back in 2015 was when i really started to take shooting seriously and what i mean by that
is start trying to invest in the skill set of shooting and i started training in a way that
furthered my skills but what that journey took me on is also investing in other gear and as i kind
of started exploring into the world of outside the waistband carrying or you know owb setups i got
into plate carriers and armor and things like that i just started experimenting with different setups
i started realizing that my reloads from my chest rigs or my plate carriers were really slow
and initially i just made the excuse that i believed that it's just because there's retention
they're a little harder to get to you know these mags all tight together it's a little hard to get
your hand around them so i just kind of wrote it off as it just is what it is as i started training
more and shooting more and more i started to realize that that's not necessarily the case
and while there are benefits to both having a mag mounted or a belt mounted mag carrier versus
a chest rig and there's areas that both will shine versus the other if you train with both enough you
should get your times pretty consistent and my hope for this video is to break this down show
you some reload drills with rifle and pistol both from the chest rig and my belt and just compare
i'm not a professional shooter i'm not the most skilled marksman out there
i'm not the best guy to come to for all things firearm advice but i've learned a couple things
and i'm hoping that this video at the very minimum presents some data that helps you out in some way
so the first way we are going to test this and experiment is with my rifle so what i did
downrange is i have one of our uspsa cardboard targets and i put it down there at 10 yards
and we're going to start out on paper first we're going to go down then and check the
hits and all that stuff i am going to time each drill that i run so let's get geared up
so right now i have an empty mag we've got one in the chamber
just check my dot good to go so to start i'm gonna reload from my
belt so on the timer we're gonna do this all with the rifle from hi ready
all right so that time was a 3.55 i'm going to show you this one time i'm not going to waste
your time and show you the shot timer every time i feel like that's unnecessary but that was a 3.55
one thing to note is i have not shot at all today so this is 100 cold make sure we're empty
got one chambered let's do that again
all right that was a 3.66 let's do it again
3.12 all right one more time with the rifle we're gonna really try
to burn this down i'm gonna see if i can get below the three seconds
all right
that was a 3.15 and i threw that round pretty far to the left i felt that as soon as
my dot landed on target i broke the shot and it was off to the left so now let's do the exact
same thing but instead of reloading from the belt we're gonna reload from the chest rig and a lot of
folks including myself when i got into chess rigs you kind of wonder which way to the mag's face how
do i orient everything how do i grab my mags and i'm just going to show you real quick what i do
i tend to not overthink this there's a lot of folks are like oh you must
like slam your chest get down in there really rip up with a beer can grip and the reality is
that's fine with certain plate carriers but when you get into a chest rig like this with a lot of
retention and the mags are really tight sometimes you just really have to come up from the bottom
and i typically like the bullets to be point pointing toward my right side so again it just
gives me an easy way to rock them up into place you could probably make the argument you could
do it from the bullets facing the left side you could kind of go over the top and rock in
honestly i'm not going to tell you guys one way to do it this is just what i've found that works
really well and i think that my times are going to reflect the method that i've implemented
so earpro back on all right the fastest time i had with the belt was 3.12
all right that was a 3.86 so my slowest time with the belt was 3.66 so i'm about
0.2 seconds slower with the chest rig let's see if i can speed that up
there's a 3.73
do it one more time again these are very consistent
and this is cold i haven't practiced this today
3.92
all right for science we're going to try to burn it down real quick
i'm going to just try to go blazing fast
all right that was a 3.23 for science cool let me actually clear this rifle out
so we don't point the gun at camera guy wouldn't want to do that stick that round
back in here all right let's do the same thing with a pistol so again we're going to start
it's a glock 22 convert it to 9 millimeter we're going to start from the belt then i have 22 round
mags up here in my chest rig we're going to analyze that and see what those look like so
all right let's do this
all right that was a 3.60 looks like i have an alpha and a charlie 3.78
again this is cold no warm-ups
3.67
definitely feel sloppy with the pistol right now but so that was 3.67 we'll do one more
3.57
all right do the exact same thing now i'm grabbing my reload from the chest right
all right so that was from my belt
habit always drives my hand right here to my belt we're gonna this time do it from the chest rig so
let's see that was a 3.76 so very consistent from the belt let's actually get it from the chest
right all right that was a 4.80 fumbled that a little bit let's try to clean that up
4.38
all right let's pick up some speed here
so 4.95 definitely fumbling more with the pistol
just shows what i need to work on so let's go downrange real quick we're going to check
out these hits and then talk about this because there's one other aspect that i want to do with
this drill that's going to hopefully give you guys a little bit more data
so you can see most of them are in the a zone i have a couple charlies with the pistol
three charlies i'll call that a charlie two charlies with the rifle
i threw one really high with the pistol and sometimes that happens if i have a really bad grip
and i push out and i just don't watch my dot and i break the shot just stuff to keep in mind
so all of those are fine so the last piece of this puzzle
yeah i'm not super happy with how the pistol shooting went but what we're going to do this time
is try to isolate the reload what i mean by that is we'll go back down to the 10 yard mark
we're going to start with the pistol pressed out with the slide lock back do the same thing with
the rifle and on the buzzer we're simply going to grab a mag insert the mag drop the slide or
send the bolt home and then engage the target but this time instead of using the cardboard
i'm going to use a raven target system that i have down here this is the target system that
we produce we we manufacture in a partnership with john lovell over at warrior poet society
the benefit of this target system in this particular instance is we're not going to have
to walk back down range you're going to hear the audible impacts the raven's a little bit bigger
than an a-zone it's actually closer to a c-zone in size so actually let's i'll show you right here on
this cardboard target so the raven is actually about the size of a c-zone so it's a little bit
bigger still small enough for this drill that i think it'll get the point across for science
all right since we have the pistol in my hand already again on the buzzer
i'm going to be on target as soon as the buzzer beeps i'm going to insert a reload and shoot and
we're just going to check the time and that should get closer to isolating the reload
alright so that was 2.12
let's do that again
hang on 2.19
let's do it again
it was a 1.88
do it one more time
that was a 1.87 all right let's holster that up
so let's do the exact same thing with the rifle and that's data that i'm just using to eliminate
the actual draw portion of this drill because we all know that during the draw there's time
between when you register the beep you draw the firearm push out get on target break the shot
i'm just eliminating that from the equation oh i actually got ahead of myself there we're gonna do
that from the chest rig with the pistol but that's eliminating from the equation that draw aspect
just so we can kind of see how close these times are so let's do it from the chest right
so that was a 2.34
2.18 so again we're about 0.2.3 seconds slower with the pistol and the chest rig one more
that was really sloppy one more for redemption
all right 2.73 let's move over to the rifle do the exact same thing isolate those reloads
2.34 on that one
2.42
all right let's do that again
2.75 let's do the same thing from the chest rig now
all right 3.14
3.18
one more
all right 2.74 so what's the data telling us here with this reload so obviously from the
belt i'm a little bit quicker i have a lot more time with the belt what you notice when
i coupled everything together from a push out on target break the shot and reload
they're very consistent we're talking a couple tenths of a second typically between the two
so don't make the excuse that okay maybe you're reloading in five seconds from a chest rig
more than likely you need to spend some time working with that chess rig
so guys the reality is it all comes down to training i hope that this particular set of
drills helped you out in some way if it did leave us a comment below let us know if there's
anything else you want us to dive into in this particular topic if you like the raven targets
or any of the uspsa targets that we have you can find them on our website tattargets.com you can
also find free paper targets there as well under resources definitely swing over there check it out
so you