Are there any minimal tension handgun grip/recoil management techniques?

[arcfide]

Thanks everyone for some great advice and thoughts (both in this thread and in the "hands slipping forward" thread). I am going to be studying these things and really thinking about things while at the range.

Let's say for the moment that I'm willing to accept a pretty firm grip on the firearm from a purely hand strength standpoint. How do people feel about the elbows, shoulder, and so forth? I've seen and read and observed a lot of different techniques, including more locked or less locked arms, more or less tension in the arms (discounting the hand grip, specifically), back, and rest of the body, with more or less forward lean.

While everyone seems to get great results with different approaches, it's not clear to me what the trade-offs are between all of these things. For example, some argue that having a stiffer body helps to drive the recoil into the ground and keep the gun steadier through recoil, while others argue that having loose arms and bent elbows helps to better absorb the recoil and return to point of aim more consistently, &c.

Thoughts? I am still interested in finding the minimal amount of tension I can get away with, and I'll be happy if I can find a way to manage recoil effectively where only say, my hands have to hold the gun tightly, but the rest of my body can be relaxed, or something like that. Anything to help reduce overall tension would be a plus provided I can get good results with it.

[Peally]

Tension (outside of the hands) will generally decrease shooting performance.

Your running, transitions, damn near everything related to fundamentals are quickest and cleanest when your body can move fluidly versus tense and janky. That being said do what works for you and presents the best results, you'll end up changing it up down the road as you gain more experience regardless.

[Clusterfrack]

@arcfide: There are some basic common elements that I would suggest:
-don't lock your arms
-try to keep everything feeling relaxed except your grip (been working on that myself for a while...)
-maintain "forward intention" without going all "tactical turtle" or sticking your ass out

Beyond that, I wish there was a better answer than "you'll have to figure it out", but if there is, I haven't found it. Learning to manage the dynamics of the recoil cycle, transitions, movement, draws, reloads, etc. is a process that takes a lot of work, and constant self-reflection. Experiment and figure out how your body position, arms, and grip affect how your sights track, transitions, ability to shoot on the move, etc. Keep an open mind. I've found that some things that didn't work for me in the past are now awesome.

Edit: looks like @Peally and I were typing basically the same thing at the same time...

[Peally]

I was quicker, you gotta be less tense

[HopetonBrown]

Ben Stoeger says to grip with your hands.

[arcfide]

Thanks.

Actually, due to various aspects of my own learning tendencies, I'm perfectly happy with the answer being, "Play around and figure out what works through doing and reflection." In fact, that almost makes me feel much better than if there were some standard, accepted best practice outside of a few basic mechanisms. I am much happier to live in a world where I have to figure out what works best for me than if there's a particular dogma for shooting that is wildly incompatible with my own requirements, necessitating accepting a sub-par handgun shooting performance in order to gain something else bio-mechanically.

To give some history to this whole thing, I've been doing martial arts pretty much my entire life in one form or another. At this stage of life, I'm actively working on the "long picture" or studying for the "fight that is life" if you will. In a lot of competitive circles, there's a huge tendency to optimize short term performance over long term effectiveness and efficiency. I see it a lot in the unarmed martial arts systems that are heavily focused on MMA competition, for instance. They are extremely effective, but induce so much internal damage to one's own system that I can't really embrace them as effective for me, since in the long term it's probably more damaging to myself and my own psyche than to the people I might be fighting.

This has lead me down a path of martial arts that is much more holistic. One of those aspects is learning to play the mental/emotional/spiritual game more and particularly, learning how to better utilize minimal amounts of stress, aggression, tension, and the like, to achieve the needed end. This has tremendous benefits in terms of overall health as well as generalist fighting capacity, but it has presented me with issues with shooting a pistol over the years, as I've gone through various attempts to learn different shooting styles. One of the first ones I encountered was a tendency to limp wrist even very limp wrist resistant guns. I eventually figured out that it was a combination of things, one of which was sensitivity training that I was doing specifically to absorb recoil/pressure in the case of unarmed physical contact, such as punches. The result was an active cognitive dissonance between my unarmed and armed martial arts. On the one hand, the shooting styles I was learning were encouraging a great deal of rigid tension and active resistance to the recoil of the gun, while my unarmed combat was teaching me the exact opposite.

The dogmatic way in which pistol fundamentals were/are taught really caused a bit of an issue for me, especially for "defensive pistol" since they were, to use more martial arts analogies, more Krav Maga than Tai Chi. I've never found the idea of having all of these discrete skillsets with hard, fixed boundaries creating very hard escalations between them to be particularly convincing as a method of building a long term, successful martial arts competency. It's only recently that I've begun to feel like there might be some hope to finding a compatible method of shooting that integrates effectively with the rest of my martial arts in a way that doesn't create a discrete segregation between "fighting with a gun" and "fighting with your fists." But it's tremendously difficult to bring in all of the rest of the competitive shooting world's ideas into this sort of a practice because they're, frankly, interested in winning each match, rather than thinking about long term health (Jerry Miculek has talked about how shooting the way he does has affected his overall health, for instance).

For me, if I could be as loose as I am when dealing with unarmed combat with a pistol while maintaining 0.30 splits, true situational and mental awareness, and freedom of motion/body position with a convincing accuracy standard under external stresses, I would be tremendously pleased. I'm nowhere even close to that goal, but it's something to work for, I guess.

I guess that's not the same sort of goal as a lot of people here, but that should give a bit more context. I appreciate the help. :-)

[willie]

I read the thread rapidly so I may have missed this point but I saw no reference about the relationship of hand size to grip size. Though having very large hands, I shoot better with smaller grips. Other may have different experiences. Shield grips for me are too thin. The result is twisting. I want to share a shooting experience that I had today. My new Glock 22 was shooting 7 inches left when firing offhand a 25 yards. Already I understood that my grip was causing point of impact to shift left but proved it to myself this way. I gripped the pistol very lightly with it placed in the web of my hand between thumb and forefinger. I relaxed the bottom three fingers. Then I let the shooting hand rest gently against my left hand. I lined up the sights on the target and pulled the trigger. Each time the sight picture was on the bullseye when the pistol fired, and each time the bullet flew dead center to the bull. Fatigue set in, and I stopped.

I am severely arthritic. The condition causes me to struggle with extending my arms and establishing a grip that works. The technique described above is a trick long known by target shooters and others who had too much time and ammo on hand. I used it to verify that my Glock shoots to point of aim and that I need to make adjustments to fit it.

[Leroy]

I think everyone has to experiment to figure this out. Outside of the grip I would make sure your arm position allows good contact with the palms of your hands. I recall a period were I was a little to chicken winged with the elbows and it caused issues with sufficient contact. Keeping the front of your face close to vertical is really important as well.

[wtturn]

It was a good indication of how a very strong grip can buffer a poor trigger pull, but also can cause some problems unless applied properly.

No, it was an indication that an untrained person will have poor trigger control.

If he had gripped more loosely, I guarantee his trigger control would have been even worse.

[JohnO]

I took my BJJ instructor to shoot a handgun (G17) for the first time on Friday. It was very interesting. His grip strength is off the charts. The gun pretty much didn’t move from recoil.

I find shaking a persons hand gives a fairly good indication of what they are capable of shooting a handgun.