Breakthrough Marksmanship: The Tools of Practical Shooting By Ben Stoeger

This book is filled with great information. As a new shooter in an area with virtually no other pistol shooters, Ben Stoegers books give insight into my shooting that I couldn't get anywhere else.

This book in particular offers cause and affect explanations that can be incredibly beneficial at a glance, I had a ton of ah ha moments as I read.

If you're looking for no nonsense literature covering all aspects of practical pistol shooting, Ben's books are for you. Ben Stoeger It's a good book, a quick read. Kinda a Clif notes of his other books, evolved with some of the ideas expressed on the podcast and in class. If you kinda know what you should be doing but think there's something off in your performance this content may help you. If you want the minutiae of the sport look at Practical Pistol, drills Dryfire or Skills and Drills. Why are you reading my review? You should be reading the book stop wasting time on my review go order it! Book was mostly Fluff, but had a few good things. As either a confirmation that your practice is actually beneficial to you reaching your goals or a complete teardown of what you thought you knew, this book is practically required reading from The Man The Myth The Legend himself. I own some of his other books and still I found the visuals and explanations refreshing and motivating.

I’ve been shooting for almost 5 years and made it about as far as I can go classification wise. That said, I sometimes I feel like the information out there can be like drinking from a fire hose. This book is not like that and really focuses in on the meat and potatoes. I like that a lot and am getting a lot of value from it.

What I found most interesting are the diagrams and follow up passages which explain what you’re looking at. Often times shooters (or instructors) will try to explain things online, through text, or podcast, but you can’t actually see what they mean. As a visual learner I felt this book really bridged the gap between trying to imagine the concepts and then actually seeing what the instructor meant.

PROS:

Great visuals
Straight to the point
Learnings can be immediately applied to your training

CONS:

This isn’t a meta book so if you’re looking for deeper thinking, or heavy theory (ie: Brian Enos type stuff) this isn’t for you Breakthrough Marksmanship: The Tools of Practical Shooting TL;DR: This book is an easy to read, easy to understand diagnostic tool to help a competitive shooter understand how to make marksmanship improvement through explanation and example diagrams.



I've read all of Ben's books. Breakthrough Marksmanship skips the detail contained in the others, and instead Ben takes a different approach by explaining technical topics relating to shooting in an easy to digest format. This is certainly the one book that should be read first by a competitive shooter.

Now that I have a better understanding of the theories taught by Ben, I have been able to diagnose my own marksmanship shortcomings with the cause effect relationships explained in Breakthrough Marksmanship. I have noticed in my own practice sessions and matches that I will automatically self diagnose my hits on targets. This is something that was previously overlooked by me even though this important feedback information was literally in plain sight. By understanding the reason why my shots fired may not hit the intended spot on a target (i.e. shots hitting low left instead of directly in the middle of the A zone), I have been able to immediately deploy the diagnostic techniques taught in Breakthrough Marksmanship, which have lead to a breakthrough improvement in my own shooting performance. Now, instead of ignoring this important feedback information, I use this information to make corrections in my grip and shooting behavior, which has produced better results over time in my own performance. The value alone of this realization is worth the price of admission to read Breakthrough Marksmanship.

I fully recommend reading Breakthrough Marksmanship. I've been shooting competition for a few years now, first in IDPA, and now almost exclusively in USPSA/IPSC where I am a solid B Class shooter. But I don't want to stay a B class shooter, I want to move up in the rankings and be competitive, and the only way to do that is to train and practice, not just go throw rounds down range.

This book is enormously helpful in plainly spelling out the concepts needed to improve your shooting skills. The individual skills are broken down as easy to understand concepts, and then diagrams are provided to help you diagnose exactly what you are seeing. The targets will tell you a story, this book will show you how to translate it correctly.

It's an excellent read, easy to consume and directly to the point. Want to get better? Buy it, read it, do it. Breakthrough Marksmanship: The Tools of Practical Shooting The book is incredibly short. At 117 pages, double spaced with probably 20 30 blank pages between sections, this is an incredibly short book.

That being said, there is still some good info in there, but it's hard to justify the price when for a bit you can get one of his other books that really dives into the details. I only bought this book because I own his others, but am disappointed at the lack of content in a $16 book.

I wish he would have just marketed this as the summary of his other books, shortened the spacing, eliminated blank pages, and slimmed it down to like 50 pages and I would throw it in my range bag. I've read the other books from Ben. This one is a very concentrated version of a lot of that material. More like a cheat sheet but great content.

Negative: Was disappointed to pay $10 (Kindle) for something that ended up being equivalent to a magazine in reading time. Kindle

I have been teaching Practical Shooting for than a decade. Watching thousands of students fire millions of rounds over the years has taught me quite a lot about shooting. It also taught me how individuals process and obtain an understanding of shooting. I have seen students repeatedly shoot the same patterns over and over again, and I've realized the same drills highlighted the same mistakes. Over time, it has become easy for me to spot these patterns. The difficulty was making the student see and understand what I saw. However, when the student would experience an understanding, they had a breakthrough in their shooting.Over time, I modified drills and created new ones, to highlight the patterns I was seeing so that students would understand what they were doing wrong and comprehend how to fix it. This book is the product of that refinement. It contains a simple set of ideas, techniques, and drills; distilled down to an uncomplicated form. By developing your understanding of the concepts contained in this book, you can achieve your own breakthrough. Breakthrough Marksmanship: The Tools of Practical Shooting