On any given day, thousands and thousands of American gun owners will head out to their local shooting range. The vast majority will set up their gear, load a firearm, shoot at a target, then take it down and then move on to the next activity they have planned that day. Shooting guns in a safe environment is a lot of fun, and that’s exactly what these people do when they go to the range.
But shooting at a target and getting your hits? That’s even more fun.
This isn’t something that’s unique to the shooting sports. Playing golf and getting a low score is fun. Scoring touchdowns is fun. Hitting home runs is fun. For some reason, though, there’s a big disconnect between what happens on the range and how you get better at making the shot, and that gap is exactly what the SIG Connect app and target system from SIG Sauer is designed to bridge.
App And Target Working Together
The SIG Connect app is available for both Apple and Android phones, and offers two tiers of membership. The free membership gives you access to 10 sessions of drills, games and other range activities, as well as podcasts, interviews and a selection of training videos. There is also a free tool to help you zero your pistol-mounted red dot sight, which is useful for those of us who run a dot on our defensive sidearm. These features (and the premium features as well), require the use of SIG’s OHD (Optical Hit Detection) targets, but on the bright side, these targets cost about as much as other large paper targets out there, leading to no extra target expenses for you when you head to the range.
The Premium membership (which costs $79 for a year, about the same as range fees and two boxes of 9mm ammo), opens up the full potential of the SIG Connect app. Now all the training videos and interviews are open to the user, but more importantly, so are unlimited range sessions, analytics and games to play while you’re at the range.
The SIG Connect App At The Range
Those games are where the SIG Connect app really shines. The average American gun owner knows they should get better at marksmanship, what they lack is an easy and fun way to do so. Thousands of years ago, we humans figured out that playing games would make us better in life-or-death situations, so it makes sense we’d do the same thing today. The games inside the SIG Connect app are easy to understand, easy to play and best of all, can be done on an indoor range with no specialized gear besides your phone, a SIG Connect target and a tripod for your smartphone. Accurately shooting holes in a piece of paper becomes much more difficult under stress, and adding a time requirement on top of an accuracy standard is one of the easiest ways to get used to the stress of getting good hits on-demand.
There are times when I go to the range for the sheer joy of sending rounds into the target, and there are times when I go to the range to practice and train specific areas of weakness in my shooting ability. What the SIG Connect app allows me to do is combine the two activities: I can go to the range and have fun, and I can get better at shooting while doing so.
Win-win.
Thanks to the Alamo Range for providing a range for this video.
