Drills to improve/reinforce proper trigger manipulation under pressure?

[Cowtown44]

I'm interested in both dry and live fire drills that will teach/reinforce/improve my trigger manipulation at longer distances and tight times. I can provide details about my current abilities if requested.

[Jared]

There's a new book out there titled "Skills and Drills for the Practical Pistol Shooter" by Ben Stoeger that has a section on Marksmanship Training. I think the drills in that section in particular would be what you are looking for.

I personally think the book as a whole is the best live fire training manual I have ever read, just my opinion.

[Cowtown44]

There's a new book out there titled "Skills and Drills for the Practical Pistol Shooter" by Ben Stoeger that has a section on Marksmanship Training. I think the drills in that section in particular would be what you are looking for.

I personally think the book as a whole is the best live fire training manual I have ever read, just my opinion.

Agree 100%. This is the book that exposed my weakness but I'm having difficulty finding a suitable solution, especially in dry fire practice.

[Mr_White]

Agree 100%. This is the book that exposed my weakness but I'm having difficulty finding a suitable solution, especially in dry fire practice.

I think you have to throw a lot of time and repetitions at the problem. Make targets so hard in dry fire, that when you come back to live fire, the difficulty of most shots is much easier than you made yourself contend with in dry fire. And be very honest and conservative in considering what the sights tell you about your shots in dry fire. I don't think you are going to be able to get where you want to be without the live fire, but that is how I have run the dry fire component for myself. I have a lot of agreement with Ben's philosophy of frequently making things exceptionally difficult in practice.

I'll get more complete comments posted another time, but I really dig the Skills and Drills book from Ben too.

[Joseph B.]

For dryfire you can set a timer on a par time, and use it to push the speed while doing all the normal stuff, work from a compressed ready or holster, etc.

For livefire you can do the same with either a par time or just run the timer, start from a compressed ready or from the holster.

Basically just trying to use the normal trigger manipulation while speeding up and trying to work your time down without dropping accuracy.

I used to set my par's for a 1 Sec from compressed, 1.5 Sec from the holster, you can work.it down from there.

[Jared]

Here's one dry fire drill I came up with, although I bet someone else has done it before, so I'm not gonna claim to be original, but it goes a little like this:

I start aimed at a simulated 10 yd USPSA target focused on the front sight. With a PAR time set, at the start tone, I transition to a simulated 30 yard target and fire a "shot." Now, I shoot a DA/SA gun, and I do this drill in both trigger modes, and it's more of a transition drill, but it definitely gets tough when you push the PAR time down and widen the gap between the targets. I started doing this as a "micro drill" to work on a specific problem I was having with a couple of larger drills. It had a side effect in that it really sharpened my ability to drive my eyes and then my gun to a very specific spot, YMMV if you try it.

If you don't have Ben's dry fire manual, there are a number of drills in there to help with marksmanship at speed there too. His Far Target Gunhandling section helped me a lot. Between that dry fire manual and Skills and Drills, I think a person could go a LONG way with the drills available.