I'm new here, so try not to roast me too much.
Here's the background to my question. A few years ago, I started trying to get better at shooting as opposed to just acquiring firearms. At that point, I started shooting one centerfire handgun (an HK P30) about 95 percent of the time that I shot centerfire instead of switching between firearms. In the past year, I have been dry firing two to four times a week. Fairly recently, I bought
Stay in the Fight by Kyle Lamb at the recommendation of a friend who has extensive experience with firearms, including several tours of duty.
Here's where the trouble starts. Lamb recommends a thumbs-forward grip and has some great illustrations to accompany just what he means. Given that Lamb has more experience with firearms in a month of his life than I will have in the entire course of mine, I changed my grip from a support-hand-thumb-over-trigger-hand-thumb grip to the thumbs-forward grip. I have been practicing with it for a few weeks.
Now, I have not had a chance to go to the range with live ammunition yet to see what I think of the thumbs-forward grip. However, in practice with Snap Caps, I find it quite uncomfortable compared to the way that I usually grip my P30. I see a couple of ways of viewing my experience so far:
1. I just need more time to acclimate myself to the new grip. Thus far, I have spent about two hours with the thumbs-forward grip in the basement. Once I practice more extensively with it, I'll be a better shooter.
2. That grip just does not work for me, and rather than try and completely change my grip, I ought to continue with what seems to be working for me and work on building other skills from there.
I should probably specify that I am not interested in competition shooting or shooting pretty touching groups. I'm interested in reasonable accuracy at reasonable speed for self-defense purposes (my current benchmark that I use to measure my progress is the FBI qualification test). Obviously, those terms are open to interpretation, but that's a rough description of why I am shooting handguns.
So, any thoughts? Is the thumbs-forward grip essential to becoming a competent defensive shooter? Or should I focus my time and energy elsewhere?
Thank you in advance.