Sight picture with dry fire

[Ultimo-Hombre]

In dry fire I am cautious of which drills I press the trigger to drop the hammer on.

I learned the hard way what happens when you dry fire and drop the hammer every time (at least on one shot type drills) I developed a nasty mental groove of trying to beat my par times so much that I was kidding myself on the adequacy of that first sight picture. It later manifested itself by me getting horrible first shots, at the start of otherwise great strings.

Back on topic... I am working classifier skills hard in dry fire, 6 reload 6, el prez etc.

I have been dropping the hammer first shot and then pressing the trigger for the balance of the drill. For El Prez for example I have hit a wall at about 3.8 to 3.9 sec. Tonight in training I tried just getting an acceptable sight picture for all shots of the drill not pressing. Obviously much faster.

But is this going too far and over simplifying? Clearly there is merit to sight picture only in draw drills, but what about these compound drills?

Edited August 26, 2013 by Ultimo-Hombre

[Ultimo-Hombre]

Some anecdotal notes on this...

Worked these drills without the trigger press and found some good progress.

Doing just the sight picture was a little clunky so I tried something new, for each target of the el prez I just counted each shot, at first just a fast 12-34-56, reload repeat. Then just "pop-pop,pop-pop etc" under my breath, kind of as a joke from my buddies doing the "pew-pew-pew" thing at matches. It sounds stupid but I found it allowed me to get some timing for the sight pictures, like a metronome at a much faster rate than I can work the trigger. I know I need to work the trigger control skills up to speed but this allowed me to work on just pushing how fast I can see what I need to. My goal was just to improve my "seeing" speed but with timing. With the turn and draw and reload 3 seconds became consistent. After many reps of this I went back to conventional dry fire for the drill with trigger presses for each shot. 3.8 became much smoother, being able to really call each shot better than before.

I hope this makes sense, perhaps this was nothing more than progress simply attributed to a fresh mindset.

[Ben Stoeger]

But is this going too far and over simplifying? Clearly there is merit to sight picture only in draw drills, but what about these compound drills?

I don't see the point to not pressing the trigger on bigger drills.

[Flexmoney]

It is training. It is learning. Try it various ways. See what you experience. Let us know how it works.

[Moltke]

Consider prepping the trigger, but not pressing the trigger during dry fire.

Edited August 27, 2013 by Moltke

[motosapiens]

No one should listen to me, since I just made B's after about a year of semi-serious shooting, but I find that if all I'm doing is the draw, it works for me to spend most of the time just getting the sight picture and prepping the trigger. I do a little bit of actually pulling the trigger at the end, but I don't stress about beating the timer so much as about pulling the trigger without disturbing the sights.

On multiple-target drills, there seems to be less temptation (for me) to overlook jerky trigger pulls. so I go ahead and drop the hammer with the first pull, then just press the trigger on the rest of them. (single-action gun).

With all my dryfire drills, I like to verify them a little with live-fire, just to get a feel for the rhythm or rate of accurate fire that I can realistically maintain.