Learning to Dry Fire

[Dkrad1935]

I am new to the forum - and new to competitive shooting as well. I decided I needed to do some serious work on dry fire training to improve my shooting. So I bought the Steve Anderson Book.

Initially, I started doing the drills in his book, but have changed things up a bit. I created some of my own drills to replicate the IDPA classifier. I found online some PAR times for people shooting at a high level in the classifier and set those as goals (not my PAR) for the drills. Typically, in a 40 minute dry fire session I can drill through a stage of the classifier. Here is the neat part though - When I look at my times compared to the goal par times, I can start to identify where I am weakest and need to focus my work.

For example - after the first few ties doing drills on the stage 1 strings, my weakest string was the weak hand drill. Only three shots but I lost the most time in that string so began working on that 80% of the time. Also I created live fire drills to help me learn and reinforce. Learned that my biggest hiccup was an eye dominance problem that was causing my first shot from low ready to take forever. Once I knew that was the issue it was easy to solve by lifting the weapon up with a bent elbow and the muzzle high and really concentrating on the eye dominance part. Now that string is very fast - and I confirmed this with some live fire practice.

Now my weak point seems to be the turn, shoot three, slide lock reload shoot three. So am working on that and when I break it down in to the blocks, I have found my slowest part is the turn and draw. So working on that and seeing big improvements in my dry PAR times.

So - long story short - the building blocks from Steve Anderson book are where I go to work on a problem, and comparing myself to some "Goal PAR times" is how I prioritize what to work on! This has been incredibly fun to do. Am curious to learn how others approach this - a lot of posts I have read of folks trying to get better seems like they just cram a bunch of brand name drills in with no real purpose - I found that by having the set routine of the classifier and PAR times to compare myself to I can create a purpose for each workout (Dry or Live) - like improve my turn and draw or practice transitions, etc etc.

Oh - and I am not really trying to gme the classifier as much as identify skill building blocks and how I rank on each of those building blocks.

How do you guys approach intentional practice? Different or same or...

[Chris iliff]

Good approach. I don't shoot idpa, but what you are doing is identifying your weaknesses. And that, is the name of getting better. Another thing to do is figure out what the best shooters are doing, time wise, and do what is necessary to be that quick. Most of it comes down to gun manipulation and handling, which DRYFIRE is perfect at helping.