Recently, I was working with a student to fine-tune his shooting. We adjusted his grip, talked about the right part of the finger to put on the trigger, talked about treating the trigger as a “dimmer” and not a “light switch”, and slowed down the trigger squeeze, but he kept shooting quite low. The groups were very good, but consistently low. I thought at first he was just anticipating recoil, and pushing on the gun, until I saw a vibration of the muzzle right before the trigger break. I dry-fired his gun to prove it would not be there, then had him do it. I saw the same vibration. More importantly, he also saw it.<\/p>\n
Both the problem and the solution were simple. His gun had a fair amount of take-up (slack, or pre-travel) in the trigger. While I instinctively took up that slack before squeezing, he did not. He was squeezing from the very beginning of trigger movement, and when he hit the sear, it was like hitting a curb on a bicycle. That bump was causing the vibration, which manifested as pitching forward.<\/p>\n
It should be noted that some triggers have little or no take-up, and some ramp up smoothly from the beginning of movement to the break, without that bump. It depends on the design of the gun, and to a certain degree, its cost.<\/span><\/p>\n Once he understood the need to pull up to that “curb” before squeezing, his groups moved up where they should be. Once again, dry-firing pointed the way to the solution.<\/u> Navy SEALs do an extended dry-fire routine before every training session. Do you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Recently, I was working with a student to fine-tune his shooting. We adjusted his grip, talked about the right part of the finger to put on the trigger, talked about treating the trigger as a “dimmer” and not a “light switch”, and slowed down the trigger squeeze, but he kept shooting quite low. The groups … Continue reading “Dry Fire for Diagnostics”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyfirearmstraining.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyfirearmstraining.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyfirearmstraining.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyfirearmstraining.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyfirearmstraining.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyfirearmstraining.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98,"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyfirearmstraining.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26\/revisions\/98"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyfirearmstraining.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyfirearmstraining.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyfirearmstraining.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}