National Carry Academy
WILL DRY FIRE PRACTICE REALLY IMPROVE YOUR SHOOTING?
September 26, 2018
Most seasoned shooters will tell you that it takes continuous practice to be able to shoot accurately. One of the best methods of practice is dry-fire practice. It is effective, inexpensive and convenient as it can be done anywhere.
Benefits of Dry-Fire Practice
Dry-Fire practice helps you to develop proficient motor shooting skills because it requires a significant amount of repetitions and works to train your muscles in proper safe shooting techniques.
Bad habits, such as flinching, eye blinking, and lack of follow through are difficult to detect during live-fire shooting. All top shooters in the world incorporate a significant amount of dry-fire into their training regimens, some for hours each day.
Basic dry firing simply allows you to practice pulling the trigger on your gun without the bang. It’s a way to train your eyes, body and trigger finger to pull the trigger smoothly, without moving the sights off the target. By conditioning yourself to perform a smooth trigger press, without a flinch reaction, you’ll eventually find that you do the same with a real gun when it does go bang.
The most important consideration is safety.
You have to develop your own method that insures that you will never have bullets anywhere near your gun when you dry fire. All four gun safety rules apply when dry firing too:
- Treat your gun as if it’s loaded.
- Keep your finger off the trigger until you’re ready to fire, or even dry fire.
- Never point your gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
- Be sure of your target and what’s behind it.
These are the basic steps of safe and effective dry fire practice.
- Remove the magazine from your gun. Next, rack the slide to remove the cartridge from the chamber. Look in the magazine well and chamber to verify that your gun is truly empty.
- Aim at a safe target and backstop during dry fire practice. An appropriate backstop may be the basement wall. A target can be placed on a stack of bags of sand or telephone books with a minimum of 2 to 3 feet thickness, or a large multi gallon bucket of gravel.
- Focus on your front sight, so it’s crisp and clear. You want all of your focus on the front sight. Your sight will move around a bit as no one can hold a handgun perfectly still. This is normal.
- Slowly PRESS the trigger as smoothly as possible while the sight is in the vicinity of your target. As you practice, you should be able to hold your gun steadier and the sights will move around less on target. The goal here is to complete the full trigger press until the gun’s action releases – without moving the sights off target.
- As the gun dry fires, keep watching the sights until the action is complete. After the gun “clicks”, you’ll want to see the exact same sight picture as before the shot.
The key is slow, deliberate actions repeated so that every action is the same.
WILL DRY FIRE PRACTICE REALLY IMPROVE YOUR SHOOTING?
September 26, 2018
Most seasoned shooters will tell you that it takes continuous practice to be able to shoot accurately. One of the best methods of practice is dry-fire practice. It is effective, inexpensive and convenient as it can be done anywhere.
Benefits of Dry-Fire Practice
Dry-Fire practice helps you to develop proficient motor shooting skills because it requires a significant amount of repetitions and works to train your muscles in proper safe shooting techniques.
Bad habits, such as flinching, eye blinking, and lack of follow through are difficult to detect during live-fire shooting. All top shooters in the world incorporate a significant amount of dry-fire into their training regimens, some for hours each day.
Basic dry firing simply allows you to practice pulling the trigger on your gun without the bang. It’s a way to train your eyes, body and trigger finger to pull the trigger smoothly, without moving the sights off the target. By conditioning yourself to perform a smooth trigger press, without a flinch reaction, you’ll eventually find that you do the same with a real gun when it does go bang.
The most important consideration is safety.
You have to develop your own method that insures that you will never have bullets anywhere near your gun when you dry fire. All four gun safety rules apply when dry firing too:
- Treat your gun as if it’s loaded.
- Keep your finger off the trigger until you’re ready to fire, or even dry fire.
- Never point your gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
- Be sure of your target and what’s behind it.
These are the basic steps of safe and effective dry fire practice.
- Remove the magazine from your gun. Next, rack the slide to remove the cartridge from the chamber. Look in the magazine well and chamber to verify that your gun is truly empty.
- Aim at a safe target and backstop during dry fire practice. An appropriate backstop may be the basement wall. A target can be placed on a stack of bags of sand or telephone books with a minimum of 2 to 3 feet thickness, or a large multi gallon bucket of gravel.
- Focus on your front sight, so it’s crisp and clear. You want all of your focus on the front sight. Your sight will move around a bit as no one can hold a handgun perfectly still. This is normal.
- Slowly PRESS the trigger as smoothly as possible while the sight is in the vicinity of your target. As you practice, you should be able to hold your gun steadier and the sights will move around less on target. The goal here is to complete the full trigger press until the gun’s action releases – without moving the sights off target.
- As the gun dry fires, keep watching the sights until the action is complete. After the gun “clicks”, you’ll want to see the exact same sight picture as before the shot.
The key is slow, deliberate actions repeated so that every action is the same.