Shooting Positions and the Shooting “Budget”
By Ryan Long
So you’ve dreamed of attending a long range shooting school with the aspirations of hitting the magic 1000-yard mark….with repeatable results. You conducted your research, vetted the instructors, saved your hard-earned money, arranged and taken vacation from work and are now at your school.

Most long range schools can get you to 1000 yards consistently. Most of these schools start that process from a prone shooting position. This is good and bad. Good due to the fact that it is a very stable position and bad because it sets you up for failure in most of the real-world hunting positions that you are going to have available to you. The Outdoor Solutions Long Range Shooting Schools start their 1000 yard engagements from a sitting position and teach you how to mitigate positional awareness from the beginning of the class, and this gets to the nuts and bolts of this article…..your shooting position “budget.”

Imagine that you are on a fixed budget…a shooting “budget.” The distance you’re shooting eats away at some of that budget The vital size of the critter your hunting eats away at another portion of that budget. The environmental conditions, shooter fitness and fatigue, and then the unexpected…call it the flash sale of the hunting world takes up the rest.

Most all of the time, in a shooting school static “square” range scenario, the budget comes out to an even amount. Let’s use $100 for this scenario. You have $100 worth of shooting budget to spend and the most targets presented at these schools cost roughly $100. In a real world hunting scenario, the cost to the hunter, which is presented by the environment, is most always in excess of that budget. So what do you do? You will always have to give up something in order to gain something in this world. You may have to put some stability of your shooting position back on the shelve in order to purchase a less expensive shooting position that is still within an acceptable accuracy window. In other words, you may have to get out a rock solid prone position and into a slightly less stable sitting position with sticks because your desired animals walks left out of the field, instead of your expected right departure.

Being able to be fluid in the hunting environment means the difference between taking that trophy home and watching it walk away because you weren’t able to flex that shooting “budget”. This is where the Outdoor Solutions Long Range Schools stands out amongst the rest. The second day on the range will force you to take into account your shooters “budget” and make adjustments accordingly. They will force you into situations where you may feel like you are rock steady and prepared for your shot and then your target choice will be taken away and you will be forced to engage a different target from the same position in the next 10 seconds.

For a hunter, learning to flex that “budget” and knowing how to be fluid in the hunting environment is a skill that will set you up for success in your next adventure. Let the Outdoor Solutions Team show you how.