Pistol Drills: Which One to Shoot Today (by Skill Gap, Round Count & Par Time)

January 25, 2026

Pistol drills at the range

You already know the drills. That is not the problem.

The problem is standing at the bay with a box of ammo and forty-five minutes, trying to decide what to actually shoot. Most of us default to whatever we ran last time, burn through the box, and drive home with no idea whether anything improved. The drill was never the bottleneck — the choice was.

This page is a picker, not a tutorial. It sorts the classic pistol drills by the skill they actually diagnose, tells you what each one costs in rounds and what par time counts as passing, and points you at the full breakdown when you want to go deep on one. If you want the complete course of fire, scoring and dry-fire variant for a specific drill, each entry links to its own guide.

💡 Every drill below assumes a timer. If you do not have one, the Airsoft Shot Timer app turns your phone into one and works for live fire, airsoft and dry fire.

Pick Your Drill in 30 Seconds

Work backwards from the thing that is currently costing you the most, not from the drill that is most fun to shoot.

Your hits are scattered and you cannot call your shots. You have a trigger and sight problem, and adding speed will only hide it. Shoot Dot Torture cold, at whatever distance you can pass it clean, and do not move back until you can.

Your hits are fine but you are slow on the first shot. That is draw and grip, not marksmanship. The 5 Yard Roundup and the Wizard Drill both expose it in ten rounds or fewer.

Your first two shots are fast and the rest walk off the target. Recoil control. Bill Drill, every session, until the group closes up.

You are fast on one target and slow between targets. Transitions. Blake Drill is built for exactly this, and it is the drill most competitive shooters neglect longest.

Your reload is where the clock disappears. 2-Reload-2 costs four rounds a run and gives you a hard number to chase.

You shoot well on the third run and badly on the first. That is the real problem, and no amount of warm-up practice fixes it. Go to the Cold Start section below.

You genuinely do not know which of these is worst. Run El Presidente or the F.A.S.T. test. Both are diagnostics disguised as drills — the split times tell you where the seconds went.

The Par Time Table: 11 Pistol Drills at a Glance

Times below are the commonly cited passing standards for a competent shooter with a duty or competition-size pistol from an open holster. Concealment, sub-compacts and airsoft platforms all shift the numbers; treat these as reference points to beat, not as gospel.

Drill	Rounds	Distance	Passing par	Mainly diagnoses
Dot Torture	50	3–10 yd	No time limit, 50/50 hits	Trigger control, sight alignment
Bill Drill	6	7 yd	3.5 s (2.0 s advanced)	Recoil control, rapid fire
Blake Drill	6	7 yd	2.5 s (2.0 s advanced)	Target transitions
El Presidente	12	10 yd	10 s (7 s good)	Everything, under a turn and a reload
Mozambique	3	7 yd	5.0 s (2.5 s excellent)	Precision under speed
F.A.S.T.	6	7 yd	10 s (under 5 s expert)	Concealed draw plus slidelock reload
2-Reload-2	4	7 yd	3.5 s (2.5 s expert)	Reload mechanics
Wizard Drill	5	3–10 yd	2.5 s per string, pass/fail	Accuracy at speed, one-handed
5 Yard Roundup	10	5 yd	2.5 s per string, 90/100	First shot, one-handed shooting
Casino Drill	21	5 yd	21 s	Counting and reloading under stress
Cold Start	varies	varies	Your own standing par	What you can actually do on demand

Drills That Fix Accuracy

Dot Torture is the accuracy audit. Ten two-inch dots, fifty rounds, and zero tolerance — one miss and the run is a fail. There is no clock, which is exactly why it works: it strips out every excuse except trigger control and sight alignment. Start at three yards, pass it clean, then move back a yard at a time. Most shooters discover their honest distance is a lot closer than their ego expected.

Because it includes strong-hand-only, support-hand-only and reload strings, it is also the cheapest single test of whether your fundamentals survive without your dominant hand. The full 50-round course of fire, the free printable target and the at-home airsoft version are in our Dot Torture guide.

The Wizard Drill, from Ken Hackathorn, is Dot Torture’s opposite: five rounds, four strings, and a hard 2.5-second par on each. You shoot from concealment at an IDPA target — one headshot at three yards strong hand only, one headshot at five yards with both hands, one headshot at seven yards, then two body shots at ten yards. Every hit must be inside the scoring lines and every string must beat the par. It is pass/fail, and there is no partial credit.

What makes the Wizard valuable is the cost-to-information ratio. Five rounds tells you whether you can hit a small target, quickly, one-handed, from concealment — the four things that actually degrade first. Hackathorn built it as a test of whether a carry gun and its owner are genuinely competent, and plenty of confident shooters fail it the first time.

Drills That Fix Speed and Recoil

Bill Drill — six rounds into the A-zone at seven yards, from the holster — is the recoil-control benchmark, and the single most useful number in your training log. It is deceptively simple: the draw is roughly the same for everyone, so the difference between a 3.5-second run and a 2.0-second run is almost entirely what happens between shots two and six. Full par-time tables for pistol, concealment and rifle are in our Bill Drill guide.

Blake Drill is the one nobody shoots enough, and it is why so many competitors are fast on paper and slow on the clock. Designed by Blake Miguez, it uses the same six rounds and the same 2.0-second elite goal time as the Bill Drill — but spreads them across three IPSC targets a yard apart, two rounds each, at seven yards.

The standard that matters here is not the total time. It is whether your transitions equal your splits. If you are shooting 0.20-second splits on a single target but taking 0.40 seconds to get between targets, you are giving away a full second on a six-target stage, and no amount of faster trigger work will get it back. The fix is visual: your eyes have to arrive at the next target before the gun does. Drive the muzzle to where you are already looking instead of searching with the sights.

Run it as a pair with the Bill Drill in the same session. Same round count, same goal time, and the gap between your two results is a direct read on how much of your speed is recoil control and how much is target-to-target efficiency.

Drills That Fix Your Reload

2-Reload-2 is four rounds and about twenty seconds of setup: two rounds in the first magazine, two in the spare, draw, fire two, slidelock reload, fire two more. Goal time is 3.5 seconds including the draw; under 2.5 is expert territory. Because the shooting is trivial, every second you save comes out of the reload itself, which makes it the cleanest possible measurement of that one skill.

Two variations are worth rotating in. Load four rounds in the first magazine and perform a tactical reload after two shots instead, and you are training the proactive top-off rather than the emergency swap. Or have a partner load a random one to four rounds so you do not know when the slide will lock — that removes the mental cue you have been unconsciously relying on, and most people’s times fall apart the first time they try it.

Technique, magazine pouch setup and the full three-phase progression live in our pistol reload guide.

The Casino Drill, from Tom Givens at Rangemaster, is what happens when you add arithmetic to a reload problem. Six numbered shapes on a target at five yards. You shoot shape one once, shape two twice, and so on up to shape six — twenty-one rounds total, in a 21-second par, with a one-second penalty per miss. You load three magazines of seven rounds, so the reloads land mid-count and at unpredictable moments.

The counting is the point. Shooters who can run a clean Bill Drill routinely blow the Casino because they lose track of which shape they are on while their hands are busy with a magazine. It is the closest a square-range drill gets to simulating the cognitive load of a real stage, and it is a genuinely humbling twenty-one rounds.

Drills That Test Everything

El Presidente is Jeff Cooper’s comprehensive test and still a USPSA classifier: start facing uprange with hands in surrender, turn on the buzzer, draw, two rounds on each of three targets at ten yards, reload, then two more on each. Twelve rounds, and a 10-second run passes while 7 seconds is genuinely good.

Cooper’s own standard was about rhythm rather than raw time — six evenly spaced shots, a reload, six more evenly spaced shots. Uneven cadence means you were not actually seeing the sights on every shot, regardless of what the clock said. If the turn-and-draw is beyond you right now, shoot the Vice Presidente: face the targets from the start and move up to seven yards. Scoring, the 99-11 par-time breakdown and the turn technique are covered in our El Presidente guide.

The F.A.S.T. test — Todd Louis Green’s Fundamentals, Accuracy and Speed Test — is six rounds that behave like a whole match. Two rounds at a 3x5 card from concealment, a slidelock reload, then four rounds at an eight-inch circle, all at seven yards. Head misses cost two seconds, body misses one. Under five seconds clean, twice, earned Green’s numbered challenge coin; only a handful of shooters ever collected one. Scoring, ratings and the coin standard are in our F.A.S.T. drill guide.

The 5 Yard Roundup, from Justin Dyal, is the low-round-count answer to both of the above. Ten rounds, everything at five yards, four strings with a 2.5-second par on each: one round from the holster, four rounds from ready, three rounds strong hand only, then two rounds support hand only. Score the target out of 100 and treat 90 as the line between competent and not.

It is the drill to shoot when you have ten rounds and ten minutes. Every string is short enough that you cannot coast, and the one-handed strings at the end catch the people who have quietly stopped practising them.

Defensive Drills

The Mozambique Drill, or Failure to Stop, is three rounds — two to the chest, one to the head, at seven yards from the holster. Five seconds passes, 2.5 is excellent. It came out of a real 1970s encounter rather than a classroom, and what it actually trains is the transition from a fast, coarse aiming problem to a slow, precise one without stalling in between. That gear change is the skill; the headshot is just where it gets measured. The origin story, the par-time table and the airsoft version are in our Mozambique Drill guide.

Cold Start: The Only Score That Counts

Here is the uncomfortable part. Almost everything above measures you after you have warmed up — and the warmed-up version of you is not the version that shows up when it matters. Shooters routinely perform substantially better on their third or fourth run of a drill than on their first, and it is the first run that represents your actual, on-demand capability.

So make the first thing you shoot each session a timed, recorded drill, before a single warm-up round. That number is your Cold Start, and it is the only score in your log worth trending.

Two ways to run it. The simplest is to fix one drill — Bill Drill is the usual choice, because it is six rounds and the standard is unambiguous — and shoot it cold every single session for a year. The graph you get is brutally honest and impossible to argue with.

The better version is to randomise it. Write five or six drills on index cards, draw one blind at the bay, and shoot it cold. This removes the last advantage you were unconsciously giving yourself: mental rehearsal on the drive over. Mozambique, F.A.S.T. and the Wizard Drill all work well here because each is short enough to shoot cold without burning your session.

Log the cold number separately from everything else. Warm scores tell you what you are capable of on a good day. Cold scores tell you what you own.

Building a Session Around Your Round Count

Ammunition, not time, is what usually limits a range trip. Plan the session around the box you brought.

With 50 rounds, pick one thing. Shoot a cold Bill Drill (6), then either Dot Torture at a distance you can barely pass (50 is exactly one run, so this is a full session on its own) or a block of Blake Drills. Do not try to cover two skills with 50 rounds; you will get a shallow pass at both.

With 100 rounds, run a cold-start drill first (about 6 rounds), spend 60 rounds on two drills that attack the same weakness from different angles — Bill and Blake, or 2-Reload-2 and the Casino Drill — and leave the last 30 for free practice on whatever the drills exposed. Ten rounds of slow-fire warm-down at the end is not wasted; it resets your fundamentals before you leave.

With 200 rounds or a full match-prep session, add El Presidente or the F.A.S.T. test in the middle, while you are warm but not yet tired, and repeat your cold-start drill at the very end. The gap between your first and last run of the same drill is a useful read on how quickly you fatigue — which, in a long match, is its own skill.

Whatever the number, record it. A drill you did not time is just recreational shooting, and a time you did not write down is gone by the drive home. The Airsoft Shot Timer app handles the timing and par-time side on any phone, which also means these drills stay measurable when you take them to airsoft or dry fire.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a pistol drill, exactly?

A drill is a fixed course of fire with a defined start position, round count, distance and a time or accuracy standard. The fixed part is what makes it useful: because nothing changes between runs, any change in your result is a change in you. Shooting a magazine at a target is practice; shooting six rounds at seven yards on a timer and writing the number down is a drill.

What are the best pistol drills to start with?

Two: Dot Torture and Bill Drill. Between them they cover both halves of shooting — one is pure accuracy with no clock, the other is pure speed with a clock. Once you can pass Dot Torture clean at five yards and shoot a Bill Drill under 3.5 seconds with all hits in the A-zone, you have earned the right to worry about transitions and reloads.

How many rounds should a drill session use?

Fewer than you think. The Wizard Drill costs five rounds, the 5 Yard Roundup ten, 2-Reload-2 four. A focused 50-round session with a timer and a logbook beats 200 rounds of unstructured shooting, and low-round-count drills are the reason: they force you to make every repetition count instead of shooting your way to a good run by volume.

Which drills work for dry fire?

Anything that does not need recoil or a slidelock. Draws, transitions, and the first shot of almost any drill dry-fire well, and par times transfer directly. Blake Drill dry-fires particularly well because transitions are a visual skill, not a recoil skill. What you cannot train dry is recoil recovery, so the Bill Drill’s real content only exists in live fire.

Do these drills work for airsoft?

Yes, and better than most people expect. Every drill on this page except the reload-under-slidelock variants runs unchanged with a gas blowback pistol, and the timer standards still apply — you simply shift the distances in to match the platform. Transitions, draws, target acquisition and trigger control all transfer. It is the cheapest way to run a Blake Drill two hundred times.

How do I know when to move up a level?

Hit the current standard three times in a row, clean, cold. Not once, and not warmed up. If you can only make the time by dropping hits, you have not passed it — you have found the speed at which you stop shooting accurately, which is useful information but not progress.

What is the Dicken Drill?

It is the informal name for the shot Eli Dicken made in 2022 — a long-distance pistol engagement — and range versions of it typically involve firing accurate shots at 30 to 40 yards under time. It is not a standardised drill with an agreed course of fire the way the Bill Drill is, so treat any version you see as one instructor’s interpretation rather than a fixed benchmark.

Summary

Structured drills work because they turn a vague ambition to “get better” into a number you either beat or you do not. But the drill you choose matters less than choosing deliberately: pick the one that attacks the skill actually costing you time, shoot it cold, and log it.

If you only take three things from this page, take these. Diagnose before you prescribe — the drill should match the weakness, not your mood. Shoot cold and log the cold number, because that is the only score that reflects what you can do on demand. And move up only when you have hit the standard three times running, clean.

Pick one drill from the table above, put four runs of it in your logbook this week, and you will already be training more deliberately than most people at the range.

Put a Shot Timer in Your Pocket

Airsoft Shot Timer is a free shot timer app tuned for airsoft and Action Air — it picks up BB gun shots, tracks your split times, and saves you the cost of a $150+ hardware timer for IPSC/IDPA practice.