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Production Division - Opposable grip from Front Sight


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Mr. Jake Di Vita,

 

As I remember, I presented myself at my very first post in this topic. I am one of Ron’s instructors, but to be more informative I can say I have some years of experience working with international law enforcement, military and security agencies, private contracts, and have been instructing together with colleagues from United States, South Africa, Israel, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand and etc. For that period I’ve concluded that professional ethics have a core meaning.

 

You haven’t start rational discourse, you did multiple statements and we do not see any point to comment on them. These are your words:

 

“I've never seen Ron do anything that I can't do rather easily, so no I don't find his speed or accuracy while going full speed particularly impressive. He has won some matches. All of that is possible while using less than ideal technique.”

 

“I think Ron is a very good shooter, but I don't think the technique he is espousing is maximizing the ability to run a gun quickly and accurately. It's very common to find a pretty good shooter that isn't using pristine fundamentals.”

 

You must to understand that we are not trying to argue or cavil. Instead, I am suggesting you to meet Ron and discus and demonstrate your superior technique as you’ve claimed above. We are evolving constantly and will be glad to see something different, but you need to prove your statements. We are happy to offer you a free stay in our guest house, but regarding your comment to take care of your travel and meal expenses, I think you are messing us with a travel agency.

 

...and yes, I will be happy to shoot with you, as I enjoy to shoot with every shooter on a great match. You are welcome at USPSA Iron Sights Nationals.   

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On 5/12/2017 at 8:36 PM, Jake Di Vita said:

 

My opinion is that you should have them adopt their normal firing grip, tell them to squeeze like they would if they were shooting, then take measurements for both left hand and right hand. Your overall grip strength won't be as good of an indicator as the amount of pressure that you actually apply while you are shooting. I believe what you want to measure is their productive application of force, not their total contractile potential. In order to measure productive application of force, you need to introduce technique...which in this case is their normal firing grip.

Impossible test to perform. One GM open shooter had a "shooting grip" strength of 26# whereas mine was 80# others tested between 40-90. I don't think anyone could duplicate the actual grip strength used while shooting. I did find some guys who were skinny runts had very strong total grip strength compared to others. I maxed out at 94, one dude was a 168. Amazing.

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15 minutes ago, Rosshooting said:

Mr. Jake Di Vita,

 

As I remember, I presented myself at my very first post in this topic. I am one of Ron’s instructors

 

Ok, let me be more specific. What is your actual name? Or are you for some reason unwilling to attach your name to your comments to me?

 

16 minutes ago, Rosshooting said:

You haven’t start rational discourse, you did multiple statements and we do not see any point to comment on them. These are your words:

 

“I've never seen Ron do anything that I can't do rather easily, so no I don't find his speed or accuracy while going full speed particularly impressive. He has won some matches. All of that is possible while using less than ideal technique.”

 

“I think Ron is a very good shooter, but I don't think the technique he is espousing is maximizing the ability to run a gun quickly and accurately. It's very common to find a pretty good shooter that isn't using pristine fundamentals.”

 

You're cherry picking and taking my responses to another person who made some rather ridiculous claims out of context. The way this started is someone recommended what Ron teaches. I responded by saying that I don't think letting recoil happen is the most effective way to shoot. In response to saying that a few people came out of the woodwork and said the equivalent of "That's what Ron does, he's great, you don't understand". That is why I posted the excerpts that you quoted. 

 

I'll reiterate my stance on Ron. I've never met the man. I think he's a very good shooter, I'm sure he's a very nice guy, and I believe that he's probably a good instructor. The idea of letting recoil happen does not make logical sense to me either theoretically or practically. I've detailed why in depth in many areas of this forum, but if you want me to consolidate my position here for you to read, I would be glad to.

 

If you have something in writing that you think adequately explains your position on grip and recoil management I'm all for reading through it and giving you a comprehensive response and we can restart with what you'll hopefully see as rational discourse.

 

Here are a series of short responses from this thread to the only person that was willing to try to give an explanation. You must have glossed over this, but a response to some of what I said here would be a good start.

 

32 minutes ago, Rosshooting said:

You must to understand that we are not trying to argue or cavil. Instead, I am suggesting you to meet Ron and discus and demonstrate your superior technique as you’ve claimed above. We are evolving constantly and will be glad to see something different, but you need to prove your statements. We are happy to offer you a free stay in our guest house, but regarding your comment to take care of your travel and meal expenses, I think you are messing us with a travel agency.

 

You aren't trying to argue or make petty objections? I may be willing to buy that if you hadn't just leapt to the conclusion that I can't back anything that I'm saying up.

 

You keep saying I need to prove my statements. I'm asking you what do you need to see to satisfy your criteria for proof? Do you need to see match results? What qualifies as acceptable match results to you? Do you need to see me run certain drills? Which drills and what hit factors are we looking at? The devil is in the details. Don't just give me obscure "standards"....tell me exactly what you need to see and make sure you don't try to give me standards that you don't hold yourself to. You may find that in the 20 years I've been shooting competitively that I've already satisfied your criteria.

 

No I'm not confusing you with a travel agency. I thought we were putting our money where our mouths are after your initial post to me. If you're so confident that I'm full of shit, you have nothing to lose. Since I know I'm not full of shit, I'm upping the stakes. Once again, I just wanted (and still want) to have a conversation. Don't forget, you initiated this challenge about my ability. I was challenging the principles behind what you teach.

 

44 minutes ago, Rosshooting said:

...and yes, I will be happy to shoot with you, as I enjoy to shoot with every shooter on a great match. You are welcome at USPSA Iron Sights Nationals.   

 

That's not going to work. I don't even own an iron sighted gun. I compete in the Open division (if you didn't know that, you must literally have not looked into anything about me whatsoever). What other matches are you attending? We can work out a handicap for you for comparison purposes if you aren't going to shoot Open.

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22 minutes ago, shootingchef said:

Impossible test to perform. One GM open shooter had a "shooting grip" strength of 26# whereas mine was 80# others tested between 40-90. I don't think anyone could duplicate the actual grip strength used while shooting. I did find some guys who were skinny runts had very strong total grip strength compared to others. I maxed out at 94, one dude was a 168. Amazing.

 

I'd have to see the tool you are using for measurement to give you any decent feedback. What would be the best instrument to test is if you could put pressure sensors around a mock up of a grip so the pressure from every angle could be measured. Obviously there would be a lot of work and probably cost in setting that up.

Edited by Jake Di Vita
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On 13/04/2017 at 11:54 PM, CHA-LEE said:

 

The below link is to a fairly inexpensive Grip Dyno that you can use to measure your maximum grip strength. I used this grip dyno to test shooters at all skill levels. There was a consistent correlation between higher skill and higher maximum grip strength. The average grip strength per hand for a highly skilled pistol shooter averaged 120lbs. For the best shooters the minimum was about 100 pounds and the maximum was 165lbs. The Limited Major shooters were consistently stronger than the Open or Production shooters. This data is from testing 100+ shooters from D class to World Champion GM's. 

 

https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Dynamometer-Strength-Measurement-Capturing/dp/B00A8K4L84/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1492091243&sr=8-1&keywords=camry+grip

 

I have done a similar thing at a smaller scale (not over a year and no world champions in the test - but shooters of different divisions and different classifications from C to GM).

 

I agree that the better guys tended to have higher max strength. I haven't done enough people yet to get real trends. 

 

For those who are curious. buy a grip dyne and take it to matches. I've taken it to a few and being competitive people all I have to do is break it out in front of a squad of shooters and say "such and such GM pulled 140lb on this thing" and suddenly they all want to have a go at it! :)

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Interesting discourse here and VERY pertinent personally.  as a member of the unwashed masses of low classed peons, I need a more consistent grip to improve.  It's easy to understand "strong" grip and "high" hand position, but I'm still working out how to increase "leverage" .  I was told by a GM that more leverage was needed to better control the gun.   I know what the word means, but not how it works for the grip while firing.

 

Jake, could you please discuss how you go about driving the gun forward? Maybe give a few drills to work on  for that? Also, your comment on timing being off inducing a dip, describes what I do when screwing up. Any tips there?   For what it's worth, at my level  of monkey see monkey do,  the short video of Ron A's grip is easy to understand and is pretty much what I'm doing. (Just not as well).  But if your method is superior, I'd love to start learning it.

 

Thanks!

 

 

 

 

 

 

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1 hour ago, johnbu said:

Interesting discourse here and VERY pertinent personally.  as a member of the unwashed masses of low classed peons, I need a more consistent grip to improve.  It's easy to understand "strong" grip and "high" hand position, but I'm still working out how to increase "leverage" .  I was told by a GM that more leverage was needed to better control the gun.   I know what the word means, but not how it works for the grip while firing.

 

Jake, could you please discuss how you go about driving the gun forward? Maybe give a few drills to work on  for that? Also, your comment on timing being off inducing a dip, describes what I do when screwing up. Any tips there?   For what it's worth, at my level  of monkey see monkey do,  the short video of Ron A's grip is easy to understand and is pretty much what I'm doing. (Just not as well).  But if your method is superior, I'd love to start learning it.

 

Thanks!

 

Hi John, I'd be happy to.

 

First off I want to say that I'm not hung up on anything I do. I don't think I'm superior and I'm willing to change anything I do if I find something that works better, which is how I got to where I am right now.

 

As to your question about leverage, we gain leverage on the gun by being as high as possible and also as forward as possible with our grip pressure. If it was realistic to hold a pistol directly under the end of the barrel, that would give us the most leverage possible on the gun. Since that obviously isn't realistic we have to make some concessions on leverage, but it provides a map as to what we're after.

 

What I do took a long time for me to learn to do well because there is a lot going on when I grip the gun. I wanted my grip to satisfy 3 criteria. The first is to have as much leverage as realistically possible. The second is to minimize movement of the gun. My experience is the less the gun moves in recoil, the faster it will come back to the target and the closer it will be to where it lifted from in recoil. The third is I want to be able to keep the gun on target through less than perfect trigger control. I'll get into more detail on this part in a bit. Stance obviously also plays a large part in this, but this will be long as it is. I'll address stance in another post if you wish.

 

The setup of my hands on the gun are very similar to a lot of other shooters. I want my strong hand to be as high as possible on the beaver tail. I want my weak hand index finger to be wedged in the corner of the trigger guard and my strong hand. One small detail about my weak hand is that I reach my fingers so that my first knuckle on my index finger is on the right side of the trigger guard (left hand is my support hand), then I heavily squeeze my hand and that first knuckle on my index finger acts as a stop against the trigger guard. You should see the freakshow callus that I've developed there. This gives me a good bit of extra friction that helps to ensure my grip doesn't shift while shooting. From that point after I've established the position of both my hands, I torque inward towards the barrel axis from my wrists. The reason why I do it from my wrists and not my shoulders (ala Vogel) is because torquing from the shoulder would put my shoulder into an internally rotated position in flexion, which is an unstable shoulder position compared to external rotation in flexion. In general, the most bio mechanically stable position for the body to occupy is also the strongest and safest position (funny how that works huh?). The marker for this is elbow position. High and outside elbow in shoulder flexion is internally rotated, low and inside elbow in shoulder flexion is externally rotated. The inward pressure near the barrel axis acts as a way to increase leverage on the gun.

 

Now we get to driving the gun forward. What I'm looking for is tightness in the kinetic chain used for shooting. If you do a push up or a bench press then you pause, squeeze the involved musculature, and hold a little past 3/4 extension, this is close to the tension and extension that I want in my arms. So effectively I'm always applying force on the gun away from me and towards the target in the same way you apply force on a barbell away from your body when you bench press. The reason for this is two part. The first part is I want to be able to effectively transfer recoil from the gun through my shoulders through my torso through my legs into the ground. Tight musculature transfers force much better than loose musculature. The second part is I want to put enough energy into pointing the gun where I want that errors in trigger control have a minimal effect on moving the gun. This part is tricky and where people will tend to struggle. Where this came from is the understanding that you will never have perfect trigger control on every shot in a match. So if I'm executing a shot where I don't pull the trigger perfectly, the energy I'm putting into pushing the gun towards the target largely overcomes the unwanted force on the gun from the mistake in pulling the trigger. That doesn't mean that you can just pull the trigger like a monkey for every shot, you should still be trying to pull the trigger straight to the rear of the gun. The benefit is small to medium errors in pulling the trigger no longer cause the same degree of problems that they would if I were just lazily holding the gun in front of my face. The trigger weight on my gun is around 3 pounds, I yank the crap out of the trigger using way more force than necessary for 99% of the shots in matches because I want to pull the trigger quickly and usually shoot around 95% of the points.

 

3 hours ago, johnbu said:

Also, your comment on timing being off inducing a dip, describes what I do when screwing up. Any tips there?

 

Couple things to touch on here. You can successfully push the gun down to manage recoil, but if you start that process too early it becomes the dreaded flinch. The way I get around this is what I mentioned earlier. I don't push the gun down, I push the gun towards the target as that is where I want it to return in recoil. Since I've organized my body to always be applying force towards the target the timing of it no longer matters. There is no dip. I never have to initiate recoil compensation because it is a natural component of how I hold the gun.

 

I wrote this kind of quickly while being in a fog from this nasty persistent cold I'm fighting. If I didn't do a good job explaining something please ask and I'd love to elaborate. Hope that helps.

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18 minutes ago, Jake Di Vita said:

 

Couple things to touch on here. You can successfully push the gun down to manage recoil, but if you start that process too early it becomes the dreaded flinch. The way I get around this is what I mentioned earlier. I don't push the gun down, I push the gun towards the target as that is where I want it to return in recoil. Since I've organized my body to always be applying force towards the target the timing of it no longer matters. There is no dip. I never have to initiate recoil compensation because it is a natural component of how I hold the gun.

 

 

Although I have been shooting for 30+ years (shotguns/rifles), I have been humbled quite a bit since starting to shoot pistols (haven't even been shooting USPSA for a year yet).  As a newer pistol shooter when speed is involved, that is a very interesting concept/theory that I haven't seen or thought of before.  Since nothing is ingrained yet, I am going to have to give that a try.  Of course, right now, everything needs work.  Thanks

Edited by B585
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2 hours ago, B585 said:

 

Although I have been shooting for 30+ years (shotguns/rifles), I have been humbled quite a bit since starting to shoot pistols (haven't even been shooting USPSA for a year yet).  As a newer pistol shooter when speed is involved, that is a very interesting concept/theory that I haven't seen or thought of before.  Since nothing is ingrained yet, I am going to have to give that a try.  Of course, right now, everything needs work.  Thanks

 

Thanks. Please let me know if you have any questions.

 

14 minutes ago, johnbu said:

Jake, thanks for the detailed reply.  I'm reading it a few times and then off to dry fire and see if i understand it!

 

No problem, hope it helps. Go into it knowing it's going to take a long time to mold this to fit you. The general rule of thumb that I use for myself is that if I want to make a large scale change in my technique, it's going to take a solid year or more of work for it to really take solid hold.

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Ok.... i don't "get it" on where your fingers are on the grip.  thought i did.... but i guess a picture is worth a thousand words.

 

Would you be able to please post one?

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33 minutes ago, johnbu said:

Ok.... i don't "get it" on where your fingers are on the grip.  thought i did.... but i guess a picture is worth a thousand words.

 

Would you be able to please post one?

 

Sure John, I'll get one as soon as I can. Remember that I don't expect your body to mirror mine. You properly using the fundamentals I briefly discussed will probably look at least a little different than me. We all have different body anthropometry and different strengths/weaknesses. The important thing is understanding the fundamentals behind recoil management and applying them in the way that best fits you.

 

29 minutes ago, Rnlinebacker said:

Here it is in action

Sent from my SM-G950U using Tapatalk
 

 

 

That's great stuff from Rob. I'm with him on all his points.

Edited by Jake Di Vita
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Here are a couple pictures of my grip. Now that I'm looking at them, they're a bit washed out from the sun. Let me know if you can see what you were looking for, if not I'll get someone else to take pictures of it instead of balancing my phone on my squat rack.

image2.PNG

image1.PNG

IMG_0793.PNG

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On 5/10/2017 at 6:12 PM, Jake Di Vita said:

 

To my knowledge, Ron is a let the gun recoil kind of guy. I think that is a far less than ideal approach. I've never met anyone that just lets the gun recoil that has impressive speed / accuracy at speed.

Quite a bit of that same style in Brian's book too.......

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16 minutes ago, RangerTrace said:

Quite a bit of that same style in Brian's book too.......

 

Yeah there is. I joined USPSA in 2002 when Brian's book was really the bible on practical shooting. I spent many years working on being physically relaxed while shooting and I got pretty decent even making GM. I took some time off and turned my focus towards learning about the body and fundamentals of human movement and over years using what I learned morphed my style into what I use today. Personally I get more out of Brian's relaxed methodology when I look at it exclusively from the perspective of being mentally relaxed rather than any type of physical relaxation. It was Brian talking about how he and Rob threw out the collective dogma of shooting and experimented with everything that spurred me to do the same. I owe a lot to him because of that, but we do have conflicting opinions in some areas of technique...which is fine. Maybe my style wouldn't have worked well for him in the same way being physically relaxed is far from the most efficient method for me.

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Yeah, while having only shot one match with you, relaxed isn't a word I'd use to describe you!!  Intense yes.....relaxed, not so much!!

 

On another note, I've enjoyed most of this thread and there is a lot of great information here.  Everyone, please keep the attitudes civil so we can keep this one going.

 

Thanks,

 

Trace

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Jake, thanks for the pictures.

 

I'm  pretty close ... but not exact. Biggest variance is my weak hand  rotated more thumb forward with the weak palm farther forward.  My skinny fingers look longer too.  and i don't squeeze near as hard.

 

Beginning to see how moving more palm to the grip and pushing in harder would work to gain more control. Especially in conjunction with greater upper body pressure. (Yes?)

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1 hour ago, RangerTrace said:

Yeah, while having only shot one match with you, relaxed isn't a word I'd use to describe you!!  Intense yes.....relaxed, not so much!!

 

On another note, I've enjoyed most of this thread and there is a lot of great information here.  Everyone, please keep the attitudes civil so we can keep this one going.

 

Thanks,

 

Trace

Agree, there is a lot of great info in this thread.

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32 minutes ago, johnbu said:

Jake, thanks for the pictures.

 

I'm  pretty close ... but not exact. Biggest variance is my weak hand  rotated more thumb forward with the weak palm farther forward.  My skinny fingers look longer too.  and i don't squeeze near as hard.

 

Beginning to see how moving more palm to the grip and pushing in harder would work to gain more control. Especially in conjunction with greater upper body pressure. (Yes?)

 

Yeah my fingers look abnormally short in that picture lol. I don't like camming my wrist forward, I think that puts more downward force on the gun than forward force. The forward force is coming more from my arms, shoulders, and forward lean.

 

I'm not pushing in necessarily, I'm torquing up and in. All of the inward pressure is coming from the meat around my thumbs as a consequence of torquing in from the wrists. We can trace this back to leverage being about getting most of the pressure as close to the barrel axis as possible (which is another way of looking at being high on the gun).

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On 4/10/2017 at 1:35 PM, ArrDave said:

The article was interesting.  For those who haven't got it yet - the "Gist" is that your support hand should have a "handshake" natural cant, not a strong forward cant, and most of your power should be on a 45 down and into the bore.  It seems better suited for LIM/OPEN.  I shoot a CZ and just tried this at the range.  I couldn't comment that it helped because after 2 or so shots my thumb would shake loose from my Shadow.  My thumb was basically resting where the slide stop enters the frame.  In a longer string of fire I would lose the thumb on frame connection. 

 

On a Glock, I could see this being viable because of the little shelf it has.  Do any production shooters use this "opposable grip" indicated in the current front sight? 

I'm sure I'm just skipping over it, but what article are you talking about?

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