How to stop healing a pistol

[ingun999]

Right handed shooter, hitting high and right. Seems like I am healing the pistol but dry firing is not helping. Any training techniques that might help? Thanks

 

[Wabatuckian]

Stop its antibiotics.

Seriously, what's causing you to heel it? Are you anticipating the shot?

Sometimes pistols just don't fit your hand. I'll do the same thing with a Glock or the A1 version of the 1911.

Try rotating your hand downward so you have more pressure on the web of your hand between thumb and forefinger.

 

[ingun999]

Stop its antibiotics.

Seriously, what's causing you to heel it? Are you anticipating the shot?

Sometimes pistols just don't fit your hand. I'll do the same thing with a Glock or the A1 version of the 1911.

Try rotating your hand downward so you have more pressure on the web of your hand between thumb and forefinger.

I probably was anticipating the shot when using 9mm or 45acp but have been using my G44, 22lr. No recoil there. I do have small hands and the grip can be a challenge, mostly on my revolvers.

Thanks for the rotation idea, I will try that on the next range visit. Assuming you mean rotating down means moving down the back of the grip with your hand web.

 

[2A-Hoosier23]

Bob Vogel calls it "pinching into the gun", it's the same idea as Wabatuckian's. All about getting your grip as high up on the gun as possible with both the shooting and support hand. Vids should help explain it

 

[Ziggidy]

Bob Vogel calls it "pinching into the gun", it's the same idea as Wabatuckian's. All about getting your grip as high up on the gun as possible with both the shooting and support hand. Vids should help explain it

Excellent

 

[Ziggidy]

I will have to try this technique. To be honest, I always hit my target but my shot is not always where I want it to be on the target. I have pretty much decided it was my eyes and wearing progressives. Trying to find where and how to look. Look at target or the front sight and such. I decided on focusing in on the front sight and my aiming improved quite a bit and thought, well, this is it. But these 2 vids gave me some insight and I am gonna try changing my grip. It makes sense to me.

Thanks to the OP for asking.

 

[ingun999]

Also will try this and thanks for the replies.

 

[Twangbanger]

"Heeling" the pistol is commonly accepted to mean you are anticipating recoil and "muscling" the gun at the instant of the shot. If you meant that your shots are going somewhere you don't intend them to, it is not a "where you grip the gun" issue. It is a "what you're doing at the moment of the shot" issue, and changing your grip will not address it. You can grip the gun in the perfect high location, but still muscle it at the moment of the shot.

The best method I have found is to shoot a plate rack with a pistol that has a dot sight mounted on it. The dot sight combines the front and rear sight into a single visually recognizable aiming reference, and where that dot goes between shots shows you whether you're muscling the gun or not. What you're looking for, is for that dot to work its way across that plate rack in a "bouncing" ball pattern, lifting off one plate at the shot, moving upward and over in an arc to the next plate. If the dot does anything crazy before or after the shot, like dipping below the base where the plates are mounted, then you are muscling the gun in anticipation of the shot. Your goal is to have your grip at 100% of tightness before the gun comes up on the first plate, the dot settles in, lifts off at the shot, your eyes "flick" over to the next plate, and the dot moves in a "McDonalds Arches" pattern from one plate to another with no extraneous motion, and zero change in grip pressure between or during shots. Don't over-control the gun. You are just "riding" the dot across the plates, allowing the gun to recoil upward as high as it wants to, and then settle back down on the next plate, without being forced down. You cannot stop the recoil. Just let that gun go up as high as it wants when it kicks. If you're doing it right, it will always track right back down to where your eyes "flicked" to.

The goal is not to grip the gun higher or harder than anyone else, although that helps. You don't want a perfectly "flat" gun between shots, so much as you want a gun that comes naturally back down to where you're guiding it to with your eyes, without extraneous movement or "detours" where your hands are muscling the gun. Hypothetically, the shooter with a slightly weaker grip who lets the gun recoil "high," but doesn't muscle the gun and lets it track naturally back down with no wasted motion, is better than someone who strangles the shxt out of the gun but muscles it when the gun goes off. You will eventually get a strong consistent grip that keeps the gun flat and tracks smoothly from target to target, but un-forced tracking is more important than strangling the gun and keeping it flat during recoil.

This can be done on a torso target or really any piece of paper or cardboard. I just think a plate rack is better, because it punishes bad technique more severely. On a paper target, if people shot a small group, they tend to think "they did good," but if the sight tracked all over the damn place in the process of producing that group, that's the slop you're trying to eliminate. You can shoot a small group while "heeling" every damn shot. I have done it. You just heeled every shot into the same place. That's not a good result, even though the group on paper may look nice.

You can also work this with open sights, but again, that dot sight just makes the movement so much more obvious, if you have one available to train with. I thought I was a decent plate rack shooter with open sights, but when I started using a dot sometimes, I was shocked to see that my dot was actually spending a significant amount of time _below_ the plates between shots. There was absolutely no reason for that dot to be anywhere below the plates, except for me muscling the gun down from recoil and "overshooting" the correction too far. Eliminating that extra wasted downward movement knocked almost a full second off my runs. Even if I hit them all in one try, I was wasting movement and not being as good as I could. Open sights were totally obscuring this extra wasted movement, for me.

Master level: do it one-handed. This really teaches you to be "cool" in not over-controlling the movement of the gun.

(Disclaimer: I'm not a big fan of dot sights, and don't carry them or even compete with them. But they can give you very useful info about your shooting).

 

[EricG]

300-400 rounds of 1" dot torture between several range trips helped me get rid of this.

Found that my support hand was "squeezing" just before ignition.

 

[cosermann]

You could try some ball & dummy drills. Either have a friend load some mags with dummy rounds in them, or you load a few mags with dummies at various positions, and mix them up before you go to the range. The idea, is that you do not know what mag position the dummy rounds are in.

At the range, if the pistol moves - at all - when the dummy round comes up, then you know you have a bad habit that needs to be trained out.

The other thing to ask is, are you following through?

 

[NHT3]

I will have to try this technique. To be honest, I always hit my target but my shot is not always where I want it to be on the target. I have pretty much decided it was my eyes and wearing progressives. Trying to find where and how to look. Look at target or the front sight and such. I decided on focusing in on the front sight and my aiming improved quite a bit and thought, well, this is it. But these 2 vids gave me some insight and I am gonna try changing my grip. It makes sense to me.

Thanks to the OP for asking.

I'm confused, what are you considering the target, your point of aim or the whole paper? As I've gotten older I found that focus on the front sight has become impossible because what I'm seeing is 2 fuzzy front sights. Red dot solved that problem for me because it moves my focus to the target rather than the front sight.