Today I am embarking on a short journey of focused dry fire training. The goal is to take the Mantisx Basic assessment to benchmark my current status and then end the exercise with the same to determine my success. I thought I’d take you through the journey with me, so bookmark this post as it will be updated each day.
Benchmark
I knocked out my benchmark session. 10 rounds at 4 yards. Overall, I was pretty happy with the results.
The red trophy shows my best score of 99.1 while the grey trophy reflects my worst, 87.3. Shot 6 was my fastest at 8.34 seconds. Keep in mind that this isn’t a speed drill. I was focused only on trigger control.
Looking at the trace history for my best shot, I can see that I had a good bit of movement (blue) leading up to the trigger pull (yellow). What’s interesting is that as I started the trigger pull, I dropped a hair, moved right and back to the left, and the trigger broke just below where I started. Another interesting point is that I had a 1° cant which I really wasn’t aware of.
Looking at my worst shot, I had more compressed hold movement, but you can see that the muzzle moved almost straight up with the trigger pull before breaking. Definitely not my finest shot. But that’s why I’m here.
Day 1
Trigger Control & Followthrough
One of the areas I seem to struggle with according to my past Mantisx sessions is followthrough. It appears that I tend to slap the trigger rather than having a solid trigger pull after the shot. Just like a golf swing, followthrough is important. Since you still have milliseconds from the time you pull the trigger until the projectile leaves the bullet, any motion can still have a negative effect. If I can get this under control, I should see my flyer shots disappear.
Today’s exercise was centered around maintaining the sight picture while completing the trigger pull. Unfortunately, I misplaced my SIRT pistol during our move so I can’t maintain the sight picture through the reset since there isn’t one. Using the Glock 19, though, I felt pretty good after my initial benchmark round. Looking forward to seeing what’s on tap for tomorrow.
