Training Techniques

TonyD

TonyD

One Shot One Maggie's Drawers
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As you can see, we've split the Training forums up due to the recent interest in discussing certain techniques.

Please use this forum for discussing tactics, training methods, etc. and the other forum for classes, courses and reviews.

Semper Fi!
 
Question?

If one trains alone on his techniques how does he know if he is in error?

We who train together have the ability of seeing the errors that you cannot pick out on your own. A watchfull and experianced eye will catch a lot.

The draw, the presentation, the purchase, etc.

If your concentrating on your sights and the target then you cannot evaluate the rest.

We have seen this proven over and over again by the likes of Jim Crews, Louis Awerbuck, and the other esteemed instructors that we have had the pleasure of learning from.
 
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There's 2 ways.

Dry firing in front of a mirror. You can see your errors, correct and repeat a million times until it becomes muscle memory.

On the range shooting to a standard. Go for accuracy and time. There are plenty of drills on M4carbine.net that will challenge any shooter.
 
Forget the mirror. If you are looking in the mirror, you can not have a hard focus on the front sight.
Here is some of what we teach.
Take a 3x5 index card, and mark an X on it.
Put the card on a wall that can withstand a bullet hit
Simply bring the gun up, get the sight picture and slowly press the trigger.
When the hammer or striker falls note where the front sight relative to the X.
That is where the bullet would have hit
Repeat as necessary until you get 10 in a row where the frontsight did not move from the X
Do this for no more than 15 or 20 minutes a day.
Okay 10 is your record. Tomorrow, try to break the record.

If your gun will allow you to balance a penny on the front sight, do it.
Bring to gun to your line of sight and break the shot without the penny falling off and without the front sight coming off the X. Once you get good at the penny start using a bigger coin and repeat as before
 
Jim,
That is a great skill building drill, same as a dime washer or an dry fire point drill. Ive used a similar drill and its part of my bolt gun dry fire drills. I was making the mirror point because the former question was in regards to draw and presentation. His original statement of focusing on the sights and nothing else, well if you are in front of a mirror you can evaluate your stance, draw etc. As long as the shooter knows what right looks like it can be very helpful.
 
"As long as the shooter knows what right looks like it can be very helpful." You could not be more right. The problem is in knowing what is the correct way to do it. If you do it the wrong way, all that you are doing is building a bad habit that can be very hard to break.
I suggest that practicing the presentation without being taught the correct way can also build some very dangerous habits
 
I completely agree. This exercise is more or less homework or remedial training. You get allot from dry firing. This is a great way to continue to build muscle memory. Another thing that can help is the shooter watching one of those high speed videos on You Tube for a refresher prior to his dry fire drills.
 
Dry Fire

There is a dry fire program CD put out by Clyde Werner that is very good. http://firearms-safety.info I posted the details in another post, about 2 months ago
I know that it is counter intuitive but every shooter will see more improvement from dry fire that live fire. All that live fire does is to validate the results of your dry fire program.
In our current economy with the ammo shortage, this is indeed good news for those that are really trying to improve.
 
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I'm not sure where I got this impression but I thought it was bad to dry fire your gun. Is this true at all? is this more true for some types of guns than others? is there a way to dry fire (if it's not great for the gun) that's easier on it?

I could certainly use some help on flinching. I've caught myself doing it a few times when i forgot how many rounds i'd shot w/ a revolver...

Thanks for the help.
 
livefreeorhere said:
I'm not sure where I got this impression but I thought it was bad to dry fire your gun. <snip>
I could certainly use some help on flinching. I've caught myself doing it a few times when i forgot how many rounds i'd shot w/ a revolver...

Thanks for the help.
Click to expand...

The answer to your first question is debatable, get some snap caps instead.

Snap caps can also be used mixed in with live rounds for ball & dummy drills.
You'll need a partner to mix the mags for you or you'll have to load the mags under a jacket so you don't know exactly where the snaps are.

That'll cure your flinch and give you good pratice for a FTF drill.

The other way to cure a flinch is to fire off a few of EddieCoyle's nuclear S&W .500 loads. [laugh]
 
Firing off Hot .500 S&W Mag loads is NOT an effective cure for a flinch. Usually it's an effective way to get someone to slowly put down a gun and walk away from the line.

Snap caps are great practice for both FTF training and dry-fire trigger control training. Dry fire practice is much easier on a Double Action Revolver or double action pistol that allows refire (a lot of strike guns don't)

Second best pistol shot I know used to load up his .357 service revolver with non-firing brass (typically spent brass with spent primers) tie his combat boots together by their laces and hang them from the front sight, then shoot the "bad guys" while watching TV.

Great trigger control, no flinch and a rock solid grip.

He's one of very few people to ever qualify for police service with a .44 magnum in NH.
 
Another technique I found good for trigger practice (Dry or Live fire) is to use a laser sight. The laser will amplify any movement of the gun during the firing process and you will immediately see any movement of the weapon during firing. You'll need to use other techniques to obtain and maintain a good sight picture during firing, but it does allow you to practice your trigger pull.

If you have someone with you while doing live fire training and the laser is adjustable, move the laser point of aim down 6-8" so it's out of your sight picture while you aim with the iron sights. Now your partner monitors the laser's point of aim while you aim and fire.
 
MrTwigg said:
The other way to cure a flinch is to fire off a few of EddieCoyle's nuclear S&W .500 loads. [laugh]
Click to expand...

i wonder what these are like! the biggest pistol round i've fired was the .445 super magnum. the other day i shot a 12 gauge w/ a pistol grip loaded with buckshot with one hand just to see what it feels like. it didn't feel good.
 
I'm not sure how "hot" his loads are, but it is possible to load a .500 S&W magnum to performance exceeding that of a 1oz 12ga slug (437gn @ 1400fps). Out of a 56oz pistol (I have the 4" barrel)

Fortunately the standard models have a very effective integral compensator and recoil absorbing rubber grip. I feel the heat of the muzzle flash and the concussive overpressure on my chest more than the recoil of the gun. I find mine less abusive to fire than a hard gripped solid barreled .44 Magnum.

I honestly can't imagin what the "bear country" survival kit 2 3/4" uncompensated gun with hard rubber grips feels like.
 
i have found that when i shoot targets at the range, im very relaxed, my heart rate is easy to control. when i get in front of an exciting live target or after a long hike to my destination, i am all over the place. i am beginning to train under stress, which is something i think is easy to forget to do. im experimenting with doing a 100 yard sprint and then trying to get an accurate shot off within a reasonable amount of time, and also doing some pushups before i shoot to try to recreate a long day of hauling a rifle around. im pretty new to hunting/shooting so i may be ahead of where i should be in technique training, but hopefully someone else can use these ideas.
 
stress shoots are a great way to train. we do them a lot with my unit and i'm in love with 'em. the only thing you have to worry about is getting caught up in the moment and forgetting your fundamentals. i'd recommend mixing in plenty of slow fire with the runnin' 'n' gunnin'. smoothe out the kinks little by little and build up your consistency, it'll show when your heart is thumping and you're struggling for breath. practice setting in to your positions with as little adjustment possible so you don't have to think about it your body just falls into place. the faster you aim, the slower you can shoot. i have a similar problem and found that to correct it i had to force myself to muscle the gun a bit. i could hit a 6" plate consistently at 25yds but my follow through shots were all over the place when i sped things up. after talking to a ton of shooters i found that all i had to do was tighten my palms, loosen my fingers, bow my elbows out and roll my shoulders in. it took a long time to find what worked but i didn't it was well worth it. the key is just to keep trying new things and find that delicate balance between speed an accuracy.
 
In the Randy Cain class the past weekend, there was a series of drills where the shooter would do 5 push-ups at the 15 yard line, run to the 7 yard line, do 10 jumping jacks and then shoot
Interesting how the accuracy went south for some of the shooters.
 
Dear you should forget the mirror If you continues watch the mirror then you have not concentrated in your front side. This is more or less homework or remedial training for.
Guerilla Marketing
 
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This can work both ways, you can and will improve yourself as your skill set develops/improves.

In this case I've been very lucky. In the use of Sidearms, I had the fortune of being friends with several Gunsite Instructors. The single most important practical pistol shooting maven in SoCal of the era was Mike Harries of the Harries Flashlight technique. Mike walked me through how to practice and sent me on my way. I took the time to dry fire for months before I thought of live firing since we had our .45s very different from what people use these days. We only had 2 safeties, the manual safety and your trigger finger. That was it. We pinned out grip safeties since the current generation of built up grip safeties didn't exist yet.

More then that, by the amount of dry firing I did with my .45s, I improved not only my trigger control which can and is tricky with the 1911 types since any deviation of pressure on the trigger pushes, pulls the .45 off target both horizontally and vertically. By dry firing I also learned about follow through to keep the weapon on target for double taps and of course the Mozambique. This all worked very well without having someone watch over me, since there were normally at least one gunsite instructor shooting with us at any time.

I should also mention Mike Horne was also a Gunsite instructor, not only that but he put on some of the most incredible "practical" matches I've ever known of. Some of these were so challenging, they were invitational only. Mike went on to design and run the SOF three gun matches in Vegas. he's retired these days. Sadly Harries passed on before Jeff Cooper did.

Rifle work was different. I was fine with a rifle until I started pushing out past 500 yards. One of the guys in out SWPL club was an ex-USMC sniper. I talked him into giving my help so I could extend out to 1000 yards for Palma. Oh he taught me and did so the old school type USMC instruction..... coming home from the range black and blue was not unusual. But it did speed the building of the skill set I needed. To this day I still dry fire since I plan to go to Perry this year. I'm rebuilding a rusty skill set due to an accident in 2007... in 2013, I'll be back to shooting far more seriously.
 
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JimConway said:
Forget the mirror. If you are looking in the mirror, you can not have a hard focus on the front sight.
Here is some of what we teach.
Take a 3x5 index card, and mark an X on it.
Put the card on a wall that can withstand a bullet hit
Simply bring the gun up, get the sight picture and slowly press the trigger.
When the hammer or striker falls note where the front sight relative to the X.
That is where the bullet would have hit
Repeat as necessary until you get 10 in a row where the frontsight did not move from the X
Do this for no more than 15 or 20 minutes a day.
Okay 10 is your record. Tomorrow, try to break the record.

If your gun will allow you to balance a penny on the front sight, do it.
Bring to gun to your line of sight and break the shot without the penny falling off and without the front sight coming off the X. Once you get good at the penny start using a bigger coin and repeat as before
Click to expand...
In the army , we called it dime drill
 
This eleven year thread bump made me wonder if we can remove this as a sticky thread (and maybe not just this one), since the techniques discussed are very outdated by today's standards. @drgrant
 
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