Becoming the master of the draw doesn’t require creating a mountain of spent bullet shells at the range. Taking this approach is both wasteful and expensive plus fairly ignorant.  Squeezing the trigger and firing your handgun is one step to becoming a hand gun master and only the very last step. To become the master, you need to include a regime of dry fire practice.  This type of practice only requires your wiliness and an empty and handgun.

Dry fire practice, marksmanship is a sport

Many individuals who practice marksmanship do so because because of life and death reasons. They put their life on the line in their occupations (police, military) or they may be citizens with the objective of protecting themselves and their family. But make no mistake about it, marksmanship is also sport. And you should practice it as if it were a sport.  Most if not all professional athletes have become elite through practice.  They practice the same technique thousands of times over and over.  They even break each movement into separate steps and practice each of these steps over and over thousands of times, finally putting each step together into one complete fluid movement.  A marksman can use dry firing practice for this same purpose.

What is dry fire practice what are the objectives?  

This type of practice is the practice of shooting and shooting related skills without actually firing a shoot. Being able to manipulate the gun and trigger, finding the sight as quickly as it moves in front of the face, aiming, triggering your firearm without ammunition and reloading. There are an endless array of real life scenarios you can dry practice.

The main objective of this type of practice is to develop muscle memory.  When you develop this you will not even need to think everything will become a reflex.  You will develop the fine motor skills that are essential to becoming proficient with a handgun.  Dry firing practice will also allow you to better notice mistakes and bad habits that are almost impossible to detect during live firing, such as flinching, blinking and lack of follow through.

Core of dry fire practice

Pay close attention to the front sight during trigger manipulation and practicing for the reset.

You want to pay close attention to the first site because it will tell you if you are doing something wrong:  Is it moving down. is it moving down to the right, is it moving up?  Pay close attention to your front site during dry firing we are not always able to notice these mistakes when we fire live rounds.

Dry fire practice allows you to practice presentation.  Presentation bring from the time you pull the gun, put your hands together on the gun and then up to the target. Also during the practice of presentation you want to work on picking up the front sight as quickly as possible as the gun moves in front of your face.

Practicing multiple targets. Presenting the gun to one target, rotating to the second and rotating to the third target.  Two shots at each presentation.

Practice your draw, this can be done with your arms relaxed at the sides or with your hands up in the air.

You can practice your reloads, present the gun to the target, reload (empty) and present their gun back to the target.

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