Dry Firing: Who here simulates recoil?

[nitrohuck]

Who all simulates recoil in their dry fire routine???

I am sort of on the fence... On one hand, my dry firing times are significantly decreased when I don't simulate recoil (obviously), but when I simulate recoil I am clearly unable to perfectly replicate actual recoil, so I am not sure if it is even all that helpful to simulate recoil...

So pulling the trigger without recoil sort of seems like cheating, and replicating it seems fake.... that is my conundrum,

What about you guys?

[StraightUp_OG]

I think it will introduce bad habits.

[Jman]

Not a good idea.

[alma]

Makes it much harder to follow through and call your dry fire shots which is one in the primary benefits of dry fire IMHO. You could really develop some bad habits to include pool trigger control and exaggerated recoil. Really bad idea. I see novice (and some not so novice) shooters at the range doing this all the time. They take one shot and allow the recoil to snap the gun into the air like they are in an old western. Sometimes they do it with such authority that it robs the slide of energy and induces a malfunction.

Let your dry fire help to cure you of bad habits that can come from fighting (or not fighting) recoil, not add to the bad habits.

[nitrohuck]

oh jeez... didn't even really think about that. but you're absolutely right, I guess that could very well create a bad habit

I was mostly doing it to sort of handicap myself in the first place... seeing as without simulating recoil my dry fire el prez's are 3.5sec yet at the range they're closer to 5.5sec, something isn't translating hah...

Also I guess there's definitely something to be said about the validity of being able to call shots when not simulating recoil, can definitely tell when my transitions fall short or go too far,

Edited June 3, 2014 by nitrohuck

[Vincerama]

Air soft gun? You get a BIT of recoil, but it's not from you moving your hand...

[glockified]

Airsoft provides some feeling of recoil, but it cannot simulate the recoil of live fire. When you are shooting with your real gun, it will be different from airsoft, so I'm not sure it helps.

[alma]

Airsoft is almost more useful for the trigger reset than the recoil.

[mr.elite]

Not a good practice.

[Jshuberg]

I agree with the above, it will develop bad habits, with one exception:

The subconscious mind learns from observation. It's connected to our 5 senses, and can see what we visualize in our minds eye. It doesn't know what we're thinking though. If the subconscious mind doesn't witness the performing of an action repetitively, it isn't going to learn it and persist it to procedural (AKA muscle) memory. The one skill you want to teach the subconscious mind to perform that requires recoil is tracking the front sight. This is different from calling your shots - a person can still call their shots even if they lose and reacquire their front sight shot to shot. Tracking your front sight through recoil is necessary for rapid fire that is faster than your raw reaction time. Search the forum for "chronostasis", I've posted several times describing the effect, but the gist is that the subconscious mind will optimize away small rapid transitions in an attempt to optimize your steam of consciousness.

Because in all other aspects of shooting we work to essentially hold the gun as level as possible, and to minimize muzzle flip, it's not likely that the subconscious will pick up on the idea that you want to visually track the sights through recoil. In fact, by physically trying to minimize muzzle flip, it's likely that the mind will try to minimize it as well, and simply drop it's motion from your awareness. If this is happening, you need to explicitly train in such a way that the subconscious will recognize that visually tracking the front sight is important. Thinking about it alone isn't going to help at all, visualizing a front sight in motion, and tracking it will help, as well as "zooming in" on the front sight with your mind, but the thing that I've found works best for me is to periodically do the following:

During dry fire, when you press the trigger and hear the click, simulate the recoil in slow motion. It should take around 3 seconds for the gun to flip up, and come back to horizontal again. You also want to grossly exaggerate the muzzle flip, the front sight should move up around 6-12 inches, and your hands should move up in space as well. While you do this, keep your head level, but move your eyes as the front sight moves up and down, and keep your vision tightly locked on it the entire time. This is a separate dry fire exercise that should not be co-mingled with your other dry fire exercises. You should do this periodically, as necessary to reinforce the necessity of tracking the front sight, but should not be introduced into any of your other training.

What this does is teach your subconscious that you want to track the front sight through recoil. You've exaggerated it to make it absolutely obvious what it is that you are doing, so that your subconscious can begin building the procedural memory that will do this for you automatically and without conscious effort. Because you are doing this in slow motion, without any targets anything else involved in your normal dry fire training, it won't build any bad habits. It will only build the procedural memory necessary to "turn off" the effects of chronostasis, and the build ability to track the front sight through recoil.

This all presumes that you don't blink when the gun fires

I hope this makes sense.....

Edited August 21, 2014 by Jshuberg

[Slabbie Shooter]

The "Penny Test" is also a good addition to the dryfire routine.

aka: Place a penny on the front sight blade. If you can break the trigger without dropping the penny, you are on the right track.