My name is Hwansik Kim; I’m a 3 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.
I have been teaching since 2016 and started teaching full-time in 2018. Since then, I developed many drills, such as: Track The A Zone, In N Out, Designated Target, One-shot Return, Confirmation Drill, Go Stop, and many more. I have taught over a thousand students both face-to-face and online.
I earned the title of 2016 USPSA Area 1 Production champion during my second year of shooting. Recently, 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 until I was 19 years old. As I was growing up, I failed many Physical Education classes and didn’t play any sports because I had many fears but I played computer games. 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 pistol shooting. My experience with firearms at the time was only about 3000 rounds with a rifle mostly from the military.
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 other sports such as soccer players, sprinters, and basketball players. As I love studying, my focus in training is always learning new things and my mission is to share what I have learned with as many people as possible. As a result, I am currently running an online training website (pstg.us) with my business partner Ben Stoeger who is an IPSC handgun world champion. We are teaching lots of shooters with different backgrounds in shooting from all around the world.
