Studies on the effectiveness and limits of dry fire?

[Warped Mindless]

I’m a huge fan of dry fire. Ive had periods of my life where I’ve had to go long periods of time unable to fire single live round but because I adhered to a disciplined DF schedule, my shooting skills managed to avoid atrophy.

I have had a lot of new shooters in my life recently between friends and family and one thing I keep trying to convince them of is the validity of regular dry practice. This has led me down a rabbit hole of wondering if any legit studies have been done on dry practice and the effectiveness of it.

Would anyone know of any they could point me to?

Any useful antidotes I could point them to would be helpful as well. For instance, in one book a guy talks about to training his naval shooting time with 90% dry fire for a year and his team scoring just as well as another team that did all their practice with live fire. I’ll have to try and find that book again. Another helpful one is the recent Eli Dickens revelation that he never really live fired much (if at all) and did all his practice via dry work.

Essentially I’m looking to form a collection of evidence I can show even the most ignorant of newbies shooters and say “Here… now believe it or dont but I’m not going to waste my breath trying to convince you further.”

Thank you!

[John Hearne]

Everything I've seen is anecdotal and doesn't rise to the level of peer-reviewed and published research. One of the better books to make the point is Solomon's Building Shooters. He discusses the origins of his program where he had almost no ammo but lots of time to train navy personnel. When he was able to later gain access to more range time and ammunition, the results were not appreciably better than the majority dry fire group.

Other examples include the Rhodesian IPSC team which had a budget of 50 rounds per month for the entire team. Supposedly, either Rhodesia or South Africa conducted an experiment with recruits during their respective arms embargoes where one group of recruits got the normal amount of live fire and a second group dry practices almost or totally exclusively.

There a ton of other anecdotes that we can point to that are too various for me to mention in the time I have.

[Glenn E. Meyer]

A quick lit search, only came up with some laser training articles for biathalon and airguners. Nothing for our type, but I'm not looking through more that 5 pages.

[ECK]

Studies aside, I would say that regular practice (in any activity) is going to improve a person’s skills.

[JCS]

Anecdotally, look to Jay Beal. He has shown one can become one of the top 5 shooters in the country on an extremely limited live fire regimen (<5,000 rounds per year).

It's not just dry fire tho. It's self analysis. If you look to a lot of the top USPSA shooters they have taken very little formal training. They are just all really really good at self analysis.

[GJM]

The challenge is the quality of the dry fire practice. Two people can spend the same amount of time dry firing, and one person might grow dramatically, and the other may just waste time burning in poor repetitions.

[John Hearne]

I dug into this a while back for a presentation. I can't give you my source but these are a couple of the slides. Also, if you understand how the mind develops and uses motor programs, dry practice makes a lot of sense.

[gringop]

Lanny Bassham's "With Winning in Mind" had a story of when he was stationed at a location where there was no rifle range so he dry fired in his bedroom every day. Went on to win the Olympics that year

I can't find my copy or I would copy it out for you.

Gringop (with finding books in mind)

[ViniVidivici]

I've seen a brief talk with an NCO with the AMU, he said your ratio of dry to live practice should be 100:1.

I've had various instructors over the years all tell me of the importance of dryfire, both trigger control and all aspects of weapons manipulation.

And of course the dime/washer excercises many of us were taught and did.

[JCN]

Another anecdote

https://saigoneer.com/vietnam-news/7...ithout-bullets

But honestly, if they don’t want to believe you they’re not going to believe you.