What is a Bill Drill?

A bill drill is an incredibly powerful but simple shooting drill that is focused on stretching your shooting fundamentals with any firearm platform. Simply put, it consists in it’s most basic form of putting 6 rounds into a target as quickly as possible with acceptable accuracy at a short distance.

How to Perform a Bill Drill?

Performing a Bill Drill using Dryfire with Project MARS

Project MARS supports running bill drills at home. MARS Mobile is best used with standard “metric” USPSA targets or “classic” IPSC targets. Ideally, you’ll have a laser dry fire setup that will allow you to fire semi automatically. Check out our equipment guide for more details on the ideal dry fire setup.

• Make sure that you are dryfiring in a safe environment. Make sure there is no ammunition located anywhere in the dryfire area.
• To begin, setup any target (ideally a USPSA practice target) on your wall.
• Setup your phone with MARS Mobile, with the rear facing camera pointed at the target.
• Add at least one target area covering the target.
• Select the “Bill Drill” mode. Begin.
• The “Shooter ready?” range command will commence
• Position yourself 7 yards or so from the target
• When the shot timer rings, fire 6 shots into the target, attempting to keep all shots in the center of the target (A-Zone on a USPSA Target)

Interpreting the Results

If using USPSA style targets, your hit factor will be calculated based on the minor or major power factor (depending on your selected settings). Your goals for improvement with this drill will generally be as follows.

Goal 1: Improving Hit Factor

Hit factor is a concept used in USPSA to determine a shooter’s ability in a given stage as compared to other shooters. Achieving a higher hit factor is desirable. If you aren’t familiar with hit factor, read this article, as an understanding of the concept is critical to maximizing training benefits.

Just as some USPSA stages are more difficult than others, as you add more difficulty to the drill (e.g. shooting from further away, drawing from the holster, closing your eyes until the buzzer goes off), these factors will negatively impact hit factor score as they will add time to the drill. Keep this in mind as you challenge yourself more.

Goal 2: Shooting Speed

The main goal of the Bill Drill is to develop shooting speed while maintaining a combat proficient level of accuracy. You want to shoot a string of fire as quickly as you possibly can while maintaining that minimum accuracy standard. At say 7 yards, an acceptable group running this drill with a 9mm pistol would be all hits within the a zone on a 6 inches circle.

Goal 3: Shooting Cadence

The reason for establishing shooting cadence is that it keeps you from developing bad habits. It’s better to go slower at first, focusing on the fundamentals of marksmanship, picking up speed gradually as you get better with a given weapons platform.

Goal 4: Maintaining Accuracy while Shooting Fast

With this drill, we aren’t worried about bullseye shooting accuracy. Rather, we’re focused on practical accuracy. We want to get lots of hits in a reasonably accurate target area, in as little time as possible, rather than getting 6 well placed hits in a very short amount of time.

Applying the Bill Drill in a Live Fire Range

Finally, the whole point of dryfire is to make as many gains as possible before trying a particular skill on the live range.

A bill drill on the live range isn’t so different than the bill drill while dryfiring. Keep in mind that some ranges have limits on shooting speed (e.g. 1 shot per second), in which case you should ideally find a range that does not restrict rate of fire.

Traditionally, shooters will stand 7 yards from the target. Shooters can start by drawing from the holster or from a low ready position. Shooters will put 6 rounds into the target as quickly as they can while maintaining an acceptable level of accuracy (all A Zone hits on a USPSA target is acceptable, achieving about a hand sized grouping is ideal). The drill should be performed with a shot timer.

Practicing with MARS Mobile first will help you familiarize yourself with a bill drill maximizing the benefits of live fire training. All of the concepts of dry fire training with a bill drill carry over to a live fire context.