Jshuberg

Hey all, I run Slide Glide in my pistols and its absolutely fantastic. I also have a full-auto Shrike, and have been using Extreme Weapons Grease on the BCG and in the feed cam lever and pawls in the top cover. The problem is that the EWG gets sprayed across everything like a sprinkler, gets gunked up really quickly, and turns into a baked on sticky mess. I need to find something better, and was wondering if Slide Glide might do the trick? I like the way that Slide Glide stays put, but I can't find anything on the max temperature ratings for it. Will it hold up to the high temps of a machinegun? It's a short stroke piston system, but I do run a suppressor, so there is dirty high temperature gasses entering the receiver. I'd be running it on the cam mechanism in the top cover, the BCG and a light coating on the buffer spring. Before trying it I'd like to know what temps its rated to, and whether it's expected to turn to liquid and go bye-bye or not.

Dupe, sorry. I don't see a way to delete the post...

Grip strength is important, but it's not the cure-all that many people believe it is. Once you have enough grip strength applied to control the weapon, and to bring it back from recoil to exactly where it started, any additional grip strength isn't improving your technique, it's masking errors in technique. If you can manage to develop enough grip strength that masking errors works for you all the time, then by all means use it. However many people, shooters with small hands, female shooters, etc. will never be able to develop the hand strength to fully mask their errors. So pointing those people to "increase grip strength" as a solution isn't going to necessarily fully solve their problems. I only use around 40-50lbs of force in my grip, as measured by a Camry electronic hand dynamometer. Comparatively, many top shooters who utilize the "grip the hell out of the gun with your support hand" technique report using between 100-140lbs of force when gripping the gun!! Even so, I can consistently run a bill drill and put all shots in the A at around .13-.15 second splits. So it's not all about grip strength, it's just as much if not more about technique. Any grip strength training should also be accompanied by other exercises that improve grip, trigger control and follow through that don't rely entirely on raw grip strength to work. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Becoming visually ambidextrous is actually pretty easy. As far as there being a second set of sights when shooting both eyes open, just ignore the other one. After awhile your mind will drop it from your stream of consciousness. Don't do anything with tape or markers or anything. If it's hard for you, turn your head slightly, but doing this is a temporary trick to get your mind used to developing a proper sight picture. You should straighten yourself out and shoot correctly as soon as possible. 95% of shooting is in your head. That's where you need to solve the problem, not with equipment tricks. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Isolating your trigger finger becomes more difficult the faster you shoot. If you start getting down somewhere around the .12s there will almost certainly be at least some sympathetic muscle movement in the hand. While the primary goal is to minimize it to the least amount of undesired motion possible, in order to shoot accurately at speed you also need to deal with the fact that some amount of undesired motion is likely at speed. Some people advocate a very strong grip, which effectively masks sympathetic muscle motion. This works well for some people, but not everyone. You need a lot of hand strength and forearm strength, which some people don't have, and its effectiveness at masking the error varies from person to person. Another technique is to construct a grip that is much less sensitive to sympathetic motion. Inoculating your grip from the negative effects of sympathetic muscle motion. During dry fire hold your gun with your normal grip strength. Align your sights, and then close your eyes, and relax your grip to the least strength you would be comfortable shooting with. Then open your eyes, and observe your sights. If they've moved, realign them and close your eyes again, and increase your grip strength to your maximum. Open your eyes and observe your sights. Keep doing this exercise across a wide range of grip strength. If your sights move when applying different grip strengths, then your grip is not symmetrical, and sympathetic motions will throw your shot. Work on changing your grip, where you apply pressure, where your hands are located, how they transfer pressure to the pistol. Keep experimenting until you can construct a grip on the weapon where the sights don't move at all through a range of various grip strengths. Again, the primary goal is to minimize unwanted motions and errors to the smallest amount possible, but that can only get you around 95% of the way there. To capture the last few percent of your speed/accuracy potential, you also need a grip that either masks, or in inoculates you from accuracy loss due to sympathetic muscle motion. Hope this helps. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Learn how to switch which eye the brain is favoring on demand. You do not have a dominant eye the same way you have a dominant hand. Which eye your mind is favoring is entirely in your head, and is fairly easy to control. Everything else people suggest is simply compensation for not having learned to control this fairly simple mechanism. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I'm not an optometrist, but heres a good article that goes into this a bit: http://chrissajnog.com/vision-and-shooting-and-aging-part-1/ I'm sure it's different from person to person and prescription to prescription, but he indicated that "in most cases" increasing the prescription for the dominant eye of +0.75 will result in a clear focussed front sight with the dominant eye, while your non-dominant eye is focussed at 20 feet (optical infinity). This is a "shooters" variation of a monovision prescription, where both eyes are corrected to accommodate (focus) at different distances. This can be really weird at first, but eventually your mind will work it out, to the point that you can throw on your "shooting glasses" and within a couple seconds you mind adjusts, and you can see just fine without distortions. What's cool about this (once your mind gets used to it) is that both the target and front site can be in focus, or very close to focus, resulting in an improved sight picture over what a person with 20/20 vision can see. The one thing I've found with this though is that when shooting out past 15-20 yards or so, where you want to see both your site and the target in reasonable focus, your front sight can't be touching your point of aim. It forces you to "aim small" and to also favor a slight 6:00 hold, where POI is slightly higher than the front slight blade. I think the reason is that it's just too difficult for the mind to stitch 2 images together, that are out of focus relative to each other, into a single "everything in focus" perceived image when the objects being stitched (front sight and target, each with a different eye, and at different focal distances) visually overlap one another. There needs to be at least a small amount of separation between your point of aim on the target and top of the front sight for the "illusion" of both target and front sight being in focus to happen. I started putting together a video awhile back, of ideally what a shooter should perceive visually when shooting both eyes open. What a proper binocular sight picture is, with accommodation decoupled from convergence, monovision, shifting dominance, etc. The idea is that a lot of these concepts are difficult to describe or understand with words, and something visual could really help with this. I dropped it for awhile, but might pick the project back up again. One of the big problems is that when the images from our left and right eyes are stitched together in our mind, the perceived image doesn't have to follow any laws of physics or make much sense. We can approximate our minds perception of two images by overlapping them on top of each other, but it's never going to look quite right. Here's a quick example. This video snip attempts to convey what the shooter perceives when shifting his focus back and forth between the front sight and the target. Note that the gun appears to move out of the center of vision. Well, it doesn't actually move just by adjusting our eyes, it actually in the same place in the center of our vision. The same is true of the target. It doesn't move out of our center of vision either, which is difficult because when flattened to a 2D movie, what we end up with is not what we perceive. We can try approximate it though, which is what this little test clip is doing. It's not going to look quite right, but after watching it a few times most people will pick up on what it's trying to convey. If I ever get motivated again, I might get around to finishing this project.

I've hesitated to respond to this remark because it's so difficult to address. Things happen really fast when firing quickly; and, at least for me, it's difficult to sort everything out in order to be able to grasp it with my conscious mind; and, I’m of the opinion that for many shooters, it's also exceedingly difficult for them to understand, 'Why' or, 'How' they shoot so well without being able to rationalize their body's own physiological functions. (In other words, many people shoot well; but are unable to explain either why, or how they manage to do it - They simply do it without a conscious explanation for either themselves, or others.) Personally, I shot well for many years without truly understanding how I was able to do it. This wasn't a problem for me until I injured myself, and had to stop shooting for awhile - only to discover that my previous (mostly) instinctive shooting skill just seemed to evaporate! The lesson I learned is that a, 'naturally depreciating skill set' like pistol or rifle shooting is exceedingly difficult to maintain over time UNLESS the rudiments and proprioceptive mechanics of that elusive skill set are able to be consciously explained and, thereby, understood. Nowadays when I go, 'off' I'll stop and mentally review the do's and don'ts of what I've learned about pistol shooting. When I was a young shooter I shot, more or less, by instinct. Today, though, I tend to fire by a very deliberate method of conscious recall. This recall occurs on BOTH a mental and physical level; and it works a whole lot better for me than merely firing by rote. Because I'm able to consciously recall and adequately understand what I need to do in order to (repetitively) hit the target, it's no longer necessary for me to have to reach into, 'the netherworld at the back of my mind’, or to fire thousands of rounds in order to regain a skill set that I've been unpracticed at for awhile. Instead, I’m able to rely upon actually understanding the mechanics of pistol shooting; and I can consciously recall whatever I need to know in order to keep on hitting the target. In the above cited instance I think that proprioceptive trigger control ('driving the gun') operates, or should operate, off the visual cues supplied to the shooter's brain by his apparent front sight picture. As I said, everything's happens very fast; and, yet, I do believe that there's an, ‘essentially mindless’ preconditioned reflex that can cause a shooter to drop repetitive shots as the distance to the target increases, and/or the front sight picture becomes narrower and narrower. As best as I'm able to determine: I think the brain actively interprets the decreasing front sight picture and adjusts the proprioceptive mind/body reflexes accordingly. All of which indicates to me that if a shooter is dropping his shots as distance increases, then, he's firing mainly by rote (by instinct) without the advantage of being able to actively process his visual inputs by using alert conscious recall. Too abstract for ya? OK! If you can't adequately explain something to yourself then you certainly aren't going to be able to explain it to anyone else, either. When I'm regularly practiced (not now) I don't drop shots. No matter the distance I put everything into nice tight 8 inch circles. Personally I attribute this to being able to almost instantly read and, then, immediately respond to my own visual front sight pictures. It is at this point that deliberate conscious recall, and firing by instinct (or rote) come together, and blend into one. Because there is no deliberate thought involved in intentional proprioceptive reflex, front sight dwell time reduces itself to almost zero. (I wish!) However, when the front sight picture changes so does my trigger stroking technique; and if that isn't happening then, as far as I'm concerned, the problem becomes a matter of me not truly understanding what I’m trying to do. Rather than being a, ‘thought driven shooter’ who understands, ‘What’ he’s about, I’ve allowed myself to become an, ‘instinct driven shooter’ who is merely firing by rote, and operating on nothing more than preconditioned physical reflex. (I’m saying that mind should never be surrender to emotion - NOT if you want to be consistent, and continue to perform well. Once again, skillful shooting performance is a lot like playing a musical instrument and being able to, ‘keep the beat’ and carry a tune.) In my opinion, any such muddled pistol shooter will continue to drop his shots until that moment when he consciously realizes and, then, grasps onto whatever he's doing wrong; but, more than just timing or simply, ‘driving the gun’ are involved. There’s another, closely related, pistol shooting anomaly that I’ve also noticed: A few weeks ago I got tapped on the shoulder by another senior instructor who said to me, ‘Don’t take this the wrong way.’ ‘You shoot well; but I’ve noticed that you shoot better when you fire faster; and I’m sure of it, too.’ He was right; and, yes, I was already aware of the problem. I think I know, ‘Why’ too. It was my sight picture! I was having trouble holding onto and maintaining it between slowly fired shots. Whenever I fired more slowly I, ‘lost the visual rhythm’ and reduced my physical control over the, ‘rock and roll’ of the pistol. As the rate-of-fire slowed down I had to work harder and harder in order to recapture the previous front sight picture. All I can say, right now, is that timing and rhythm are also involved in the problem with dropping quickly fired repetitive shots. It’s. kind ‘a, like playing a musical instrument: As the beat changes the shooter has to stay in tune; and everything a competent pistolero does while firing a gun is closely related to, and centered upon keeping his rhythm - A feat which is impossible to accomplish without: A proper grip on the pistol, a skillful trigger stroke (or, ‘tap’), and a very carefully watched front sight picture. This is a very good post!Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

DonovanM is right. If you train a lot, and the act of shooting and using your sights is instinctive, there is a good chance that you are actually seeing your front sight, but that because the target was so close your mind decided the sight picture wasn't important enough to remember it. Not remembering seeing your sights, or having your subconscious mind observe your sights without being consciously aware of it is perfectly fine. If you're curious if this is what's happening, either remove your front sight temporarily, or obscure both sights with a big piece of electrical tape that hides them from view. If you shoot better when the sights are visible, you're most likely seeing them and using them without being consciously aware of it. If you shoot the same, you might just be point shooting. If you are using your front sights subconsciously without remembering it, that's actually a very good thing. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

You don't actually "see faster", what you are trying to accomplish is your mind not throwing away rapid transitions in order to de-clutter your stream of consciousness. The effect is known as chronostasis. It's an optimization of our conscious perception of the world around us. For example, if you move your eyes rapidly from in place to another, you typically don't remember seeing a moving blur during the time it took for your eyes to move. It's a very interesting filter the mind inserts into our stream of consciousness to eliminate unnecessary clutter and distractions. Unfortunately, if you want to track your front sight through recoil, the chronostasis effect gets in the way. The result is that you don't "see" the sight move in recoil and then return back to where it came from. What the shooter perceives is that the sight just simply jumps from its starting location to its ending location after the shot, and it takes roughly your raw reaction time for your mind to react to it. You'll also find, especially when shooting fast, that you are not able to call your shots very accurately. The reason is that the mind backfills the time the sight was in motion with a snapshot of its ending location. It's very easy for the mind to confuse where the sight actually was at the moment the shot broke due to this artificial memory. What you're experiencing is something similar to the "stopped clock" temporal illusion from which the term chronostasis was derived. With enough careful observation over enough time most people are able to train their mind to the fact that the front sight is important, and that's it's motion during recoil shouldn't be discarded. However, I believe that there are some training exercises that can help with this, both dry fire and live fire. During dry fire, draw your gun and simulate firing it in slow motion. Move the muzzle up slowly, and then back down slowly back to where it came from, properly aligned in the rear notch. Exaggerate the muzzle flip, even move your hand up and down while you're doing this. What you need to do is watch the front sight as it moves in this slow motion, in exaggerated recoil. Move your eyes up and down (not your head) as you do this. Do this around 10 times, then slowly add speed, until you are simulating the recoil of 4-5 shots per second without mentally losing track of the front sight. What this is doing is letting your subconscious mind know that the motion of the sight is important. The subconscious doesn't know what the conscious mind is thinking, and learns through observation. By performing a dry fire exercise that exaggerates that motion of the front sight, where your eyes move to keep it constantly in your center of vision, and your mind is tightly latched onto it, your subconscious will figure this out much faster than it otherwise would have. During live fire, loosen up the "spring" that your hands make on the gun, and allow around 1.5" of muzzle flip. Your target can often be a mental distraction, so it's best to not use a target when first doing this. It's also useful to "zoom out" your mind a bit from the front sight, to the space your gun and hands occupy. A "soft" focus on the front sight can also help. One thing that you do *not* want to do is to follow the sight with your mind. Just passively observe the sight. Fire a round, and simply observe the sight. Don't lock onto it with your mind, let it go and just let it do what it does. If you didn't see its path through recoil, that's ok as I t might take awhile, but keep working on it. The reason you loosen up your grip is to increase the motion of the sight - the bigger the motion, the less likely the mind will optimize away its motion. Trying to mentally track the front sight is the worst thing you can do. Just fire the round, and then see if you can remember seeing it's motion afterward. The conscious mind gets in the way, so listening to music or thinking about something else can also help your subconscious let the sight movement through. Once you get to the point where you are seeing the sight lift, pause, and slide back into the rear, tighten up your grip again and bring the muzzle flip back down to normal. Don't be surprised if you lose it again, if you do, loosen up your grip again slightly until you can see it again. For some people, tracking the sight is easy, for others this is really hard. For those people who have a real hard time, or for those who wish to gain this skill as quickly as possible, the about should help. It's all about training the subconscious to do something outside its natural instinct and programming. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

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As long as you are only applying downward force after the shot, I don't see the problem. The stronger you grip, the less you will have to "wrangle" the gun back on target though. Switching between my tanfo and glock, I have to "wrangle" the glock to keep similar splits. You should not have to move any muscles, apply any pressure, or do any wrangling in order to get the sight back on target. Your grip should be a spring that allows the muzzle to lift slightly in recoil, but then returns the gun back to the exact same spot it came from before the shot. Recoil control is a constant, passive effort throughout the firing cycle. If any part of your body moves, strengthens or braces during the firing cycle, other than the movement of your finger on the trigger, your doing it wrong. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

As long as you are only applying downward force after the shot, I don't see the problem. The stronger you grip, the less you will have to "wrangle" the gun back on target though. Switching between my tanfo and glock, I have to "wrangle" the glock to keep similar splits. You should not have to move any muscles, apply any pressure, or do any wrangling in order to get the sight back on target. Your grip should be a spring that allows the muzzle to lift slightly in recoil, but then returns the gun back to the exact same spot it came from before the shot. Recoil control is a constant, passive effort throughout the firing cycle. If any part of your body moves, strengthens or braces during the firing cycle, other than the movement of your finger on the trigger, your doing it wrong. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Yep. Fighting the gun, fighting the recoil takes physical effort that isn't necessary. It's a waste of energy. Your energy and mental focus is best used to control the guns return from recoil, rather than fighting it. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

There are a couple of different techniques that can be used for shooting well at further distances. There isn't one "right" way, but here is something that works well for a lot of people, myself included. Using this technique I can consistently hold 2" 5 round groups at 25 yards, and an occasional sub inch group when I'm really shooting well. When aiming there are two principles in play - sight picture and sight alignment. Sight alignment refers keeping the front and rear sights perfectly aligned relative to each other. Sight picture refers to the relationship of the sights (specifically the front sight) in relation to the target. However, unless you are using a rest you will not be able to hold a perfect sight alignment and a perfect sight picture. You will tend to move around slightly, and this motion is called arc of movement. Ideally you want to minimize arc of movement to the smallest amount possible when aiming and beginning your trigger squeeze, but without a rest there will always be some motion. With training, most people can manage to eliminate almost all motion from either the front sight relative to the target (sight picture), or the motion between the front and rear sights (sight alignment). However, most people are incapable of eliminating all arc of motion, so a person must learn how to favor a perfect sight alignment, and when to favor a perfect sight picture. Since we were very young, we have learned to manipulate objects around us. In doing so we have learned to favor the location of an object over the orientation of an object. When setting an object down on a shelf you place it there first, and then turn it so it faces forward. It's instinctual. The opposite feels much more forced, to rotate and orient the object perfectly before setting it down. Our location instinct assists with sight picture, so shooters tend to favor sight picture over sight alignment. This works well out to around 15-20 yards or so, but as you get further away the physics and geometry require that alignment be favored over picture. When shooting up close, you want to hold the front sight blade over the target, and a little variation in alignment due to arc of movement is fine. However, when shooting at greater distances, you want to hold the front sight as perfectly aligned in the rear as possible, and allow the front sight to float around the target. You do *not* want to hold the front sight tightly to the target at greater distances - doing so will lead to error being introduced into your alignment, which is the opposite of what you want. This can be difficult to do, since our location instinct for objects will want to hold the front sight tight to the target, but there is a trick that can help with this. Convince yourself that it's not you that is moving, but the target. Hold your front and rear sights together in a tight alignment, and imagine that the target is dancing around behind your front sight. When you convince yourself that the target is what is moving, you can more easily "let go" of trying to hold tight to the target, and allow yourself to put all of your attention on the relationship between the front and rear sights. The idea is that even if your gun is moving around an inch or so in space, as long as you maintain a perfect alignment, your shots will place all within an inch of each other - provided you have a proper trigger squeeze, etc. It can take time to learn to do this where it doesn't feel forced. The other thing that's important is that while you see your front sight dancing around your target in front of you, that you do *not* follow the front sight with your eyes. Your eyes should be fixed directly on the target, and you should see your sights floating around the center of the target. Don't confuse this with focusing on the target, your eyes should still be focused tightly on the front sight, but your eyes shouldn't follow the sight, they should be locked directly on the target and not move. Again, this can be tricky to do, but with practice you'll have an "aha" moment, and it should be pretty easy after that. Trigger squeeze is a whole other subject, but to start out squeeze the trigger slowly. Extremely slowly. If it takes 5 or more seconds for the gun to fire after you begin your trigger squeeze, fine. Just keep it a slow, even, fluid rearward motion. A trick that can help with this is to visualize a string connected to the back of the trigger, going through your hands and the frame going all the way to the tip of your nose. Imagine that instead of you squeezing the trigger with your finger, that your actually pulling the trigger slowly rearward by winding the string up with a little winch in your nose. Imagine that your finger is simply riding the trigger backward as you winch it slowly directly towards your nose. It sounds goofy, but I found it to be the best visualization to assist with developing a perfectly rearward trigger squeeze. The idea is that your mind isn't focused on the trigger itself, but rather on the path that the trigger should take through space, moving directly rearward toward your nose. So anyways, shooting accurately at distance is just as much (more actually) about what your thinking about than what your hands are doing. It's about decoupling what your eyes are fixed on (the target), from what they are focused on (the front sight), from what your mind is paying attention to (alignment of front and rear sights). It's about knowing what to pay close attention to (sight alignment), and what you should let go of and allow to drift (sight picture). And it's about using various visualizations and mental tricks to learn how to let go and to do these things instinctually. Being able to shoot well on closer targets isn't simply because they are closer. It's because on closer targets you want to favor sight picture over sight alignment, which is much more instinctual for us to do. On targets out past 25 yards, the physics of the shot change, the technique for aiming changes, and the psychology to use that technique that normally goes against our natural instincts is difficult to develop. Hope this helps.

I know it's unusual, but I focus my eyes an inch or so *below* the magwell, at the point the magazine will be in right before I slide it home. As soon as the mag comes into my center vision just below the magwell, I guide it in with my eyes. What was happening when looking directly at the magwell was that at speed, it would occasionally get hung up or rattle in at the wrong angle. What I reused is that by looking into the magwell, I didn't see the magazine until it was too late to correct an error. By looking just below the magwell, and leading the mag the last inch or so with my eyes, my subconscious can see any errors and fix them in that brief instant before the mag seats. It's the same idea as pre-focussing your eyes on the spot the front sight will occupy during the draw stroke, so you have a proper sight picture the instant the gun gets there. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

You don't have a problem. In fact, you have an advantage in that you can readily switch which eye the mind is favoring. This is something that many people strive for, especially when using an ACOG or similar sight on a rifle. The technique is called the Bindon Aiming Concept, and by switching which eye the mind is favoring you can switch between 0x and 4x magnification entirely in your head. It's not as useful in pistol competition, but for military or law enforcement in can help when shooting from behind barricades, by only exposing 1/3rd of your head regardless of which side you're shooting from, simply by switching eyes on the fly. It seems a significant number of shooters believe that cross dominance, or the ability to shift dominance, or "weak dominance" is a problem that needs to be solved. It isn't, it's a natural condition that needs to be understood. Many people use tape over their shooting glasses, which works but is a mechanical crutch that prevents a mastery of optical skills that would result in being a better shooter. Don't try to solve the problem. Embrace the skill and learn to master the ability to shift between eyes on demand. It's actually much easier than you might think.

A couple of suggestions: When working on a new draw technique, or fixing a glitch in your draw, start out working on it slowly. Focus on smoothness and efficiency of motion. Work on doing it exactly the same way each time, slowly. Once you've done that awhile, watch yourself differently while performing those same slow motions, watch how your hand acquires the weapon, look at how your hands come together, look at the movement of the gun through space. Do the exact same motions slowly, but break it down and watch each part and observe it separately. At the same time, pay attention to how each part of the draw feels. Where are your hands and elbows are in relation to the rest of your body. What does the gun feel like when you first touch it just before getting a proper grip. How does it feel when you touch it just before you get your grip wrong. Also visually track your front sight while keeping the target fixed in your center of vision, as the gun enters your peripheral vision below and comes up to the target, don't look directly at the sight, but pay attention to how it looks as it makes it's way up to the target. By doing these things repeatedly, you're programming yourself a feedback loop. By visually and physically observing the proper draw, you are building the procedural memory (aka muscle memory) to perform the draw, and also to recognize by both sight and feel when something goes wrong. Once you've done that for awhile, the next step is to visualize the arc the front sight takes from the holster to full presentation. Imagine this path as an orange ribbon in space, and that when you perform the draw, you see the front sight follow this path perfectly from holster to presentation. If you make a mistake, you should physically feel something wrong, and you should see the front sight where it doesn't follow the ribbon properly. Really work at seeing the arc the front sight will follow as a ribbon in the air. By visualizing the ribbon, you're giving your subconscious mind a mechanism by which you can lead the motion of your gun with your mind, rather than simply following and observing it. The result is that you're mind will actually be one step ahead of the draw, rather than one step behind it. Between this and your feedback loop, you are developing the procedural memory to properly draw your weapon much faster than brute force repetition would provide for you. Once you've done that for awhile, pick a point of aim on the wall, close your eyes, and draw your weapon the same way. It should feel the way you observed it earlier. Visualize the ribbon you want the front sight to track through to full presentation. Visualize the location of the front sight relative to where your hands are. Bring the gun up through the path, feel how your hands come together to full presentation, pause for a brief moment, and open your eyes. If you practice this enough you will discover that when you open your eyes your sights will be properly aligned directly over your target. This is validation that your technique and training is working. Once you've done that for awhile, keep your eyes open again and add a little bit more speed. If you start introducing error or otherwise recognize you're moving too fast, slow it down a little bit. Once you've done that for awhile at your slightly faster speed, you're done - go have a beer. Next time you do this, try to start at the speed you stopped at last time. You can use a shot timer to help with this. Once again, visually and physically observe your draw at your starting speed. Visualize the ribbon the front sight takes through space. Then do it with your eyes closed and verify that your programming is working, then open your eyes, and speed it up another notch. Rinse and repeat. Once you can get the draw down to somewhere around 1.0-1.5 seconds on target with your eyes closed, you no longer need to consciously observe yourself anymore. At that point your programming is in place and you need to fully hand control of your actions over to the subconscious. Don't think about your motions anymore, at the instant you decide to draw your weapon, simply see the ribbon flash into place, and let your subconscious deal with the details of getting the gun out and moving. As far as the conscious mind is concerned, the draw is simply a matter of imagining the ribbon the front sight will travel through. No motion, no front sight, just the path from the holster to full presentation as a ribbon in space. It's also possible to further speed up your draw by forcing your mind away from your weapon hand by intentionally focusing your mind on your support hand. It's an active form of meditation. When the mind is mentally paying attention to your support hand, it's *not* paying attention to your weapon hand, allowing your subconscious to take over. Don't track the full movement of the support hand, but pay attention to getting your support hand in the proper position and orientation to join your weapon hand just before the weapon hand gets there. It's not the motion of the support hand, it's the position of the support hand in space in order to properly mate up. The conscious mind is slow, and it lags what we are doing in time by a fraction of a second. By intentionally paying attention to your support hand, while simultaneously visualizing the ribbon the front sight will travel through, you are completely surrendering the movement of the gun during the draw to the subconscious, which gets it there much faster and accurately by using your procedural memory than you would be able to accomplish with the conscious mind. Hope this helps.

If you're really looking for fast splits, faster than .15-.20, you need to learn the proper technique. The technique you use when shooting around .20 or slower simply doesn't scale to shooting faster. Think of it as the difference between a horse trotting and a horse galloping. They are completely different motions and produce completely different speed ranges. Moving your finger conventionally back and forth has an upper speed limit. You need an alternate technique, you need to learn to gallop with your trigger squeeze. Trying to trot faster simply won't get you there.

Maintaining a cadence is great. It helps with control, timing, and helps you to find the speed at which you start to lose the sight. Shooting with a metronome is great for this, but a metronome and establishing a cadence isn't typically enough to stop thinking about shooting. A metronome is pretty damn boring after all. Listening to music is the best way I've found to let go with the conscious mind and learn to shoot without conscious effort. It's an active form of meditation. When your thinking about the music, you're not thinking about shooting. I suspect that listening to the car radio does more for new drivers becoming proficient behind the wheel than even the amount of time they spend on the road. In order to master something you need to let go and not think about it. Active meditation on something else is the easiest way to do that, and music is the best subject to distract your conscious mind with, since its easy to let go and let music be a fully immersive experience. I recommend Pink Floyd, or something slow and classical when training for speed because it also relaxes the mind against rapid twitchy actions, and encourages a smooth flow to your movements, even when those actions are performed quickly.

See my previous post. If you do as suggested, you'll see results quickly.

Shooting fast is all about moving your finger fast. Moving your finger fast is all about moving your finger efficiently. There are a few "tricks" to moving your finger more efficiently which will result in faster splits. First, your trigger finger cannot be tight. When your finger muscles are tight, the muscles that are trying to move the trigger are fighting against the muscles holding your finger tight. This slows your finger down, and significantly reduces your dexterity. You need to back off as much as possible with your grip strength with your weapon hand. At first this might cause your accuracy to go bye-bye. That's OK, let it go as long as you're not unsafe. You can work on improving your grip technique so that you can control recoil more with technique than brute force hand strength, and/or increase the strength of your hand muscles. Either way, your trigger finger needs to be loose and agile. Let your support hand control the position and recoil of the gun as much as possible. The second thing is to only ever move your finger in one direction - rearward, and to only apply the minimum pressure on the trigger necessary to fire it. Most people squeeze the trigger with more strength than they need, thinking the additional strength will speed them up. It doesn't, it slows them down. You should squeeze the trigger rearward with the minimum pressure required, with a relatively loose trigger finger, until the gun fires. After the gun fires, instead of switching directions and activating a completely different set of muscles to release the trigger out to reset, you simply relax your trigger finger. When you relax your finger, the angle of your hand will tend to naturally move your finger forward again. The trigger reset spring will move the trigger forward without your having to do anything but relax your finger. Then it's just a combination of feeling and timing as to where/when you once again apply just enough pressure to the trigger to move it backward to fire. It takes a good bit of practice to master, the hard part is learning the feeling and timing of a particular gun as to where/when to begin moving your finger rearward again. Relaxing your finger when the gun fires is much easier. You can actually leverage your startle reflex, where the instant the gun fires you instinctively relax your finger to reset, and can be back on the trigger again and able to fire it extremely quickly. When done correctly, your finger feels more like an automatic oscillation than a squeeze, reset, squeeze, reset, etc. You don't actually perceive the individual back and forth motions at all, it's more of a slow buzzing with your finger, and your only controlling tone and amplitude of the buzzing, not the back and forth movement itself. I've been able to get my splits down to .11 seconds using this technique, though my accuracy does suffer quite a bit when using it. Once you get to this point, then it's all about getting your accuracy back. Which is all about grip, and grip technique over grip strength. There's always something else to learn, something else to understand, something else to master. That's why this shooting thing is hard Hope this helps!!

If you're thinking of sight picture, and thinking of trigger squeeze, that's the problem. The conscious mind is slow, and can only do one thing at a time at any given instant. What you need to learn to do is let go. To run your gun the way you drive your car, or how you walk down the road. You don't think about moving your knees and ankles as you walk, you don't think about turning the wheel or pressing the clutch when you drive. If you're thinking about your gun, you need to learn to stop and let the subconscious take over. One thing that can help with this is to make a point of staying loose, and shooting while listening to your favorite music in the background with earbuds. Nothing fancy, single target at 7 yards is fine. Every time you reaload, turn up the volume a small amount, and pay a little more attention to the music and a little less to your shooting than the last string. By the end of your session you should be singing along and dancing around absorbed in the music, and just shooting your gun in the background, the same way you drive your car. This is a great exercise to help with the psychological aspect of letting go, and allowing the subconscious mind to take control of the act of shooting. It may take a little time, but you should expect that you'll find that you shoot faster and more accurately when your not thinking about your gun, but instead rocking out to pink Floyd or whatever you're listening to. You don't actually need music to do this, but it's a great tool to use since it's really easy to become fully absorbed in listening to your favorite music. Give this a try. You might be bumping into a physical limitation that you need to train through, or it could be psychological. People tend to overlook the psychological, which is often times the actual root if the problem. Hope this helps!!

During dry fire, your only point of feedback for your subconscious to learn and to develop procedural memories is by observation of the front sight. You need to maintain a hard front sight focus in order to get the most out of dry fire. However, there is nothing at all wrong with changing what your mind is primarily paying attention to during a given dry fire session. Physically, you can do the exact same drill, exactly the same way (including eye and focus movements), but have a completely different training session and develop and fine tune different procedural memories by changing what your mind is doing. For example, during one dry fire session you can pay attention to a precise sight alignment and sight picture. You can pay attention to moving your optical focus up and down the focal continuum during transitions. In other words pay attention to and work on exercising your optical skills. You're still squeezing the trigger, but you're not paying much if any attention to it at all. You're simply going through the trigger motions for the purpose of working out your aiming and visual skills. On the following day, do the opposite. All of your mental attention should be on your trigger squeeze. You're still looking at your front sight, you're still moving your focus back and forth between the sight and your targets, but your mind is as focused on trigger squeeze as much as possible. When doing this, at the moment the hammer falls you should have a hard front sight focus so that you can call where your shot would have placed. Rather than aiming though, you are just passively observing your front sight. The task of maintaining sight alignment and sight picture, and the shifting of your eyes up and down the focal continuum is performed entirely by the subconscious.The same can be done for the draw and grip, and for the movement of transitioning between targets, etc. The cool thing about this technique of dry fire training is that you are actually learning the same action and developing the necessary memories and understanding two different ways. For example, when paying attention to sight alignment and sight picture, you will consciously see any errors you are experiencing and apply the appropriate corrective action. The conscious, logical mind will identify, diagnose, and correct errors in technique. The next day when running the exact same drills only mentally focusing on trigger squeeze, you are in fact still exercising and developing your visual skills. By focusing entirely on trigger squeeze you are employing a form of active meditation, intentionally taking your mind off of a task you're physically performing, requiring the subconscious mind to take over the task, which then results in the development of procedural memories. By rotating your mental attention through the various fundamentals for each of your dry fire drills, you're bringing different parts of your mind to bear on the same task, which will significantly accelerate your learning. We need the conscious mind to learn an action. We need the conscious mind to identify, diagnose and apply corrections to an action. However, the conscious mind does *not* develop procedural (aka muscle) memory. Only when a practiced and refined action is performed by the subconscious mind are procedural memories developed that can perform a task without having to think about it. If you've ever noticed that when paying attention to an action, you make the greatest progress when you train to the point of boredom, this is why. You need to be *not* thinking about a task while you're performing it in order to develop procedural memory and master the performance of the task. Switching what your mind is paying attention to for a given training session does two things simultaneously - it brings the logic of the conscious mind to bear on what is being payed attention to, and it also exercises the subconscious minds ability to perform everything else you're doing, and develops deeper and more correct procedural memories for the performance of those tasks. You can bring the same technique to bear outside of training as well. The conscious mind, while very logical and analytical is also very slow, and it will slow down the performance of an action if you're consciously paying attention to it. For example, your draw stroke will be faster if you focus your attention on the movement of your support hand rather than your weapon hand. By forcing your attention away from your weapon hand to the support hand (or anything else really), you are forcing your subconscious mind to use your procedural memory to perform the draw stroke, which is much faster than your conscious mind is able to do. When focusing your mind on your front sight when shooting you're also performing a form of active meditation. It's not just that you want to pay attention to the front sight for shot calling, but it's also that by paying almost complete attention to the front sight, you're *not* paying attention to any of the other aspects of weapon manipulation. When you take your conscious mind off of everything but passive observation of the front sight, the subconscious kicks in, and is able to perform much faster, much more precisely, and orchestrate more perfect combination of complex actions than what you would be able to do if you were consciously paying attention to the act of shooting. So yeah, you can and should isolate visual and aiming skills from trigger squeeze during dry fire. Physically you do the exact same things either way, the difference is in where you put your mind during that training session. If you do this, you will learn much faster than if you don't. What your mind is paying attention to is just as much a fundamental of shooting as grip, alignment, trigger squeeze, etc. Hope this helps.

The placement of your finger on the trigger shouldn't shift when rotating your hands inward, or "pinching" the gun high up. The slide of the pistol should be in line with the bones of your forearm when holding it one handed. When holding it 2 handed, your two arms should create an A-frame behind the gun either directly in front of your dominant eye, or directly in front of your nose with the gun canted slightly toward your dominant eye. If your arms and hands are in the correct locations, changing exactly where or how you are transmitting pressure from your hands to the weapon shouldn't change the location of your finger. You're not moving your hands, your changing how your hands are pressing on the gun. The ideal position of your finger on the trigger is going to vary from person to person and from gun to gun, but as a general rule it should be somewhere between the center of the pad and the crease of the first digit. If you're only getting the tip of your finger on the trigger, you're likely either holding it incorrectly, or the gun is too big for your hands. Try lining up the gun with the bones of your forearm and dry fire one handed, and see where your finger naturally rests. One way to determine the "best" location for your finger on the trigger, as well as to dial in the motion of your finger is to do a "weak grip" exercise. What you want to do is to hold the gun with two hands, but hold it as loosely as possible, just enough to keep from dropping it when you fire it. It should be balanced on your hands rather than being gripped by the hands. It should wobble freely, and a person should be able to lift it out of your hands with almost no resistance. Load one round, and begin to squeeze the trigger slowly. You'll notice that the pressure between your trigger finger and the web of your thumb will actually stabilize the gun more than your grip does when shooting this way. You want the greatest amount of pressure on the gun to be your trigger finger. It will be much more difficult to call your shots this way, as your attention should be almost entirely on what your finger is doing, rather than where the front sight is when the shot breaks. After the shot breaks, simply look at the location on your target where the round placed. What this exercise does is to amplify trigger errors that are normally masked by grip pressure. This will allow you to find the optimal location for your finger on the trigger of that specific weapon, and to fine tune your trigger squeeze until your rounds place where they are supposed to with very little grip support to mask trigger error. You obviously don't want to shoot like this normally, but it is one way to quickly and easily find the ideal position of your finger on the trigger. If your normal shooting grip prevents you from comfortably placing your finger on this spot, something is wrong and needs to be changed. Hope this helps.