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GJM
1. Good job identifying and working on weaknesses to turn them into strengths.
2. You’ll find all kinds of learning and mechanics epiphanies as you get further into it.
As someone who has done a lot of experimenting, I think you’re on the right track. I’ll make some clarifying comments on where you might be blending a couple observations together that might be particular to your mechanics or your gun setups.
1. If you just talk about size and shape of guns, less muzzle weight and smaller grips mean that it’s less forgiving of lateral trigger press variance. This is what you’re probably noticing and compensating with by using more support hand.
Note that while it is trigger weight influenced, it’s not a direct influence on the split itself. It may be that you get a little “slappy” with the trigger when trying to grip a small gun harder and go faster with a heavier trigger.
With a balanced grip and neutral press at speed, the strong and weak hand ramp up together and the grip proportion between them doesn’t change. You can test this by max SHO splits.
2. Resonant frequency of guns: we’ve talked about this before and how hitting things on “first bounce” is a whole nuther ball of wax than double bouncing everything. Different guns have different inherent first bounce frequencies which are influenced by ammo, grip, recoil springs, muzzle weight and compensators. In general, a well tuned Open gun will split 12s on first bounce, a CO gun around 15 and a stock-ish plastic gun around 18 so you’re getting there!
The goal is to be able to micro correct at speed to get accuracy on target.
PF context:
How do I know what I know?
People are probably tired of me posting the videos, and I’m happy to if anyone isn’t familiar with them.
1. I can split a small, light gun like a P365 down to 0.12s but not with good vision correction.
2. I can split a compensated P365 comfortably at 0.15s (it’s not the gun size that affects the split, it’s the recoil control and compensators help with that). My grip isn’t distributed differently when doing so compared to 0.15 splits with a CO gun.
3. The shorter and more tactile the reset, the easier it is to “bounce” off the wall and do sub 15 splits. For this reason it’s easier for me to do with steel guns than mushy plastic striker ones.
I can only see and adjust down to 0.15s or so splits. At that speed I can track and micro correct the dot. Faster than that and I’m just along for the ride. But it takes practice to git er dun on the first bounce, which is what I try and force students to work on seeing faster. If they never push the splits they’ll never learn to hit the fastball (stuck in T-ball practice).
So with my wife in only a few sessions we got her there on 1-1.5 bounce.