"Drill Baby, Drill!"

It costs no money and it's the most beneficial practice you can do if you do it right: DRY FIRE PRACTICE

The idea behind dry-fire practice sounds boring and pointless to many. Honestly, if that’s how you feel, you’re doing it wrong. Drills should be challenging and should reinforce good behaviors. It should engage your brain, actively. It should foster an internal drive to self-critique and self-correct. It’s where you should try to go faster, or try to make it clean. It’s where you build the foundation of what will become confidence and competence. If nothing else, it should be encouraged more than live-firing.

“You Should Never Dry Fire a Gun” (don’t believe it)

I’m still shocked and a little offended when I hear gun store employees say to patrons “you should never dry fire a gun.” This is usually the case in the firearms department of a “big box” store who’s employees are NOT true firearms professionals; just salesmen. Let me just say, with all professional emphasis, “never dry-firing a gun” is ridiculous. Any gun that cannot be dry-fired without damaging the gun, should not be a gun you depend your life on. That said there are only two exceptions I can think off where it is acceptable to own a gun that can’t be dry-fired vigorously. One is a historical, antique, or collectable firearm and the other is rim-fired weapons (.22 calibers [short/long/long rifle/magnum] and .17 HMR etc). Rim-fired weapons CAN be dry-fired, just not often. But, any center-fired weapon that will be damaged from dry-firing should be avoided for ownership, in my professional opinion. If it can’t handle being dry-fired it will not handle being live-fired. As a personal rule, I do not buy a gun that I have not dry-fired multiple times before hand. I don’t even like buying a particular model of weapon, unless I have shot it. Maybe I don’t get to shoot the gun I buy before hand, but I will try to see if I have a friend who has the same model I can shoot first.

Drilling Guidelines

One of the biggest mistakes most people make when drilling is practicing too long and not often enough. I tell my beginner students “I would rather you practiced fifteen times a day for one minute each, as opposed to once a day for fifteen minutes.” The purpose of drilling is to get your sympathetic and para-sympathetic nervous systems to align in memory with your rational, logical, cognitive brain; meaning, training your body to “know” what to do without you haven’t to “think” about it. This is accomplished fastest by using a technique called “Spacing” which means you are taking breaks and forcing your body to recall what you practiced after a break. Spacing exercises your sympathetic memory and if drilled and spaced often enough, you can internalize an action within a very short period of time (days instead of weeks). The Spacing technique works for almost anything you want to memorize, and like a muscle, your brain’s ability to retain the memory gets better too.

KIMs Game

A great technique used to drive home the habit of scanning a room thoroughly is to play a “KIMs” game or Keep In Memory Game. Stand outside of a room with an open door. Briefly look through the open door into the room, scan the whole room, try to remember everything you can. Now, go to the middle of the room, grab a piece of paper and make a paper airplane out of it. Once you’ve done that, leave the room and describe the room to somebody else. Where was the furniture, what color was the carpet, where were the lights, what was on the walls? That’s a KIMs game and it is a technique used by the best operators in the world to train their brains to notice and remember things and have the ability to recall it. We are going to use Spacing to play a KIMs game, of sorts, to memorize a very specific set of movements to operate a pistol in the most efficient and safest way possible. We are going to do this by training some, then taking a break, then training some again, and repeating it. Over days and weeks, your proficiency will skyrocket and your brain will have more bandwidth for other things (like deciding if your target is a threat or not). A drilling session should not drag on so long that fatigue causes form to dissolve. A practice session should last only to the point where your performance has peaked and not started to hit a point of “diminishing returns”. If you’ve done the skill, and the last three times you did it, it went poorly, just take a break. Or if you did really well the last three times and your starting to feel fatigue in your hands, take a break. Space it out.

Start Slow, but make it clean. The moment you touch the gun you’re training

I’ve said it previous articles to start slow and smooth at a tempo where you can meet all of the points of performance. Going slow allows you to study yourself. It allows you to learn what it feels like, memorize what it feels like, and then do it right. This is VERY important in teaching your unconscious brain to perform the task you are trying to do. Pick up speed only when you can repeat the task perfectly… don’t forget to break often. Practice like you play. The moment your hands touch the pistol, you are training. Remember, your brain is recording everything you do, at some level. If I administratively load a magazine in my pistol at a table or desk every time, looking down, with my gun in my hands by my waist, because “I haven’t started practicing yet”. Guess what I’m going to naturally do, when I load my magazine, in a real situation? This is called a “training scar”. It is an inadvertently learned bad habit due to lack of intention in repetitive movements. We are going to defeat this with a mindset of “the moment my hands touch the gun, I’m training.”

Use a mirror and your phone

We are not interested in creating narcissists but we DO need to critique ourselves. Practicing in the mirror allows you to get instant feedback into thing like, where your muzzle is pointed, or what your trigger finger is doing etc. Are your shoulders shrugged up to your ears, with your head “turtling” in between them? Are you moving your head when you move the gun down your line of sight? These are questions you can immediately answer by practicing in front of a mirror, and you can do it all while staying “target focused” on your reflection. Use your phone to record your drills from a side profile. While this doesn’t provide instant feedback, doing it for a recording adds a stress level that is good for your brain to work through, it also allows you to evaluate if you are leaning back with your upper body when you take aim and it will aid you in looking at other form issues you might want to correct. You can delete the videos later, or keep them, doesn’t matter, you just need them to quickly grade your form.

The Four Positions

The pistol shooting skill should be centered around four primary positions. By and large, a pistol shooter should ONLY be in one of these four position or transitioning between them, all other systemic movements and positions should be fundamentally eliminated. Every dry-fire drill should focus specifically on these positions and transitions between them. Internalizing these movements are key and fundamental to all other defensive pistol shooting practices.

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