FREE Practice

You want to know how to improve your skills without spending a small fortune at the range?  Its simple - Dry Practice! 

While it will not take the place of live fire, doing dry practice on a regular basis will positively affect your shooting skills. 

So what is dry practice?   Its simply practicing all of the shooting fundamentals and gun handling skills with an unloaded firearm.  Professional shooters will do about four times more dry practice than they do live fire practice.  And its FREE! 

First, there are some safety practices you should make sure to go through before you dry practice - remember, you are going to be pressing the trigger of your firearm inside your house!  Make sure the firearm is unloaded.  Double check it.  Triple check it. 

Now, move all of your live ammunition to a different room.  Just get it out of there.  You don't need it right now and its just too, too easy to grab a live round in place of a dummy round by mistake.  When you are doing dry practice, there is no room for those kinds of mistakes, so just remove the possibility by getting your live ammo to a different room.

Find a good place.  Find something that will stop a bullet - just in case.  You really can't be too careful.  Ideally you will want to be in an isolate area where you will not be disturbed.

Now, get to it!  

the MantisX

If you are worried that you might be practing incorrectly and thereby ingraining bad shooting habits, there are tools you can use to ensure you are practicing correctly.  

Two tools I use when I do dry practice. Other people use other methods, which is fine, these are what I find useful and easy to use.  And I do beleive they help. 

The MantisX.  Its a small devise that attaches to the frame of your firearm much like a weapon mounted light.  Then you download the free app for your smart phone, connect the two, and the MantisX records your shots and gives you immediate feedback.  There are videos to show you what you are doing incorrectly, and various drills to practice.  It is good for dry practice but you can also use it while live firiing to get that same sort of feedback.  Its good on both a pistol and a rifle.  And more than one uses can use it without interferring with each other because each shooter is recorded on their own phone.  It will run you around $150 but I have found it to be so worth it.

Dummy Rounds

Dummy rounds are the brightly colored plastic rounds that are made for dry practice.  Snap caps can be use too but are often a bit more expensive.   I don't use dummy rounds for practing trigger control but I do use them to practice malfunction clearing and reloads.  They are inexpensive and you will probably lose them before you wear them out. 

Other tools exist out there, one of the most popular being the laser inserts.  I have used them and they do work, however I am not a big fan simply becasue as an instructor I have had two different students show up to a class with these in their barrel.  They had been using them in dry practice and forgot to remove them.  Both loaded up and attempted to fire the gun with live ammunition in it.  NOT a good idea!  Thankfully they were caught and neither htem nor their guns were  harmed but it could have been very differnet.  IF you use an insert you must be dilligent about removing when you finish dry practice! 

I often will also use the Penny Drill to work on my trigger control.  Trigger control is one of the most importnat of the shooting fundamentals and perhaps the most difficult to master.  Just place a penny on the front sight of your pistol and then pratice pressing the trigger without dropping the penny.  When you can do that consistently, your trigger control will improve. 

Lastly, when you are finished, load your gun up with your defensive ammunition and say out loud at least three times, "the gun is now loaded.  The gun is now loaded.  The gun is now loaded."  You have just been practicing pressing the trigger on that gun.  DO NO pick it up one more time to try it again.  When dry practice is over, its over.