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.
Day 2
Trigger Prep
Today was focused on breaking down the trigger stroke. After working on maintaining a solid sight picture while paying attention to the take-up, I repeated yesterday’s work on maintaining a solid sight picture all the way through the trigger pull. I ended up doing a 50-round session and, while my overall average was down from my benchmark of 94.1, I’d say that a 91.9 isn’t a bad average with 5x the shots fired.
I need to spend a little more time understanding how the Mantisx is determining my problems. Much of what it’s stating (breaking the wrist, pushing, too much trigger finger, too little trigger finger just seem hard to believe. For example, I feel pretty confident that the pad of my index finger placement is consistent on the trigger. And unless I’m making micro movements that I just can’t visibly perceive, I’m not sure how I’m going to resolve those issues. I suppose time will tell, The white dots indicate shots over 95.
Day 3
Slow Drawstroke
“Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.” That is the general mantra for today’s training. I chose to do the complete cycle from holster draw, presentation, and re-holstering. My wife looked at me a little oddly while I was taking what felt like an eternity to draw, but after 30 years I’m used to strange looks.
What I found interesting is how, as I was almost done with the presentation to the target, my eyes would snap to the sights. If you know anything about cinematography, it felt like my brain was using a follow focus. You know the look. Two subjects are in frame. The first person is closer to the camera and is in focus while the other person is out of focus. Then, with a smooth transition, the focus changes to the other person. That’s exactly how my eyes were working. The sights would go from blurry to crystal clear.
Continuing to build upon the previous days’ work, I also repeated those exercises. Looking forward to what tomorrow has in store.
Day 4
Sight Transition
Ok, today was a struggle. Not because of the task (well, sort of) but mostly because of my eyes. My left eye has very good distance vision. My right eye struggles. Both eyes struggle close-in. Without my contacts, the sights are mostly a blur so my brain has to figure out where the darker areas are which make up the sights. Accurately judging sight alignment is difficult since I’m really only judging blurriness.
Trying to practice transitioning my vision from the front sight to the target and back is a challenge to say the least. I’m not really able to see a difference where the focus changes. Definitely something to keep working on.
Day 5
Moving to Line of Sight
This was a good day. Transitioning the weapon to the target. I chose to go from the holster with a full draw. I did pretty well with the transitions and my sights were almost always aligned.
Of course, the length of each practice session is growing as you continue to review the previous days’ exercises. It’s going to be some long sessions once I get to the 21 day mark.
Unfortunately, I’m not managing my time well and I’m starting too late. I’m not leaving enough time to couple this with my Mantisx course so I need to do better. I hate to losing my shooting streak but I have to keep starting over.
A new training too arrived at my door today, which I think will help with a number of the drills. The TitanX. While I already have a SIRT pistol (which I still haven’t found since we moved) I wanted to stick with the MantisX system and it has one built-in. I ordered the Glock 19 version since that’s what I have. More to come on that in a later post.
