Our Friend Ben Morgan with Morgan Timing Systems shares his experiences on dry-fire training.
Dry- firing is one of the most important things a shooter can do to improve their speed as well as their accuracy. Being that I make a dry fire training device that records and displays a shooters time from when the app on the phone beeps to when the shooter breaks their trigger, I get a lot of questions and comments about dry firing.
The most common question or comment is about recoil. “Why waste time dry firing if there is no actual recoil?” The simple answer is, when dry firing you focus on the fundamentals that help you manage recoil including, stance, grip and grip pressure. The second you pull the trigger, it’s too late to try and manage the recoil. If you are trying to manage recoil while pulling the trigger, you are going to tighten your grip and twist the gun left or right depending on which hand you are using (usually it’s the non-dominate hand). This twist results in rounds going to the left or right of your desired POA/POI (point of aim/point of impact). That or the shooter tries to counter act the recoil by pushing forward into the gun. This push results in the gun being forced low and creates an impact lower than the desired POA/POI. By dry firing and evaluating yourself after each shot, you can check your stance, check your grip, and check your grip pressure. With the timer, you can see exactly how long it takes you to apply your fundamentals and break that trigger. Once you are comfortable dry firing at a certain speed, you can go a little faster and see how well your fundamentals hold up.
The other question I get a lot is about accuracy. “How can I tell where the bullet would go when I dry fire?” You can tell where your bullet would go when you are dry firing, you just need to be focused on your sights, primarily your front sight. Many shooters are looking at their sights but are not truly focused on them. A simple drill to help you focus on your front sight is to dry fire with no target in your backdrop. This shows your eyes and brain what front sight focus should look like, since there is no target to distract your vision. Your eyes can’t focus on two thigs at the same time. If you try to focus on your target and your front sight at the same time you will get a blurry target and a blurry front sight. That blurry front sight makes shot placement unpredictable. The more you practice dry firing and get better and better at picking up that front sight, you will not only be able to break that first shot faster, you will see your shot groups tighten up dramatically. Holding yourself to a high standard when it comes to accuracy is important because those shot groups on the range will grow three and four times bigger under extreme stress, when targets are moving or in low light conditions.
Dry firing gives us everything we need to improve our speed and accuracy, without having to go to the range and shoot thousands and thousands of rounds of expensive ammo.
For more information take a look at:
Website- Morgan Timing Systems
Instagram- @morgantiming