See what you need to see training.

[Clusterfrack]

@JCN, @Clusterfrack Do you guys recommend keeping the gun out of battery for the trigger pull or do a real first pull and a fake second? I'd love to hear your comments.

I have done it both ways and I'm not sure that it matters as long as you have a faithful trigger press in real life.

That being said, I usually will reset the trigger and do a real first and use the trigger return springs to mock a second. Because I really want to observe how the sights move with the real first press.

I practice trigger pulls as a specific dryfire exercise, and do most of the other stuff as JCN described. Once I got my trigger pull really squared away, I found it more helpful to focus on vision in dryfire.

I do like to add stress by doing Bill drill type exercises on 3 targets, with the goal of 18 relaxed trigger presses while doing fast transitions and stopping on each target properly.

As well, you can put serious wear on your gun by operating the trigger in dryfire. Just worth noting, not avoiding.

As you compare dry and live, you'll learn to be "honest" in dryfire.

[Jamesa]

Today was my first attempt at live fire on SWYNTS. It was eye opening to say the least. I've heard several times that switching from dry to live adds 25% to your times and that seemed to be true for me.

15 YARDS
160 + 54=2.14
149 + 55=2.04
164 + 61=2.25
163 + 44=2.07
176 + 39=2.15
The grouping was more like a shotgun blast. 14" vertical and with the exception of one flyer, 7" horizontal.
4A, 5C, 1D The C's were all close with 2 high, 2low and 1left.

7 YARDS
128 + 38=1.66
117 + 23=1.40
117 + 26=1.43
105 + 24=1.29
131 + 27=1.58
One flyer in the head B zone, the rest were in an 8" spread vertically with 7A and 2C. The group was vertically spread with the exception of the 2C which were close left.

3 YARDS
93 + 21=1.14
99 + 24=1.23
97 + 20= 1.17
98 + 21= 1.19
1.13 + 22=1.35
Bobbled draw on last one. One flyer low in the head B zone. The remainder were spread vertically 8.25". The horizontal spread was 3.5". Most of my second shots were high.

Plenty room for improvement in speed and vision. Looking forward to it!

[JCN]

@Jamesa good baseline run.

The goal is to match your dry to live vision. Remember how you thought you had plenty of time for the 15 yard string in dry.... really focus on the different things you have to see and execute at the different distances. For the 15 you'll have to give it some of the best, cleanest trigger presses you have to get the impacts close.

It's so important that I'll say it again....

The goal is to match your dry visualization to your live vision. You want it to be 100% faithful and not have dishonest or optimistic dry fire. The goal is to have them match as realistically and faithfully as possible.

That's why part of the drill is to alternate dry and live runs at the range as well. To really lock them down together in your head. Dry fire is way more powerful when it's realistic.

Like this:

[Jamesa]

It's been an interesting week. Five Dry Fire sessions, one live fire session and one match.

• I don't think I was being true to myself in my dry fire practice.
• The next DF session after my live fire session, my index got worse.
• The next day it improved.
• The following day included two dry sessions and my index continued to get better.
• Shot a match today and the last half of the match, my vision had definitely gotten faster. It was noticeable to me.
• Unfortunately, my decision making process didn't seem to speed up with my vision. My match was IDPA and I had a couple down 1 shots which I clearly saw but didn't do make ups. Duh!
• At this point I think the process is paying dividends so on to week 2.

[Eyesquared]

I thought this was an interesting exercise. I took a long break from shooting and am now extremely rusty. I have been dry-firing a fair amount but some skills are coming back faster than others. I caught myself blinking during shots a fair amount at each distance.

15 yards:
1.65+.34 = 1.99
1.59+.33 = 1.92
1.60+.38 = 1.98
1.51+.37 = 1.88
1.65+.36 = 2.01
2.02+.28 = 2.29
1.64+.36 = 2.00
1.54+.35 = 1.89
1.51+.35 = 1.86

13A 7C, extreme spread was 17"
On this I had a couple shots get away high and hit on the headbox. My shot calling was less than ideal because I kept blinking but I think I was sending these with a pretty bad grip. The Charlies were spread around the A-zone essentially concentrically with a vertical bias. Interestingly enough the As I did shoot were almost all 3" low in the bottom half of the A-zone, which suggests to me I was also pushing down into recoil at this distance.

7 yards:
1.37+.26 = 1.63
1.28+.23 = 1.51
1.40+.23 = 1.63
1.21+.24 = 1.45
1.30+.24 = 1.54
1.33+.23 = 1.56
1.28+.34 = 1.62
1.24+.25 = 1.49
1.30+.23 = 1.53
1.19+.25 = 1.44

18A 2C, extreme spread was 7.5". The 2 Charlies were off to the right about 1.25" out of the A-zone. About 3/4ths of the rounds impacted level with the center dot, but the remaining rounds were low in the bottom 3rd of the A-zone.

3 yards:
1.00+.24 = 1.24
1.00+.23 = 1.23
0.98+.24 = 1.22
1.06+.22 = 1.28
1.04+.24 = 1.28
1.05+.23 = 1.28
0.99+.22 = 1.21
1.07+.21 = 1.28
1.04+.23 = 1.27
1.05+.22 = 1.27

19A 1C, extreme spread was 6.5". All but 1 round was slightly left of center at this distance which I think has something to do with the direction the gun is pointing as I establish my grip and present it. In dryfire I felt okay about making the par but I think my firing hand tension was greater live and I couldn't execute the trigger speed I did in dryfire.

I want to run this a couple more times before I draw any big conclusions but I thought this was useful practice, it'll be even more useful when I can stop myself from blinking and actually see what the hell is happening in recoil

Tried to upload an image of the targets but the image uploading function seems to be busted.

[JCN]

@Eyesquared thanks for running this, nice job.

What I can take away from the results is keep working the trigger press neutrality and quality at the 15 yard in dry fire being super focused on any micro movement of the sight with press.

And... go faster at the 3 yard speed! Pounce on the gun at the buzzer and try to get the gun up as quickly as you can. Try an make that par in dry and you'll have good things cascade downstream to the 7 and 15 yard strings.

This isn't meant as a one and done kind of exercise. If you really work at it for a few weeks, you'll see some specific and really large gains. It takes a while to build the coordination and strength to get the 3 yard down. It's weight training / ladder drill for your arms and hands.

[Eyesquared]

@Eyesquared thanks for running this, nice job.

What I can take away from the results is keep working the trigger press neutrality and quality at the 15 yard in dry fire being super focused on any micro movement of the sight with press.

And... go faster at the 3 yard speed! Pounce on the gun at the buzzer and try to get the gun up as quickly as you can. Try an make that par in dry and you'll have good things cascade downstream to the 7 and 15 yard strings.

This isn't meant as a one and done kind of exercise. If you really work at it for a few weeks, you'll see some specific and really large gains. It takes a while to build the coordination and strength to get the 3 yard down. It's weight training / ladder drill for your arms and hands.

Yeah I think those align with my initial thoughts as well - I am not 100% sure what I was doing at 15 yards exactly but intend to make that a focus area. For the 3 yards I'm now realizing the par time was supposed to be 1s instead of 1.2s. Even at the ~1.2s pace the strings felt like I was shooting with much less sight confirmation than I am used to but clearly the target was fine, so I concur I should push this pace.

[MVS]

Disclaimer, I am still working through all 9 pages of this thread so I know I am missing some points. I will get it all read.

I did this yesterday for the first time. All my hits except 1 were on the paper. They were in the lower 2/3rds. Par time was met at 15. Mostly met at 7, and ran about 1.07 to 1.17 at 3 yards. I feel like I was shooting as fast as I could which is evidenced by the shotgun pattern. Groups didn't change much with the distance. Biggest things I noticed were I seemed to have way more visual observation in dry fire. It was almost like I saw everything in dry fire including the dot wiggling side to side along with changes in my grip, but saw almost nothing in live fire. It also became evident a few times that my support hand was late to the party and affected the first shot. Another thing I picked up on was especially at 3 yards where I was really pushing to make the par, a bunch of times I was overextending at the end. All semblance of floating the gun to the finish was out the window and I was just jamming it out there. I need to get video because I am guessing I looked like a tuning fork magnified on some of those.

Maybe it is in the pages I haven't read, but where do we go from here? Clearly I will work on these issues in dry fire, but do I run this every time I go to the range for live fire? I do like the mix of dry and live. Looking forward to learning more from this thread. Thanks.

[JCN]

@MVS the groups staying similar in size at the different distances means you're scaling appropriately!

If you run it dry daily and try and hit par times with ever improving mechanics, you'll see a lot of benefit. You can run it live whenever you like, but try and be faithful dry to live. The goal is to learn what dry vision corresponds to what live vision and mechanics. If you don't match the dry and live times, it loses a lot of the benefit.

You don't have to run the full drill every live session, but most people who shoot every other week or so have been choosing to.

If you went to the range 5x per week, I'd say only run it once per week.

You're welcome to spend more time working on any particular string and experiment with grip pressure and cadence of the doubles and also welcome to run your normal baseline tests and drills.

In the thread, people were noticing clear improvement in the other drills they had plateaued at previously.

Most people also started noticing their dry mechanics improved with practice and that translated to better live hits.

[JCS]

Maybe it is in the pages I haven't read, but where do we go from here? Clearly I will work on these issues in dry fire, but do I run this every time I go to the range for live fire? I do like the mix of dry and live. Looking forward to learning more from this thread. Thanks.

Just keep doing in regularly in dry. As someone who has done it from the beginning you'll see consistent improvement over time. My times have dropped each week and my accuracy has generally increased.