Tactical Priority and Tactical Sequence are two terms that you’ll hear often in IDPA.  IDPA is one of the few action shooting sports that tells you how you have to shoot your targets so you want to make sure you pay attention in your walk through. And we are going to go through and show you how to do it today.

Tactical priority is one of the types of engagements you are going to find in IDPA. When you are going to shoot tactical priority you are going to shoot the closest target first. That means near to far.  I’m going to show you how to do that.

Many times shooters are used to engaging their targets from right to left, or left to right. When engaging targets in tactical priority, however you may be shooting them out of order. Just keep that in mind.
 

Now let’s talk about Tactical Sequence. In tactical sequence you have to engage each target with one shot each before re-engaging them. You can either start on the left or the right, or even in the center, it doesn’t matter. Let’s see how to do it. I just shot each target with one shot each. One, one, one.  One, one, one.

There’s a faster way to do this, though. If you shoot one on each of the first two targets, follow up and shoot two on the third target, you are not going to have to transition all the way back to your first target. So I am going to shoot one, one, two on the final target, and sweep back and shoot, one on the last two.

Now up and to this point we have been shooting two on each target, but in IDPA you may actually shoot more than two on each target.In this case we are going to shoot three on each of these, and in tactical sequence, that is going to change things up.  I’m going to shoot one, one, three, two, two on these targets. Now you can go ahead and shoot one, one, one, transition, one, one, one, transition one, one, one; but that’s not going to be as fast as shooting one, one, three, two, two.  Let’s give it a try.

So this is the mental challenge of IDPA, remembering what targets you’ve shot with how many rounds.This is something to practice at home. Tactical sequence, tactical priority.Two types of target engagements you’ll find at your next IDPA Match.

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