My name is Hwansik Kim; I’m a 37 year old full-time instructor, co-founder of Practical Shooting Training Group (pstg.us), and husband. The first time I shot competitively was in July 2014 and quickly after winning 2nd place at the 2017 USPSA handgun national championship in Carry Optics division, I started teaching full time.
My business associate Ben Stoeger and I launched a training website, PSTG, in 2018. Since then, I developed many drills, such as: Confirmation drills, Track The A Zone, Designated Target, One-Shot Return, Go Stop, and many more. I have taught over a thousand students both face-to-face and online, including high level competitions shooters, members of SWAT teams, DEA, elite military units from the U.S., Germany, Poland, Switzerland, and more.
Since 2019, I shifted to developing my curriculum to heavily focus on the vision aspect of shooting and athletic performance that is related to practical shooting. My Vision Focus class focuses on developing the ability of what our vision can do related to shooting. Mastery class focuses on high level practical shooting performance and the optimal execution. My teaching has helped many students to perform the best possible for their goals.
As a competition shooter, I earned the title of 2016 USPSA Area 1 Production champion during my second year of shooting. I have won 2019 Extreme Euro open Production Optics champion title and 2019 Canadian IPSC National Championship in Production Optics division, and finished 2nd overall at the 2017 and 2018 US Carry Optics Nationals as well as 3rd overall at the 2020 US Carry Optics nationals. I also placed 9th at the 2022 IPSC Handgun World Championship in Thailand using a complete factory Walther PDP 5".
I was born and raised in Daejeon, South Korea. As I was growing up, I failed many Physical Education classes and didn’t play any sports because I had many fears. I started learning English while working as a Christian missionary in Europe. Afterward, I served my 2-year military duty in the R.O.K. Army back in South Korea. At the age of 23, I moved to the U.S. to study Physics. Until my friend in the U.S. brought me to a local indoor range, I never held a pistol in my life. A couple of years later, I was introduced to USPSA competition where I felt a strong passion to start training for practical shooting.
From day one of my competition shooting and teaching career, I started researching how to be the best at practical shooting. My training not only includes practice but lots of analysis. Since I didn’t grow up playing sports, I had to learn more than shooting. I have studied other athletes from sports such as soccer, sprinting, and basketball. As I love studying, my focus in training is always to learn better approaches, and my mission is to share what I have learned with as many people as possible.