ErikW Posted May 5, 2004 Share Posted May 5, 2004 When shooting weak hand, should you ride the thumb safety? I'm starting to think that's what's causing my horrible WH shooting. Something is making me "grip" the safety rather than "ride" the safety and it's causing piss-poor results on paper. No such trouble strong hand. I tried a little thumb-below-safety today and it seemed better. But it's hard to get the draw down that way due to years of thumbing-off and riding the safety. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Larry Cazes Posted May 5, 2004 Share Posted May 5, 2004 Erik, what do you mean by Grip the safety? I find that if I dont ride the safety weak hand I have a tendancy to activate it due to the recoil after a round is fired. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kevin c Posted May 5, 2004 Share Posted May 5, 2004 I should be so lucky that riding the safety is the only reason I spray the berm W/H. I'm still at the stage where my whole hand twitches sympathetically with the trigger finger. I'm working on it with SA guns. Production W/H, with the long pull through, is, at this point, a hopeless endeavour. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kdj Posted May 5, 2004 Share Posted May 5, 2004 After a recent disaster in a classifier, I did a bunch of playing around with weak hand. I've found that if I give up on the idea of keeping the left thumb up on the safety and lock it down to the middle finger, I get better hits and feel a lot more control. It also seems more natural given the cant I hold the gun at. Trying to keep my thumb on the safety adds a lot of tension to the grip. Now, if I could just find a way to not occationally hit the mag release when trying to shoot reasonably fast, I might move from "atrocious" to "bad" with weak hand Kevin Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EricW Posted May 5, 2004 Share Posted May 5, 2004 The dumbest suggestion ever: You're closing your strong eye when you shoot weak-handed, right? At least for me, the solution was to close my strong eye, otherwise I went cross-dominant and everything went to hell. I don't shoot weak hand fast, but I get my hits. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ErikW Posted May 5, 2004 Author Share Posted May 5, 2004 No, I tried the weak-hand/weak-eye thing at the insistence of somebody who designs a bunch of WH stages. Didn't do a thing. It's a grip pressure thing where I'm putting pressure down and in on the right-side safety. Come to think of it, it's more of a problem with my Limited guns which have a wider shelf; my foo-foo gun has a narrow shelf on the right side. Larry, what recoil? I want to know how you got that .22 top end on your new SV to make .40 holes in the targets. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Skywalker Posted May 5, 2004 Share Posted May 5, 2004 Erik, I guess you answered yourself. It's a grip pressure thing where I'm putting pressure down and in on the right-side safety. Try the follwing: the WH thumb rides the safety, but it's not pushing downwards on it, instead it almost neutral or slightly pushing left from the thumb/hand joint, not from the thumb tip. It works for me, because it allows me to grip the gun firmly even with my WH only. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jasonub Posted May 5, 2004 Share Posted May 5, 2004 i tried both with the thumb riding the safety and not riding it. both gave me similar results, Excellent hits. Its your preferrence. but if you have terrible hits its due to shooting the gun with your whole hand and not with your trigger finger (from our host) This woke me up. All i did at first was concentrate in the trigger pull. Let off the slack and press till it breaks. It took me 2-300 round sessions. now i can rock a plate rack cleanly and quickly with either hand up to 20meters. HTH good luck Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nate Posted May 5, 2004 Share Posted May 5, 2004 Jasonub is right about taking up the slack and breaking the shot. The other thing is to try what works for the 50 yard shots and that is to keep pushing that front sight into the scoring area as you break the shot. A lot of people get the picture they want and yank the trigger, with predictable reuslts. A neat trick with a Glock is to force your trigger finger down against the finger gaurd and drag it across until the shot breaks, it seems to help for whatever reason. Nate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
reneet Posted May 5, 2004 Share Posted May 5, 2004 When shooting weak hand, should you ride the thumb safety? I'm starting to think that's what's causing my horrible WH shooting. Something is making me "grip" the safety rather than "ride" the safety and it's causing piss-poor results on paper. No such trouble strong hand. I personally don't ride thumb high for weak hand only. Riding thumb high somehow breaks the integrity of my grip. With thumb below, I am to obtain a stable, consistent and neutral grip resulting in much better control & hits. I tried a little thumb-below-safety today and it seemed better. But it's hard to get the draw down that way due to years of thumbing-off and riding the safety. I trained to remove the safety at the same time as I do during any other draw. It's obviously then essential to be extremely careful on the transfer to keep your finger away from the trigger. Renee Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pangris Posted May 5, 2004 Share Posted May 5, 2004 I shoot weak hand like old people (wait, is this a family forum?) I didn't have to shoot weak hand at teh sanctioned match I went to. When shooting weak hand, do you ever have to draw from your strong side with your weak hand? I've seen Clint Smith do it with amazing smoothness and grace, but I am relatively sure I'd poke my eye out (or yours) if I had to draw with my left hand from my right hand side holster. I'm hoping it is simply a normal draw and then use the weak hand only... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kdj Posted May 5, 2004 Share Posted May 5, 2004 When shooting weak hand, do you ever have to draw from your strong side with your weak hand? It used to be required back in the dark ages but these days, it's always a strong hand draw and transfer to the weak hand. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pangris Posted May 5, 2004 Share Posted May 5, 2004 Good to hear. Although I have a bad feeling I'll be better at weak hand drills than I'd ever achieve in my own training soon... Clint is ruthless. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ErikW Posted May 6, 2004 Author Share Posted May 6, 2004 This not riding the safety thing is really slowing down my WH draw. Taking up the slack before breaking the shot is a technique that works tremendously well, but I often find myself yanking, as on "close" targets. As on the May online match stage. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phil Dunlop Posted May 6, 2004 Share Posted May 6, 2004 Pangris, the weak hand draw is outlawed in the IPSC rulebook under 8.2.4 I did practice it dry firing when I first started and before I realised it wasn't permitted. The technique broke the trigger lock mechanism on my Safariland 010 so I stopped. P.D. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chutist Posted May 6, 2004 Share Posted May 6, 2004 After reading this post, I decided to devote a significant amount of my practice tonight to weak hand. AFTER I quit DEATH GRIPPING THE GUN ...things started to improve. I'd done dry fire in preparation but had to make the "connection" from dry fire to live fire...took some effort, but I saw improvement during the session. I set up a drill - 4 targets freestyle, reload, 4 targets weak hand -at 15 yards- 16 rounds total. I won't embarrass my self by posting the times...grim...but I managed to cut them almost in half just by improving the weak hand efforts. Now to the question - On Weak hand, closely spaced targets do you index target to target by moving your arm or do you move from the hips more like the turret of a freestyle stance? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MoNsTeR Posted May 7, 2004 Share Posted May 7, 2004 If you really want to break the habit of riding the safety with your weak hand thumb, fit a single-sided safety Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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