Hey guys,
I am trying to practice a lot more at home with my pistol and wanted to get some ideas about what you guys do or I can do to improve my skills. As of now mostly I just dry fire a lot and pull from my holster and bring my sight picture up to a target. Is there anything else I can try or practice? I have some snap caps too and am going to try to acquire enough to fill a magazine for some reloading practice. I am compiling a list so I can put together a schedule and such so I get a well rounded amount of time for each thing I can practice at home. This is mostly geared towards helping because I always carry, but these days it’s expensive to hit the range every week anymore. Thanks.
Somebody makes a firing pin activated chambered laser sight. This would make your dry fire exercises a bit more practical by providing some visual feedback. Even a standard red laser sight would show you how you are moving your handgun during dry fire drills.
But keep in mind you are essentially shadow boxing. Many significant things aren’t there. The weight of a full magazine, the recoil and the movement of the firearm as it cycles.
And I cannot stress redundant gun safety checks enough. I know more people who had NDs doing living room training than you would believe.
If space permits, try adding one step (or more) of lateral or rearward movement while drawing.
I heard about that, but haven’t looked at it. And I check constantly before drills. I am always scared of blowing a round into my wall or something.
I have been moving a bit with the space that I have. I guess there isn’t much else I can do huh? I have to put together a new AR then the training starts for dropping into prone and such.
I work cqb, drawstroke, and mag changes with a charged but no ammo airsoft gun and blue gun in the house and workshop at night while the wife is at work. I also have a drop in dry fire trigger I keep in a Glock to work on drawstroke to the first shot with a safe but real gun.
Like has been pointed out you can’t do everything, but you can work the basic mechanics and then verify the mechanics at the range.
Another thing I like to do is either video record or use our large gym mirror to critique myself.
Personally, I’m a big proponent of dry practice. What I’ve found is keeping the sessions short(under 30 minutes) seems ideal for most folks; beyond that the attention span as well as attention to detail fades from boredom of no live fire.
A couple of rules I’ve set for myself and I recommend to students are
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Isolate all live ammo in a drawer.
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Verify there is no live ammo in the area.
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When you’re done put the training gear away and have a bottle/glass of water away from the training area before you re-arm yourself.
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Once the dry practice session is over; it’s over. No going back to try one more thing.
Rules 1 & 2 are for obvious reasons.
Rule 3 is to clear your head and get you out of the airsoft/empty gun thought process.
Rule 4 came about after while deployed; a pretty squared away buddy re-armed himself, brainfarted, drew his M9 and put a round a foot above the chair I used at the end of my cot. We had been running dry drills for about 2 hours and he got careless. I was glad I had already put my boots on.
Drawstroke.
As my lead firearms instructor used to say, “you can shoot the balls off a mosquito at 500 yards with both eyes closed and it won’t do you any good if you can’t get the gun out of the holster.”
I’m not sure where the hell you could get it outside of a good LE academy, but an interactive judgement pistol shooting lab shows you just how quickly shit goes bad and just how slow your quickdraw really is.
Thanks guys. I will add all of this to the list and keep it safe. Do you guys practice going into prone and such with pistol/ar?
Soft armor, rifle plate, or a steel target make for good backstops during dry-fire as well as a loading/clearing target.
I keep an old vest in the corner of my gunroom for such activities.
As far as lasers and such go, I prefer to simply use my sights as confirmation that I am doing things right. Acceptable sight deviation for the skill being worked on? Yes or no. If the answer is no, examine what you are doing and where it went wrong, and correct it. I want to fight to keep my focus on the sights (pistol or BUIS) during all relevant phases of the training, and one of those times is right as the hammer drops. Subconsciously training yourself to shift from front sight focus to target focus as the shot is being delivered can harm your skill. Of course there are times that a soft focus will get the job done, but that’s a skill for live fire, not dry-fire in my opinon.
I think that one of the best things to work away from the range is stoppage reduction. You can use dummy rounds that are very obviously not live rounds, and since the critical part of the skill is the hand work necessary to correct the issue, lack of recoil doesn’t detract from the training quality.
During dry-fire, many people will fail to achieve proper grip strength or position after a few iterations since the gun isn’t going anywhere when you press the boom lever. Fight yourself to maintain the same grip and position you use when delivering multiple live fire shots.
I don’t think I am understanding what you mean by this. Can you elaborate? Thanks!
Stoppage reduction (aka Corrective Action): the manipulations necessary to make a gun that does not go “bang” into one that does.
Commonly identified by the visual/physical condition of the weapon. Can range from complex chamber impediments to lack of ammunition present in the magazine. Different platform have different indicators and manipulation requirements.
The two most missed shots are from the holster and after a reload. Your grip may be less then perfect in both situations, consistent quality practice will help smooth this out. I second F2S in not using a laser, strive for perfect sight alignment every time, and work on doing it faster every time. Watch for anticipation of recoil or slapping the trigger as well. Try to keep your sights rock steady. The fun part is trying to do all that as fast as possible, which is why you practice 
My favorite thing to work dry are reloads. Present the pistol with the slide locked back, attempt to fire a round, then reload. If necessary for your particular pistol and method, you can remove the follower from a magazine to allow you to drop the slide using whatever method you use (assuming you don’t have dummy rounds). Also only about 1 out of every 5-10 reps have a magazine in the gun. This forces you to be honest about hitting the mag release hard enough, but keeps you from having to bend over an pick up mags every time. You will find you’ll do a lot more reps this way.
-Jenrick
My review of said gizmo via PoliceOne:
I have only toyed with the laserlyte very briefly. But in my limited time, I noted that I wanted to lift my eyes and head to shift my focus on the target to look for the laser, or in other words not maintain what would equate to good follow through. When I dry fire I prefer to practice quickly picking up the front sight, developing the sight picture that I am wanting and staying on it. So when I completely ignored the laser and focused on the sight I really had no use for the laser as to where the impact was, because I was reading my sights and really didn’t notice the laser. I might see how the laser might be good for someone observing and perhaps teaching, but for myself as the shooter it was really not needed. I also felt like it could easily develop bad habits in a newer shooter in regards to these things.
Will, since you played with it quite a bit more than I did, what were your feelings on this, specifically in regards to what I mention? I also don’t like that it is not holster friendly.
Yup, I had the same tendency at first, the eye wants to look over the sites to the point where the laser arrives. After you realize that, you get your eye back to focusing on the front sight and forming correct site picture. At that point, it’s seems to just act as confirmation the POI is exactly where you expected, and you get some immediate feedback, which for me, seems to help with getting same POI faster as I got some feedback to tell me my site picture was where I expected it. It’s also fun to ‘shoot the TV’ with.
It’s interesting from longer distance. At 5 yards say, the dot appears where you expect it, but for me at least, at the longest distance I can get in my house, doing it in say low light, that dot does not always appear where I expect, and I can make adjustments that I’m not getting the POI correct, then try and diagnose why.
I tend to use it as another tool, vs stand alone. That is, might do 10-15 mins using laser, then same without, to make sure I’m keeping the correct site picture and make sure the last thing my eye sees and brain registers, is no red dot appearing.
It might make an excellent teaching aid, had not thought of that, specially if limited access to range is an issue. I’d hate to see anyone use it in place of range time however…
My guess is, for highly trained shooters like yourself who have a ingrained POI they pretty much know will happen if they get their site picture, probably not terribly useful, but a guess on my end.
Various open holsters seem to work OK on the draw, like various Serpa’s (just as example, not recommendation…) and such.
Their more fancy model, is caliber specific and fits in the gun, so nothing sticking out of gun, no holster issues:
http://www.laserlyte.com/products/lts-cartridge
More $$$ however, so I opted for the cheapo model.
Finally, simple change of pace in say dry fire stuff, and has long as it does bit add training scars, I’ll try it.
I didn’t note any big changes in say IDPA scores or other objective measures per se, but some seem to get a lot from them.
Something they could get easily some other way, like regular dry fire, more work with skilled instructors, etc? No doubt.
I am sure it will be internet heresy here but there are some EXCEPTIONALLY qualified individuals who train people to do just that. To NOT focus on the sights but to see the target that is trying to kill you. Basically they advocate a flash sight picture (where the sights are blurry and the target is focused) which is pretty much the opposite of what most tactical schools teach where your focus is on the sights and the bad guy trying to shoot is is kinda blurry.
I have been taught both ways and can see the merits of both methods. On the range I tend to focus on my sights, I am a better shot that way not surprisingly. But I also know that when people point guns at me I tend to see the person more than my sights so I’m glad I have learned to use both methods.
I’ve seen a head shot at seven yards on the Skipper from Gilligan’s Island.
Nothing to laugh about…
If you note in my post above, I mention that I will get the “sight picture that I am wanting”, meaning that I have a few variations that I use. For the most part however when I am talking about dry firing for practice, or even say shooting one hole drills or multiple round drills where I am going for very high levels of precision and accuracy where the intent is to hone basic fundamentals, I will try to stick with a classic or proper sight alignment, proper sight picture, trigger pull and follow through as I am a huge believer in drilling fundamentals religiously in training. Too many people like to jump directly feet first into whats fun and often overlook working the fundamentals.
Having said that, I do indeed teach various methods to various levels of shooters, or more correctly I start introducing alternative or varied sight picture methods as skills progress. It is often a normal progression that a shooter goes through anyway as their skills at combat style, or even competition style shooting increases, so I generally refer to it as fostering as opposed to teaching. A highly skilled combat shooter will get the type of sight picture that they need for their particular situation and that situation can vary greatly of course, but training, experience and skill levels dictate much.
I use everything from your standard front sight clear, target and rear sights blurry, to a flash front sight, to slide indexed and my actual focal point will vary. Basically I refer to it as seeing what you need to see in order to get effective hits for the given situation. So yes varied methods as you have been taught are very legitimate and IMO a great combat shooter will be doing just that.
I hope that clarifies my above post.
I actually wasn’t trying to say anything about you specifically or the methods you teach. All I was doing was mentioning the alternate method which was brought to mind by your post.
Clarification noted. Again, my comments were not directed to you specifically. I need to be more mindful when quoting and individuals post.
Ah yes. I understand now. Thank you. I do have snap caps that I try to use when I can. I will be getting more to work with and I will add this to my bag of tricks.
I did notice that even after starting to dry fire a lot that when I got out on the range I had some problems with trigger slapping and anticipation. Though it is very slight I am trying to iron out the last few wrinkles in my shooting. Reloading drills are something I have yet to work on extensively. Guessing I should be reloading from my EDC set up.
This is a pretty interesting point as far as eyes on the target. I wouldn’t know about someone pointing a gun at me, but guessing if they are you would want to be watching them more then your irons. Do you know which instructors might teach you to be eyes on target with fuzzy sites? Was just curious if they were any of the more popular ones. Which way in your opinion is better? Not asking which is better more of just which one you like more and why. Thanks!
No problems at all. I think you mention some valid points that helped out the OP or anyone reading this thread who may not understand these concepts. Very good discussion.