Different Grip Failures? Diagnosing and Troubleshooting Other Shooters?

[Sanch]

I recently learned about heeling a grip where the shooter puts extra pressure on the bottom of the grip, and cause the rounds to shoot high. I wasn't aware of this specific issue and it made me wonder, because I have an engineering background:

What are the different ways people can mess up their grip on a handgun?
What are the causes?
What are the symptoms to help identify each specific grip failure?
What are the cues to the shooter to modify their grip?

Hopefully these are in a book somewhere I can buy, or an old post here I can reference. If not, I'm open to collating information people share in this thread as a future reference for others.

A few that I am aware of:

Weak hand grip is not properly tight and in the correct place. Followup shots suffer because each shot causes the weak hand grip to slip more and more. This would likely result in the grouping of shots to skew either in a certain direction, possible left (For a right handed shooter) if the offhand grip becomes too weak, or maybe the shots stay in the same area but start to space out like a shotgun spread. Probably difficult to recognize from the paper unless they're shooting a clean target and you're staring at each hole as the bullets pass.

Too much pressure in offhand grip. Right handed shooter would have rounds to go right, because the left hand is pushing in too much.

Too little pressure in offhand grip. Right handed shooter would have rounds go left, because left hand isn't engaging enough.

Because of my engineering background I assume there's a finite list of possibilities, maybe 10 to 20? And I'd be really interested in learning them and having them for reference.

The practical side of me wants to say this is a waste of time, just focus on good grip fundamentals and don't worry about what the specific failing is. However, sometimes good grip fundamentals look okay to a casual observer, and subjectively feel okay as you're doing them, but aren't as good as they seem. Also I think this would be an interesting discussion.

[JCN]

How many ways can you miss a free throw?

Engineers often miss the forest for the trees and spend more time thinking than doing.

They forget that the most efficient hunters in nature don’t think, they just do.

So get a heavy trigger DA pistol and dry fire with a red dot.

Watch the dot move with trigger press.

Modify grip to prevent dot from moving.

Confirm in live fire.

Watching dot movement with trigger press will tell you what YOU need to do to correct it.

When coaching someone else I can watch their muzzle movement.

EDIT:

Also it’s often the trigger press and not the grip that screws up most people’s shots. They’re not shooting fast enough for their grip to matter.

I will often demonstrate to people that I can hold a gun with two fingers and execute a trigger press without moving the gun much.

Until they can do that with their trigger press, the grip isn’t what is holding them back.

Recoil control comes after trigger press.

EDIT EDIT:

Here is an LCPII with a Viridian green laser.

Two finger grip. Kind of really one finger grip.

Illustrates what kind of trigger press you need.

Grip comes after that.



The worse your trigger press, the more you’re asking your grip to compensate for that and it’ll never hold up at speed.

So clean up the trigger press and the grip supports that.

Recoil control is a separate thing. Most sub-A class shooters struggle with the press and use their grip to compensate.

[UNM1136]

Grip is important, but it is also flexable. How many of us shoot SHO or WHO?

It is easier to shoot with a poor or compromised grip, than with a poor trigger press. One former co-worker's wife wanted a divorce. So she asked for it. With his Sig P225. He had to have his suppport hand reconstructed after losing a finger. He was a hell of a firearms instructor, and a PT instructor in my academy. He was a great shot, a good SWAT guy, Canine handler, and a decent mentor. To say his grip was compromised is an understatement. He had a welder add a tab to his Sig slides so that he could run them properly with his support hand.

The hardest part of shooting consistently in my Journey of The Gun is follow through. Grip certianly helps with that, but my struggle is more mental, and I am almost always shooting multiples of some sort. Double taps, hammers, FTS, multiple targets, NSRs. Trigger control would be next hardest, and pretty much everything else (stance, grip, sight alignment, sight picture, breath control) goes into a basket of "good if you can get it, strive for it, but don't obsess over it and don't always count on having it." Part of my follow through and trigger control issues come from almost three decades of having "ride to reset during recoil" and trigger prepping hammered into me. I understand the concepts of a surprise break and a compressed surprise break, but the goal of pressing the trigger is to get a bang, and I always felt there was very little room for surprise there.

I snicker in courses when an instructor desribes fundamentals as being vital, then explains how you will likely have to compromise each of them when its "for real". So the fundamentals may not be so fundamental. I have been pondering this a lot the last few years.

pat