El Presidente Shooting Drill

What is El Presidente?

"El Presidente" is a shooting drill originally developed by Jeff Cooper (remember the 4 firearm safety rules) when he was training security for a South American president.  The name came about when it was incorporated into USPSA/IPSC as a standardized stage.

It consists of:

Why It's Awesome

Cooper didn't come up with the drill as a stage for "race" guns to set time records, but rather as a way to gauge overall shooter proficiency.  The drill takes into account everything that you would need...movement, draw, reload, and engagement of multiple targets.

So what's a good time?  The par time is 10 seconds which is considered good while pros can routinely get into the 4-5 second mark.

And from Cooper himself, he believed a well executed El Presidente should sound like 6 evenly spaced shots followed by a lull for reloading, and then 6 evenly spaced shots again.  However, most beginners sound like three double taps, a reload pause, and three double taps again.  This is most likely due to trying to shoot too fast or not transitioning targets quickly enough.

El Presidente Shooting Tips

So how do you get a faster time and make your drill sound like 6 evenly spaced shots?

Conclusion

El Presidente is one of my favorite drills to train and see where I'm at in terms of skill.  If you're working on shooting more accurately with a pistol, check out our super in-depth guide that focuses on stance, grip, sight picture, dry-fire drills, and more shooting range drills.

And here's the full video from Travis Tomasie:

{
  "blockName": "core/shortcode",
  "attrs": [],
  "innerBlocks": [],
  "innerHTML": "\n[embed width=\"600\" height=\"\"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTuycSFYk4M[/embed]\n",
  "innerContent": [
    "\n[embed width=\"600\" height=\"\"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTuycSFYk4M[/embed]\n"
  ]
}