I bought my first gun two weeks ago: H&K HK45c LEM. I've taken it to the range 3 times since, shooting 150 rounds each trip.
148/150 on paper.
10/150 in the 9-ring.
138/150 from 7-8 o'clock.
I'm a left-hander, shooting right-handed. Lefty isn't comfortable, although I shoot just as well with it. I take my time on the press-out and squeeze, and somehow, within the last 1/100th of a second, I dip the muzzle.
Any advice?
Thats what all new shooters do, and all shooters struggle with occasionally, its typically called anticipation - there are lots of threads dealing with anticipation but the short answer is ball and dummy drills and dry fire.
Good luck - glad to have you. There is lots of good advice on this forum so I'm sure that you'll find some answers.
I appreciate the response and welcome! I figured what I was doing was "anticipating", but never really knew the definition of how "anticipating" looks, you know? I bought a bunch of Snap-Caps for practice at home. I Really enjoy shooting, but hate being bad at it! Time for more practice... oh well!Originally Posted by JeffJ
I'm a new shooter as well and I have not gotten much past where you are. As mentioned, do the ball and dummy drill. You'll find that you are doing all sorts of funky stuff just prior to ignition without knowing.
I didn't much believe in ball and dummy drill. I figured dry fire + actual firing would eventually get rid of flinch/push/what ever else I'm doing. I believed that it was just the matter of getting used to "firing a gun". Although, the group has significantly gotten smaller since I started shooting. I was still stringing vertically at lower left of my poa after 1000 rounds or so.
One day, I decided that I need to fix this permanently, So I started concentrating on ball and dummy drills. I saw almost immediate improvements. I found that I was doing few things at last moments prior to ignition, mainly:
- squeezing the gun straight out with my arm and dipping the gun down a bit.
- gentle flinching at the wrist.
If your groups are really bad, I encourage buying whole bunch of dummy rounds and putting in more than one dummy per mag. At one point, I started loading with 2~3 dummy rounds per mag and it helped me a great deal.... I recommend buying cheap dummy rounds, so that you'll have at least 10 of them you can load to 4 or 5 mags.
Hope that helps.
A major piece of information that seems to fall through the cracks in many of these discussions is what part of your finger you use to physically touch the trigger as you pull. If you can switch to the TIP of your finger, or at least the front most pad well past the joint, your consistency should shoot through the roof.
Second, you should be doing SLOW press outs. The worst thing you can do for yourself is to try firing long strings through a magazine. You will tire the muscles in your arm out without gaining any insight or muscle memory. Slow press outs followed by a single shot repeated 10 times will be infinitely more valuable (and economical) than a single fast press out followed by 10 shots.
IMHO, Ball and Dummy drills are great diagnostic tools (i.e. they show you what you are doing wrong) but do not help to fix problems. The easiest drill that will actually help is a press out, be it on the range firing one round at a time, or in your living room pounding the same dummy round over and over, slow and steady will win this race. If you are absolutely set on Ball/Dummy, start with a revolver. They are slower, tend to have longer heavier double action triggers, and are easier to seed with dummy rounds.
First, congrats on an awesome first pistol!
I love my HK45c, it's my only defense Caliber pistol.
I noticed the same tendency and I believe it's a flinch, finger combo. I'm new to this forum, however, and will defer to the expertise already offered. I need to look into some of these drills myself.
Sit a penny on the front sight and practice breaking the shot without the penny falling off. Great way to develop a consistent trigger pull.
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