you practice the El Presidente with airsoft or dry fire?

Yes — and it’s one of the best drills for it. The turn, draw, target transitions and reload are all pattern skills you can build dry, and a shot timer’s par-time function lets you run the full sequence against a realistic clock at home. An airsoft pistol adds real recoil and a real reload with a gas magazine plus feedback on your hits. The Airsoft Shot Timer app provides the random start beep and par-time buzzer for both.

What’s the difference between the El Presidente and the Bill Drill?

The Bill Drill is six shots into one target at seven yards — a focused test of your draw, grip and recoil control. The El Presidente is far broader: a turn, a draw, three target transitions, a reload, and twelve rounds at 10 yards. Think of the Bill Drill as isolating one skill and El Prez as testing all of them working together.

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The El Presidente has outlived every training trend of the last half-century for one reason: it’s an honest, complete test that you can score with a single number. Turn, draw, transition, reload, and do it clean in ten seconds — the drill tells you the truth every time. Grab a shot timer, whether you’re on a live range, dry-firing in the living room, or running an airsoft pistol in the backyard, and start logging your draw, your reload and your splits. The number that isn’t moving is the one to train next. For a broader menu of drills to build around it, see our complete guide to classic shooting drills.

• El Presidente
• El Prez
• Shooting Drills
• Shot Timer
• Practical Shooting
• USPSA
• IPSC
• Jeff Cooper
• Draw Speed
• Reload
• Splits
• Dry Fire
• Airsoft
• Pistol Training
• Par Time