Fit to Fight: Why Better Fitness Makes You a Better Shooter

Most shooters spend plenty of time training the gun and considerably less time training the body running it.

We work draws, reloads, transitions, positional shooting, and increasingly difficult standards. We’ll spend money on ammunition, classes, optics, and equipment designed to shave fractions of a second off a drill. Then some of us get winded walking from the 100-yard line back to the firing line.

There’s a disconnect there.

Shooting itself may not look particularly athletic when you’re standing on a square range, but practical shooting rarely stays static for long. Once movement, unconventional positions, elevated heart rate, or physical fatigue enter the equation, your physical condition becomes part of your shooting performance.

Rick from Achilles Heel Tactical summed it up well:

“One of the most important attributes to being a good shooter is being an athlete. Movement can trip a lot of guys up if they’re not being aggressive and deliberate with their actions. Launching out of a position, coming steady into a position, and maintaining the most optimal and athletic stance during sequences that involve movement can be the main difference in a good shooter and a great shooter.”

Your Shooting Doesn’t Exist Separately From Your Body

Anyone who has shot immediately after a hard sprint already understands the problem.

Your breathing is elevated. Your heart is hammering. The gun moves more. Your visual processing changes. Tasks that seemed easy while standing comfortably on the firing line suddenly require considerably more attention.

Add stress and the problem gets worse.

The relationship between heart rate and fine motor performance isn’t as simple as crossing a single beats-per-minute threshold and suddenly losing dexterity. But the broader effect is well established: physiological stress, exertion, and fatigue can degrade the physical and cognitive processes required for accurate shooting.

That’s important because the circumstances in which someone might actually need a firearm aren’t likely to resemble a relaxed range session.

You may have to run. You may have to fight. You may have to move another person. You could be shooting from an awkward position or immediately after significant physical exertion.

Your marksmanship still matters, but now you’re asking your body to deliver that marksmanship under considerably worse conditions.

Better conditioning gives you more capacity before performance begins falling apart.

Shooting Is More Athletic Than It Looks

Fitness isn’t just about having enough cardiovascular endurance to keep from getting winded.

Athleticism matters because shooting on the move requires body control.

Think about what happens during a stage or movement drill. You have to accelerate out of one position, decelerate into another, establish a usable shooting platform, control the gun, make the shot, and move again.

Doing that efficiently requires strength, balance, coordination, mobility, and power.

Watch experienced competitive or tactical shooters move and you’ll see it immediately. Good shooters don’t simply run faster between positions. They’re better at entering and leaving them.

They can explode out of a position without wasting movement and, more importantly, arrive at the next position ready to shoot.

A less athletic shooter may cover the same distance but overrun the position, fight for balance, take an extra moment to settle the sights, or build an inefficient stance because he lacks the mobility to get where he needs to be.

Those little inefficiencies add up.

The same applies to getting into kneeling, prone, urban prone, or other unconventional shooting positions. Mobility determines whether you can comfortably assume the position. Strength helps you control yourself while getting there. Stability gives the gun a platform from which to work.

Fitness Gives Your Marksmanship More Margin

There is also a physiological advantage.

Research examining tactical shooting has repeatedly shown that stress and physical exertion can affect shooting performance. A 2015 study published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, for example, examined autonomic responses during tactical pistol competition and found relationships between physiological stress responses and shooting performance.

Research involving law enforcement has similarly examined how exertion, elevated heart rate, fatigue, and psychological stress influence shooting accuracy.

Run a drill cold.

Then perform a hard sprint, a series of burpees, a sled drag, or another demanding exercise and immediately shoot the same drill.

Your sights will tell you what changed.

The goal isn’t to become immune to stress or exertion. You won’t.

The goal is to increase your capacity so the same physical demand represents a smaller percentage of what you’re capable of handling.

That’s one of the biggest benefits of conditioning for shooters.

For Law Enforcement, It Isn’t Optional

The connection becomes even more obvious for law enforcement.

An officer may go from sitting in a patrol vehicle to sprinting after someone, climbing a fence, fighting for control, and potentially making a life-or-death shooting decision within a matter of minutes.

That’s a very different physical problem than shooting a qualification course.

The officer doesn’t get to call timeout until his breathing settles.

He may have to shoot immediately after the most physically demanding portion of the encounter.

Strength, cardiovascular conditioning, mobility, and durability aren’t separate from firearms proficiency in that environment. They’re part of the system that allows an officer to apply that proficiency when it matters.

Armed Citizens Aren’t Exempt

The armed citizen faces the same basic physiology.

A defensive gun use could involve moving a family member, getting off the ground, fighting at close range, running to cover, or simply dealing with an enormous adrenaline dump before the handgun ever clears the holster.

You don’t get to choose the condition you’ll be in when you need the skill.

That’s why I think shooters should stop treating fitness and firearms training as completely separate pursuits.

You don’t have to become a competitive powerlifter or marathon runner. You need enough strength, endurance, mobility, and athletic capacity that your body isn’t the limiting factor when you’re trying to use the skills you’ve spent years developing.

Achilles Heel Tactical Is Taking This Seriously

This is something the guys at Achilles Heel Tactical have been putting considerably more emphasis on lately.

Most shooters already understand that they should be in better shape. The harder part is knowing how to program training around the physical qualities that actually support shooting, training, and an active lifestyle.

That’s the idea behind EVLVE, Achilles Heel Tactical’s fitness program.

Rather than treating fitness as something completely separate from firearms training, EVLVE focuses on developing strength, endurance, durability, and overall athletic capacity. The program is delivered through an app with progress tracking and video demonstrations, so you’re following an actual training program rather than randomly piecing workouts together.

It costs $25 per month, which puts structured programming at less than a dollar per day.

More importantly, it’s part of a broader direction Achilles Heel Tactical has been moving toward: looking beyond what happens during the actual trigger press and addressing the complete capability of the shooter.

If you’re interested in that approach, AHT has also been publishing more material covering training, physical preparedness, and ways to continue developing when live-fire opportunities are limited.

Their recent off-season training plan for Ohio shooters is a good place to start, particularly as fall and winter approach.

Train the Entire System

There’s an old tendency in the firearms world to solve shooting problems by focusing exclusively on shooting.

Sometimes that’s exactly what you need. If your trigger control sucks, you need to work on trigger control.

But other performance problems aren’t gun problems.

If you can’t aggressively move into a position without losing your balance, another case of ammunition won’t fix it. If you’re completely smoked after a short sprint, a better optic won’t fix it. If you don’t have the mobility to establish a solid shooting position, another weekend shooting from a bench won’t fix it.

The gun is only one part of the system.

The shooter is the other.

Train both.

Learn more about EVLVE at Achilles Heel Tactical’s lifestyle page, and check out their firearms training schedule if you want to put that physical capability to work on the range.