These look like fun family handgun exercises or for an Independence Day cookout with friends. These drills are functionally important, and a challenge with other shooters is an opportunity to sharpen your skills.

Have you been to the range in a while? If you have, did you do any fun drills or did you just stare at a paper target and dump ammo downrange? A lot of us don’t go to the range as much as we should because life just gets in the way. Work and other activities make it hard to find time, but the cost of ammo is also a contributing factor.

I remember buying ammo by the case and shooting until there were blisters on my finger. But that was back in the day when ammo was about the same cost as candy. Now, ammo is equivalent to little gold coins that make you cringe every time you pull the trigger. I recently sighted a hunting rifle and every time I fired the gun it cost me $1.50. That adds up quickly when you’re not paying attention and get the trigger jitters.

But the good news is there are plenty of fun drills you can do that don’t burn through gobs of ammo. Getting some quality training, having fun, and not spending all your money sounds too good to be true, right? It’s not. You just need to spend a little more time setting up the range for various drills. Drills and exercises on the range are designed to improve specific skills. This could be accuracy, weapon control, speed, or a mixture of them all. And the good thing is most of them do not require a ton of ammo. Let’s look at some fun drills you could be doing this summer.

Mag Change Drills are discussed along with transition drills, but what he calls the Big-Little Drill can be important. It’s good to train your mind in a few things when shooting targets of various sizes and distances. One aspect of handgun shooting distance is to train your mind that the target is just smaller, not further away. The distance challenge can change the mind’s perspective on handgun shooting and cause less accuracy than simply viewing it as a smaller target at the same range. Also, our perception of a threat not standing squarely to us, presenting a quarter turn or only their side, can change our perception of how to hit the target when we can simply view it as slimmer; center mass is center mass. Those are some mental things to consider for practice; it may help.

Here’s the Big-Little Drill, you can always improvise or modify targets as resources dictate:

I have no idea if this is a real drill or if my drill instructor in the police academy made it up, but it’s fun. For this drill, you can use metal targets or random bottles and other items laying around asking to be shot at. This is an accuracy drill, so you start out with the largest item on the left and move to the smallest on the right.

Mixing the sizes up or shooting from the outside in or inside out for subsequent rounds is a good idea.

I set mine up at 25 yards to make it more fun. I normally use a pop bottle or milk jug followed by a 16oz bottle or something comparable. Next a pop can and then a shotgun shell for the smallest item. If you want to add more items in there, go ahead. The idea is to start with the biggest item and move to the smallest. This drill will also work with rifles, you just set it up further out.

I have metal targets in different sizes, but there is something more satisfying about watching the bottles fly through the air when you hit them. I like to run this drill with my lever action rifle at 50 yards and 75 with my AR-15. One of my old instructors would use the drill at the end of the day so we could shoot at the bottles and cans from our lunch break. Golf balls are also fun to shoot at if you want a really small target.

Check out his other drills at the link, and remember, gun time is a fun time.