Dry Fire Practice

[Jon S]

Check out http://www.rangemaster.com/ and click on "Dry Fire Drills" on the left hand side. You will have to decide for yourself if your computer is in an appropriate location to do these drills, but I have found them very helpful, and surprising.

[Steve M1911A1]

These drills are not for beginners.
To make proper use of these drills, you should already be familiar with drawing and firing from the holster.

Beginners would do better to forget the draw stroke until raising the pistol from "low ready" to meet the master eye, and then dry-firing an accurate "shot," is an automatic act.
For this, my experience suggests that even a target is counter-productive. Face a blank wall, with no useful aiming point. The object of your drill will be only to learn to bring your pistol's sights up to meet wherever your master eye is looking, and then "fire."
After you can do that consistently and smoothly (and slowly—speed comes with continued practice), add a target and repeat the process.
When you can go out and shoot live ammunition such that all your shots at about 10 yards hit within two inches of the point at which you're aiming, you are ready to add a holster to the mix.
At this point, you might try the dry-fire drills suggested in the previous post.

[DevilsJohnson]

I like using a small spot rather than a blank wall so people can learn how to bring up from low ready and get the gun to a real shooting position. I've seen people learn themselves bad habits and corner sight by using the blank wall. Picking a small spot will get the hand used to the feel of where the gun has to be when it comes up and the spot shows you that you are not cornering.

I explain it to people kind of like one of my old drum practice. Start out slow and make your motion fluid. Do it in sets and do not speed up until a preset limit to each set. This will teach muscle discipline.

when you get to starting from a holstered gun you can break each set of movements into parts, then putting the parts together after learning each one separately. It sounds a little rigid and boring but it works. It helped me a lot. My daughter did it and is a great shooter. It's like any training. It's a but repetitive and boring sounding but I think there's a lot to be said for muscle memory. lol..I guess it is the drummer in me that made sense of it at first.:smt1099

[Steve M1911A1]

Interesting...my pistol-shooting coach and dear friend Michael Harries also was a drummer by original profession, first in the USMC Band, and later in a jazz-and-girl-singer combo.
You have just repeated, in very similar language, everything he used to say on the same subjects...except for the aiming point on the wall.
I know, I know: All drummers think alike.

[DevilsJohnson]

Great minds..well..minds anyway:anim_lol::smt082:anim_lol:

Hell, if he was USMC then I'd say he was a lot better than I ever was. Those guys..Band members I mean have always been some of the best. I have known 2 drummers that were in the USMC band and they both were just fantastic to watch.

what he say different about the aiming point? he was a just imaging one guy? A lot are like that and I wont say it don't work because I would be a liar it just didn't do as well for me and I passed on what I have tried and it's worked for a few. I'm interested in how he did it though.

[Steve M1911A1]

The idea was to start by training only the eyes and the hands to work together smoothly.
It's something like learning to draw-and-present. You learn one part of the whole set of movements at a time. Only later do you add the next part of the movement sequence, and only at the end of the learning cycle do you run the complete sequence as a single act.
So the blank wall is used specifically so that your eyes are not aiming at something and thereby complicating the issue. All you are learning is to bring the pistol's sights up to meet your eyes' gaze (although after only a very little while, he added pushing the safety off on the way up).
Once you have that down smoothly enough, you could add an aiming point without penalty. But instead, he taught the draw-and-presentation next.
Aiming at a target actually came at the very end of the preliminary lesson set.

Mike was the finest teacher I've ever known. It wasn't a matter of education, either, because he had very little. He instinctively knew that a good teacher has to modify his teaching technique to suit each individual student, and that is what Mike was the absolute master of.
As I became more and more experienced and skillful, he would take me along to help him teach newer students. (I carried stuff, reloaded magazines, and taped targets, and that's all I did.) Thus I got to observe him as he taught a few very different people.
He always taught the same stuff, in the same basic sequence; but for each student, the instruction itself was vastly different, carefully tailored to match the student's individual ability to understand. Mike would even use different language, depending upon the student's level of education and erudition, so that he was always very clearly understood.
He was a marvel. I miss him a lot.

[DevilsJohnson]

Ahh..I understand. I have done it using the spot after catching myself learning a bad habit without trying. I started cornering sights and after looking at what I was doing I started using a spot on the wall and started over. The cornering got less and less though I still have a little trouble when moving from one to another pistol. Like from a 1911 to a Sig. I only really practiced mostly with what I carry so the muscle memory while being basically the same changes a little due to how the feel of one gun will be a little different then another due to size etc.

I do honestly believe that breaking the movement into parts then putting te parts together one at a time works wonders. It is common with learning most musical instruments but with drumming you have all your body parts doing different things in different rhythms at times much like drawing a handgun. You wont always be standing the same because where you are is going to be different. so to be able to make one part of your body do one thing while others are doing different things I see as a plus.

I imagine if you are not a weirdo like me:smt082 and can't stop cornering sights the plain wall will work just fine though.

It's a great exercise, you can't really have too much training when it comes to something like that. Newer shooter I just try to advise to not put a lot of stress on themselves to learn it all too fast. Like my old Dad used to say..It's what you learn after you know it all that makes a difference:smt023

[Steve M1911A1]

When Mike was alive, he could tell a lot about the quality of a drummer long before he began to play, just by observing his drum setup.
He would then predict what riffs the drummer would have difficulty with. His prediction was always correct, of course.
He could do exactly the same thing with competition shooters, so I learned a lot by just staying next to him and listening to his comments.

[DevilsJohnson]

My Dad was like that with drummers. My kit messes with people being I'm a left handed guy playing a right handed kit. I tend to put things in odd places but not why people think I would. I shoot a little funny too. I shoot both left and right handed. It depends a lot on how a gun ejects what hand I like using wit hit. I had a Glock that always flipped the second to last one right back at me if I shot it left handed. Being I'm a two eye open shooter and don't have a dominant eye I can put the gun about anywhere in front of me and do pretty well with it. Although it took a lot of practicing to be able to do that. I shoot a rifle left handed gut hate left handed rifles..heh

sounds like your teacher was a good man. that's the kind of man that people should like most to meet. If they keep their ears open. I'd say many found him cocky and didn't think he knew as much as he thought.:smt082 People like that have a "turn" about them that some just can't understand. The ones that do are better for it.