Trigger control/dry fire training

From Grey's Guns

We want to train our unconcious mind. Answer: visualization.

With your eyes closed:
Visualize a sight picture on your chosen target in your mind while simultaneously pressing through on the trigger. Feel the trigger, how it might creep and wiggle under finger pressure. Try to get as close to dropping the hammer as you can, and hold it as you watch those imagined sights. You should ignore the target if your mind wants to stick one down there for you to look at instead.

Watch the sights in your mind’s eye and you’ll see them dip, jerk and do all sorts of things. Feel the recoil and blink, perhaps. That’s great! Let your visualized shooting session seem as real as possible without too much conscious direction. Just allow yourself to come back to the sights, focus on the front blade, align them and press.

Be focused on the process of operating the trigger, and learn to press through without tension, convulsive grasping of the hand, jerking or other funny stuff in response to the appearance of aligned sights in your mind.

Then, go the the range. You must allow your subconscious to do it for you, since that’s what that last two weeks of intense repetition was for. Trust me, you’ve learned it. To actually DO it, you just occupy the ego with something safe it can do to help, rather than letting it take over in a doomed effort to make it happen and be the star of the show “now that it counts.”

So, give the ego a job: let it watch the sights, aligned in the notch just as you’ve visualized. If you visualize the pistol firing when the sights appear aligned on the target, that’s what will happen. You have only to step (your ego) out of the way and watch that front sight.


You also need to have equal faith in your ability to call each shot, and know where it went based on what the sights were doing as they lifted off the target during recoil.

Calling shots at speed means using information from the sights to determine whether the previous shot hit or missed. There’s two ways to shoot: One is reactively, in which the sight picture is read on some conscious level and coordinated with a more or less sub-conscious action of trigger pull. That’s the “watch your front sight” school, and it works…sort of. The other is proactively, in which the sight picture is recalled on a lower-conscious level as verification that the subconscious saw what it needed to see when it broke the previous shot, while the subconscious is busy making the present one. This relates to the mode of observation that Enos and others describe. The conscious mind tends to linger in the just-past, not the present. If you ever wondered why some top shooters could do the things they do, this paragraph is really the whole enchilada.