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DWB
04-18-2012, 11:13 AM
I didn't want to hijack this thread...

http://pistol-forum.com/showthread.php?3888-Re-engaging-that-stubborn-student-with-a-surprise-ending


...but I have a lightly built friend who shoots her .40 duty weapon with us. HK P2000 - difficult to shoot well, I don't like shooting it at all, my .45 is much friendlier and she gets frustrated...especially since she's a pro (LE) and we're just a buncha dumb hicks that taught ourselves to shoot. :D How can I help her? Grip/hand exercises and...?

I think .40 is good in that it blend good traits of .45 and .357, but it also blends the bad, and I think it is foolish to hand out to minimally trained non-shooter LE...

Al T.
04-18-2012, 08:15 PM
DWB, I've found that a good solid stance really helps control the handgun. Obviously, you get that stance perfected so that you can move away as needed, but having the basics down lets you know when and how to cheat. One thing I've seen often is rolling the shoulders forward while dropping the body's center of mass with a crouch tends to get the sightly built student firmly behind the handgun.

LittleLebowski
04-18-2012, 08:21 PM
Nose over toes, proper grip,.......TRAINING.

TGS
04-18-2012, 08:26 PM
More and more training will definitely help.

At the same time, as you noted the P2000 in .40 is no slouch in the recoil department.....so she's going to have to be realistic about what she can expect with the amount of training that she'll be able to perform.

GJM
04-18-2012, 08:26 PM
My wife weighs 118 pounds, and regularly carries a Glock 29 and 27. Stance and hand strength definitely are important.

Since it is an HK P2000, and an issued handgun, I am assuming it is a LEM. If so, I wonder if her difficulty is as much the LEM trigger as the .40 cartridge. If it is a LEM, I would STRONGLY encourage her to get a DA .22 revolver, and shoot thousands of rounds of .22, to develop her ability with a DA and LEM trigger.

Lomshek
04-18-2012, 08:38 PM
Nose over toes, proper grip,.......TRAINING.

What he said.

If her stance looks like this
http://i190.photobucket.com/albums/z67/bonecreekgunclub/AFHF%20Class/100_3931-1.jpg

Have her change to a much more aggressive stance like this
http://i190.photobucket.com/albums/z67/bonecreekgunclub/AFHF%20Class/100_3950.jpg

The more mass she can put BEHIND the gun instead of under the gun the better. Especially for light women the difference will be profound. Lots of core and upper body muscle tension will help.

As a normal size dude I could not believe how much that helped my recoil control. When in her shooting stance the top of her head should be below her upright standing shoulder height (i.e. if she is 5'2" standing tall then her shoulders are about 4'8" tall so her head should be 4'8" high when shooting).

I had my sister in law change her stance and she was blown away by how much more control she had. A rock solid grip with the support wrist locked out is the other half of that equation as Lebowski points out.

Other than that get her to do AFHF or some other pro training.

DWB
04-18-2012, 10:52 PM
Thanks for all the tips. I think her main issue is hand/arm strength. Her left hand tends to break grip on recoil. She's not really light, per se, she's tall for a girl, but she is lightly built, maybe 140 lbs, slim. I will suggest leaning in and trading in some strength training instead of always just running for exercise.

Odin Bravo One
04-19-2012, 01:56 AM
Sounds like my girl dimension wise, mine might weigh in slightly less, but she is TALL!!!

Same issues you described, we work through at times even though she has started to put some serious time into her pistol skills.

Stance is huge. Getting her into a nice, forward leaning aggressive stance with the support leg slightly forward (and somewhat exaggerated even at times) really helped a ton. I have a few different grip strength gizmos for her to play with throughout her day. One in the office, one in the car, one at home. She is to hit it 10 times per day to muscle failure, with focus on her support hand.

Grip.........proper grip placement. Tough when you don't get to choose the sidearm. As we all know, 1 size DOES NOT fit all, but it's what LEA's love to do. But work with the tools at hand to find the best grip for recoil management/hand placement, trigger reach, etc. It is likely to awkward and uncomfortable at first if there are changes to the grip. But it will pay off when her hands do what they are supposed to be doing. I also emphasize shooting the gun with the firing hand, and holding the gun with the support hand. If I see her grip slipping/re-gripping during a string of fire/etc, I remind her of what hand does what. Once it is back into her conscious mind, those issues seem to go away. At least for awhile.

Body position, arm position. Especially as it relates to recoil management. Get her to understand how to use her entire body to absorb recoil instead of simply trying to grip tighter. In order to make those grip exercises maximize their potential, recoil should be absorbed and managed from the grip, down the arms, through the shoulders, into the torso, hips, legs, feet.

And dry fire. Lots and lots of dry fire. This will reinforce that stance, the grip, and body position, as well as get her mastering those basic shooting fundamentals like SA/SP and TP.



TCinVA...............chime in buddy. (He was the first to work privately with my girl, and she improved a TON after one afternoon with him).

TCinVA
04-19-2012, 07:21 AM
Interesting timing, this, as I just did instruction over the weekend for a couple of fairly small females. (Around 5'7", 117 pounds)

The mistake a lot of new shooters make is thinking that they control a handgun entirely with their hands. In the instruction I've done for small females I try to emphasize using as much of whatever body weight they have to their advantage. Getting their center of gravity as low as they can and getting as much weight as they can forward of their waist line tends to aid tremendously both in terms of shooting dynamics and in the psychological aspect of not feeling like the gun is pushing them backwards. The taller and thinner the female, the more exaggerated the position tends to be. With the shooter I was coaching Saturday she looked as if she was about 1/2 way through a squat rep in a position that gave her really good control....but it gave her really good control. If you've ever seen video of Julie G shooting, (and on the topic of Julie, she would be the person I'd ask about this) she uses pretty much the same sort of stance.

I also try to cover activating the pectoral muscles to assist in recoil control. While there are, I'm sure, some people who can do that with their arms fully straight, most I've worked with tend to need a bit more bend in the elbows than usual to get a meaningful contribution from the pecs. I illustrate by having them bring my hands together palm to palm close to the face and pressing firmly...generally they can feel the pecs activate when they do this and that tends to make the lightbulb go off in terms of understanding what activation of the pecs feels like. All the dynamics involved in really controlling the gun are sometimes hard to teach with words. Just as a bench press isn't an exercise you do with your arms, and a deadlift isn't an exercise you do with your quads, shooting isn't really something you are doing just with your hands. Coming up with methods of illustration where they can feel what's happening is sometimes a shortcut to success.

Another thing I try to emphasize is keeping the arms in line with the shoulders, and the shoulders in line with the back...especially if it's a shorter female. They tend to want to keep their head completely upright and raise the gun up to eye level, which puts the arms at an upward angle and removes much of the assistance they can get from the muscles in the upper body. Instead of raising the gun way up, I try to get them to lower the head and raise the shoulders up like they are shrugging. If they are doing this with a good aggressive lean then the full weight of their body is behind the recoil impulse of the gun rather than just their arms.

Finally we come to hands. Generally speaking, females tend to have smaller hands than men do and that can lead to a host of problems like being able to properly reach the trigger. On one occasion I was doing some instruction for a newly minted police officer in my area who was maybe 5' tall and maybe 90 pounds. (And I'm probably overestimating) Upon seeing her I remember being amazed that 5.11 made clothing that small. She had some trouble reaching the trigger properly and we worked with her grip a little bit to get her better able to reach the trigger with her strong hand. One of the benefits of the lady with small hands is that there's usually plenty of room on the grip of the weapon to get her weak hand into an excellent position to help control the gun. Newer shooters tend to want to grip the gun low on the grip which increases the muzzle flip they experience. Getting their hands up as high as possible on the gun and getting the weak wrist locked as fully as possible tends to reduce the muzzle flip they feel...and when combined with the other points about stance and pec activation and body position the whole package tends to make them feel more like they are pushing the gun around rather than feeling like they are barely holding on to the thing between shots.

Trigger control is fairly easy to teach with the case on the front sight drill, and learning to reset the trigger during recoil often helps with that as well. Plus it's a good drill she can practice on her own, as well as practicing all the other grip/stance dynamics.

Probably the most important thing is to be able to understand enough of the "why" of things that you're teaching so that you can figure out how to adapt to what the person you are working with needs. So many times, especially with law enforcement officers, they get told "We hold the gun like this!" and that's the extent of the information they are given either because the instructors don't have any more depth than that or because they're so busy trying to keep people from shooting one another that they don't have the time to really teach. People don't come in standard sizes so there is going to be some level of individual adaptation necessary for just about everyone. That process is greatly helped along when folks understand the "why" of something rather than just trying to make sure everything looks like the picture.

Keep in mind while you're working with somebody that you are firing a lot of information at them, typically very fast. You want to ensure you're not overwhelming them. You don't want the process to frustrate them...you want it to be something positive and empowering. This isn't something they are going to master in an afternoon, it's a process that they're going to start and progress in over time and practice. If you sense that they are approaching their limit, don't panic and push harder as that rarely works. End the range session on something they can do well and have some fun with if at all possible.

SeanM is kind, but I'm afraid on this topic you can fit what I know into a thimble. The good news is that some of this stuff even if taught incompetently by someone like me has enough benefit that when applied it still shows results. Julie G. can outshoot any of us, has more trophies than any of the rest of us, and from what I understand she's spent quite a bit of time teaching lady shooters to bully the gun rather than have it bully them...so if I were interested in helping a lady shooter I'd buy her book and maybe send her a polite private message asking for whatever she'd like to contribute on this topic. :)

Wendell
04-19-2012, 09:24 AM
These might be of value to you:

http://www.defense-training.com/images/twts_cover.jpg http://www.defense-training.com/images/wlts.jpg

<http://www.defense-training.com/pubs/twts.html>
<http://www.defense-training.com/pubs/wlts.html>

JAD
04-21-2012, 05:42 PM
Something that helped me with .40 was doubling up on hearing protection. When I later read Bill Rogers talk about over pressure it made a lot of sense.

TCinVA
04-25-2012, 07:59 AM
Something that helped me with .40 was doubling up on hearing protection. When I later read Bill Rogers talk about over pressure it made a lot of sense.

Making the "bang" quieter can indeed help with taking the intimidation factor out of the weapon, which can help with anticipation. Double ear protection is pretty much a requirement at an indoor range.