"In with both hands..."

[collards]

Reading some of the forum content related to grip, I found a sort of random comment that Bob Vogel torques both of his wrists inwards to improve the strength of his grip on the gun. This feels pretty good to me, but I was wondering if this is a well-known method or sort of outlandish.

[RammerJammer]

If you look at his grip you rarely see anything like it. His forward hand pinches the trigger guard all weird. He also holds a glock dead flat and crushes the souls of some pretty good shooters.

[MetropolisLake]

torques both of his wrists inwards

Sounds like what I started doing but we may not be talking about the same thing. I picked it up off the Seeklander video below. Notice the part where he's talking about the "big dumb muscles".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrCfHYdyhw0

Edited January 31, 2014 by MetropolisLakeOutfitters

[collards]

torques both of his wrists inwards

Sounds like what I started doing but we may not be talking about the same thing. I picked it up off the Seeklander video below. Notice the part where he's talking about the "big dumb muscles".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrCfHYdyhw0

Thanks for that video! Yeah my interpretation of what Seeklander is saying can only be that you are rolling your elbows inward to engage your whole arm. I definitely notice my pressure on the gun increases when I do that.

[chickenzomby]

I use a derivative of Vogel's grip technique - imagine your shooting hand is directing its pressure down and away from it (the direction of your palm if that makes sense) and your support hand is rotating up and towards your firing hand. You are "pinning" the axis of rotation of the gun in between your support hand index finger and the base of your support hand thumb. You do rotate your elbows in, but you use your chest, triceps, and shoulder muscles to accomplish the rotation, exerting significant force on the axis of rotation, thus reducing recoil to a minimum. You also have a tendency to cant the gun to the right a few degrees (though the angle doesn't matter) to match the rotation of his elbow so that his support hand wrist maintained a position that allowed maximum force to be applied through it to the gun.

[CHA-LEE]

Bob Vogel uses a pretty unique orientation of the gun. Check out the blow video of him shooting some drills. This video is cool because it gives you a first and third person view of him shooting. In the first person view you can see a pretty extreme right twist of the gun while pointing at targets and shooting. I can only assume this is done to maximize his weak hand grip and wrist angle on the gun to better manage the recoil and muzzle flip, which he does in spades. His gun does not muzzle flip at all while shooting, so maybe he is onto something with his abnormal cant of the gun?

[sigboy40]

The way I do it, and explain it, is to get your push/pull down, after that rotate your elbows up to bring the 'big dumb muscles' into play and apply side pressure to the pistol.

[eric nielsen]

In Vogel's videos (on DVD or Panteo subscription) he talks about the forearms twisting the hands into the tops of the grips. He never mentions shoulder or chest muscles and I believe (could be wrong) he doesn't use muscles north of the elbows. This makes what he's doing different from what you see in videos by Mike Hughes and Mike Seeklander with the "big dumb muscles" (which has been around for 3 decades or more).

At the indoor range a few days ago I spent almost 30 minutes shooting my STI's (open and limited) and CZ's (production) with no target, just blasting into the backstop and watching how the guns recover with different grip styles. For most of 2 years I've used Vogel's grip and it seemed to help control and help point the plastic guns like Glock and XDm, maybe because they're so slide-heavy/frame-light, something like that. I made it work on the CZ's by getting grip panels that were flat on top, also by building my hands up with Captains of Crush #1 and #1.5 - seems like the stronger your pinky fingers, the more you can twist into the top of the grips. I found it hard to do this with the STI's because they are not flat at the grip tops.

I've tried the Hughes/Seeklander grip too: more pressure into the bottom rear portion of the grip. For me it seemed to pop the guns back on target with very little effort, once the grip is set up. I found setting up that grip to be un-natural after holding a gun with a neutral Enos grip for many years. The Seeklander type grip also left me with the feeling that the sights were floating up there and not completely under my control; by comparison the Vogel grip does a better job (for me) of pointing the gun where I want it to go.

What I settled on this week after all the 9mm, 40, and Super rounds into the back stop is: No twisting with the arms at all. Hold the gun with the hands (title of a podcast by Ben Stoeger). I just grip so hard with the four fingers of the off hand that I can feel the support hand palm trying to crush the left side of my pistol grip. No help from the off hand thumb, it's tucked under the frame alongside the trigger guard. The strong hand pinky finger is also gripping a lot, starting as the gun clears the holster. No tension in the middle finger as it is tied together with the trigger finger by shared tendons. Try gripping something super tight with only the bottom 2 fingers of your strong hand, then work your index finger through an imaginary trigger press; watch what happens to the middle finger. Hope this helps.

Edited March 22, 2014 by eric nielsen