Meta4

Assuming you're using standard OEM magazines in your XD, the shiny aluminum might show signs of wear from any pinch spots. If this is an expansion/contraction issue, that might help you pinpoint the problematic area. If this happens again, you might want to consider applying a very thin layer of oil on the magazine. Insert the mag, then drop it, and see if that helps highlight the spot on the mag where it's catching on the mag well. For what it's worth, I shoot an XD Service .40S&W and haven't run into this problem, but your mags and gun are sufficiently different from mine to make it a poor comparison.

As others have stated, a heavier guide rod is one of the cheapest, simplest, and most effective upgrades you can buy for an XD. I don't have an XDm yet, so I'm not sure if that still applies. It's been a couple years since I bought a guide rod, but Don's Guide Rod used to be the cat's meow. Wolff seems to be popular these days, and there are other choices as well.

A family member gave me Reload for Christmas. Absolutely, positively horrible. It has absolutely no redeeming value, and may God have mercy on your soul if you buy it.

I've only watched MagPul's "Art of the Dynamic Shotgun", but I found a lot of the general purpose information to be very applicable to 3 Gun. Admittedly, I'm a bit of a shotgun newb and I'm also new to 3 Gun, but I found the MagPul shotgun videos to be very beneficial. One particularly useful area was combat reloading. Costa demonstrated his combat reload several times and gave a couple different explanations to help it sink in. Afterward, the 8-10 students walked through the process several times. It was incredibly helpful to see the students learning how to utilize the method, and see the instructors assist them in applying the method until they got it down. I'm not sure why, but seeing both the instructional portion and the student's learning process really helped drive the lesson home for me.