Keeping the thumbs off the pistol?

[gigamortis]

I honestly think that the way we grip our pistols depends on the person's build, as pertaining to hand size, finger length, range of motion in the wrists, etc. Personally, my rather large hands have never been able to let me comfortably cam my weak wrist far enough forward to place my weak thumb on the frame. Whenever I have tried it, I ended up knocking the slide stop up during recoil, unintentionally locking the slide open in the middle of a magazine.

The grip that has worked for me the best is to just ride the side of the slide with my thumbs. I have learned to use these thumbs to help steer the gun rather well. Amazingly, my best spring setup for tracking has been a 16.5 lb variable Wolff with an oversize EGW firing pin stop and a 23lb mainspring. Lighter springs just gave me lower reliability due to the friction of my thumbs against the slide, so shooting a lightly sprung 9mm 1911 is out of the question for me. I only shoot .45 in a 1911 anyway. My spring weight setup is heavy for most folks, but I can't argue with consistently scoring 70-80% of our local club's open class shooters when I am just shooting Single Stack. It works in my hands, but may not work in others.

The best way to develop a grip that works for you is to just run some drills against the clock with different hand holds. Pay attention to split times, sight tracking, first shot from holster time, etc. Sooner or later, you are bound to find a particular technique that stands out from all the others in shot performance.

[KungFuNerd]

I got into the habit of steering with a 1911.

I shot well.

Then tried it on a Glock...I was pulling shots all over the place and having slidelock interference problems.

Practiced floating the thumbs and everything improved for me

[eric nielsen]

I've tried several variations of thumb-on, thumb-off. With my Caspian open gun I had the Allchin upright mount for C-More, with the optional thumb shelf that sits on the bottom of the mount and makes a horizontal, low thumb rest. I liked it, shot well with it. Now in Open I use a Dawson thumb shelf that sits up higher and at a diagonal & I press on the the shelf and the side of the scope mount equally. I like that too. Tried just putting grip tape on the side of the mount, didn't like that at all.

In Limited I always kept my thumb off the gun because that gave the best sight tracking, compared to any kind of sideways thumb pressure on the frame. With a Glock it seemed like maybe that wasn't the best way to steady the gun against a long uneven trigger press/release. Then I found videos and interviews with Robert Vogel, and I tried that way - both hands put a twisting force into the top of the frame, right hand twists counter-clockwise, left hand twists clockwise with the thumb sitting just forward of the Glock take-down latch. I liked that a lot, seemed to tame the overall kick of the Glock with Major ammo the few times I tried it in practice this year.

Borrowed my friend's XDm 5.25 to shoot our Factory Gun Classic match, got about 16 days on the gun prior to the match. 1st time shooting it I tried putting my left thumb on the XDm takedown lever with Vogel's technique - ouch, that won't work. Put the left thumb under the frame and on the side of the trigger-guard. That worked, I could shoot multiple hits in a small circle with my eyes shut. Only downside is that it's hard to present the gun out flat, the sights pop down at the last second during the draw. Kept doing that & went to the Factory match & did some the best iron-sight shooting of my life. In every stage walk-thru I had to remind myself of the twisting force, it's still new to me. REALLY seems to help the light gun behave itself while shooting fast.

Played around with that grip on my Open STI and another ouch - there's a big square corner on the STI short-dustcover frame. But, it looks like it's a solid slab with no corner on the long/wide dustcover STI so that may work on my 2013 Limited gun. I'll try all of the above when that gun arrives since thumb rests will be legal in Limited next month. For me anyway the Vogel technique doesn't seem to work with a high thumb-rest position, seems best when you press both hands right at the top of the frame. HTH

[bobby hated]

my friends always harp on me for having my support hand thumb too high, like im giving a thumbs up with my support hand. they tell me i should be pointing my support hand thumb at the target instead.

i dont think i actually contact the slide with any pressure with my thumb though. its just there.

Edited December 16, 2012 by bobby hated