One of the most popular drills for both self-defense focused and performance focused shooters is the legendary Bill Drill, which these days is largely understood as six shots fired at 7 yards at the A-zone of a USPSA target or the down zero of an IDPA target. There are countless videos of Instagram heroes ripping their guns out of the holster and slamming six shots in under 2 seconds, but is that really the spirit and intent of the drill? To understand the drill itself and how we got where we are today, we must go back in time. But first, let’s set one up and shoot it.

How to Shoot a Bill Drill

Setting up a drill is easy. For your own gear, you’ll obviously need a gun and a holster. If you want to run the drill in its true spirit, it should be from concealment with practical gear. On the range setup you’ll need a range that allows holster draws and the ability to place a target at 7 yards. I also suggest either a measuring tape or rangefinder to ensure your seven yards is a true seven yards. Finally, you’ll need a target, and we’re going to go into a little more depth on that.

A proper Bill Drill should be fired on a target that has “center mass” scoring zone such as an IDPA target, a USPSA target, or a PCSL target. Additionally, targets like the Modern Samurai Project target are good options. At a minimum, you want to have a target that has an 8-inch circle, which also means you can just print out an 8-inch circle on a piece of printer paper and shoot at that. But, a couple of notes on target selection. If you use a USPSA target, or the Modern Samurai Project target that has a USPSA scoring zone, it will be easier to get a faster time, because the vertical length of the USPSA A-zone means you can start shooting sooner.

Regardless, whichever target you choose, the drill itself is simple. On the beep, draw and fire six shots into the target’s A-zone or Down Zero zone. Record your time. If any shots are out of the A-zone or Down Zero, the run doesn’t count. Gotta be clean!

Bill Drill Shooting Technique

Now that we’ve covered how to set it up and what targets to use, let’s talk about actually shooting the drill and what it’s testing. The Bill Drill is primarily a test of two things: your grip and your sight tracking. The key to a successful Bill Drill, regardless of the par time you’re going for is to establish a perfect master grip so that the gun tracks straight up and down in recoil and doesn’t fly around all that much. With a poor grip, the gun won’t track right, and you’ll end up spraying shots all over the place.

The second thing this drill tests, which is a function of your grip, is sight tracking. You have to be able to track your sights, optic or iron, and their relationship to the target to ensure that you’re not pressing the trigger at the wrong time. Because contrary to what it may look like, a Bill Drill isn’t simply firing six sorta-aimed shots at a target. All your shots should in fact all be quite properly aimed. Shooting Bill Drills will help you get better at seeing your sights at speed and making fast follow-up hits on a target.

One thing the Bill Drill is not testing is your trigger pull. This is not a trigger control drill, this is a grip-it-and-rip-it drill, where the trigger press doesn’t matter as long as it’s not driving the gun off target. You’ll be able to avoid driving the gun off target if, as mentioned above, your grip is good.

Now you know how to set up a Bill Drill and how to shoot one. If that’s all you were looking for, close this window and go pack up your range bag. But if you’d like to learn more about the history and evolution of the Bill Drill, stick around.

History of the Bill Drill

The Bill Drill is named for its creator, Bill Wilson of Wilson Combat. Of course, Bill didn’t name it after himself. Rob Leatham coined the term “Bill Drill” after watching Bill shoot them in practice. This was during the heady days of early IPSC. That was a time when what we “knew” about fast, accurate shooting was changing at an incredible pace. In those days, a score of 3 seconds and all a-zone hits was considered an excellent time. For most shooters today that would also be an excellent time to try and achieve. But, for some people that wasn’t fast enough.

The Instagram Era

In the past 10 years, the sub-2.00 second Bill Drill has become something of a standard. Anyone who wants to demonstrate extreme handgun proficiency has tried to hit this time at least once, and quite a few people have gotten very good at it. At the 2023 USPSA Nationals, Shooting USA staged a Bill Drill Challenge, enticing the fastest shooters in the world to post their best time on this classic drill. Isaac Lockwood took home that title with a jaw dropping 1.59 using his USPSA Carry Optics gear. But how did we get to here? What drove the Bill Drill to become one of the industry standards for performance shooting, and how did we get to a 2.00 second par time for that?

The driving factor behind the Bill Drill becoming a standardized drill in the modern era is simple: it’s easy to set up, easy to score, and most importantly it looks good on camera. Watching a dude rip a gun out of their holster and then blast six fast shots is FUN to watch, and as a drill it translates well to short form video formats like Instagram.

Additionally, during the 2010s, you had the rise of what I call the Range Pokemon phenomenon. Range Pokemon are challenges cooked up by individual instructors that they can put their personal stamp on and when performed in said instructor’s class to the standard the student gets a coin, pin, patch, or some other sort of token. They’re Range Pokemon because you gotta catch ‘em all, right? The three most famous examples are the FAST Coin/Drill, The Modern Samurai Project Black Belt standards, and the Gabe White Standards. There are LOADs more, but that’s for a different article. Shooters want to collect Range Pokemon, so they become an important marketing tool for instructors as well. Interestingly, both the MSP and Gabe White standards incorporate, you guessed it, a Bill Drill.

So given all those factors, it makes sense that the Bill Drill would become a standardized drill that everyone shoots.

But Why 2 Seconds?

The original standard for a Bill Drill was all A-zone hits under 3 seconds. These days, everyone is trying for 2 seconds, and there’s no clear link to how we got here. However, the desire to go faster and shoot better exists in a lot of people. So, pushing that performance envelope was bound to happen no matter. USPSA shooters are out here trying to rip sub 1.5 second Bill Drills these days, because they mastered the 2.0 second standard.

But, before you get disheartened that you can’t shoot a 2.0 second Bill Drill, don’t worry. Not being able to do that on command doesn’t make you a bad shooter, it just gives you something to work on. And because the Bill Drill is easy to set up, easy to shoot, and easy to score, if mastering the Bill Drill is your goal, you should have the tools to get out and accomplish that now!