Pistol Mastery

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Making It Simple

Recently Kenny noticed that I bend my elbows too much, and probably have sights "floating" in the recoil, rather than snap back on target. I've started looking into that, and quickly learned that bringing the gun just a few inches forward creates a more solid arms stance, speeds up the transitions and cuts vertical sight movement in half. Not locking the elbows, just simply opening them a bit more, and engaging the triceps.

It's hard to make this into a habit, so I started paying additional attention to my arms in dry fire. And that's when I came up with with this simple approach, that works the same in Dry- and Live-Fire

Look at the Target

Put your "virtual crosshair" at the exact spot where you want your POI to be. Look first, then move. Prefer Eyes movement to Head movement, avoid moving shoulders and/or hips if transition is less than 120 degrees.

"Pull" the Gun "into" the Target

Mechanically "pull" is the wrong term here, but mentally, this is exactly how good transitions and recoil control started to feel for me. Rather than discrete one-time push, pull is a continous action, that doesn't cease until last good shotcall on target.

In freestyle, it feels like 2 invisible rubber-bands, starting at the shoulders and ending in the desired POI.

Let the sights "just appear" there

I've always get better transitions, draw, reloads, and splits when I don't think about sight-picture recovery. Just let the body do its job. Look at the spot, let the sights appear there. Don't micromanage it.

Keep "Pulling Into" the Target

Trigger press, recoil, movement - all this will disturb the alignment. Instead of treating these things as separate events and trying to "recover" from them - simply keep "Pulling Into" the Target. I've noticed that when I do that - there's not much difference for my body in disturbances caused by transition, recoil, draw or movement. All it knows and has to do, is how to pull the gun into the target, everything else just doesn't matter. Keep Pulling it Into the Target.

Science?

I can probably google and copy-paste some shit here about neural pathways, hand-eye coordination, so called "muscle memory" and try to justify this whole thing with science, or at least it's appearance.

I won't, it doesn't matter. Truth is - "Making It Simple" works. It's not easy and takes a lot of time.

But it works.