Dry fire practice is a brilliant way to maintain or improve your skills even when you can’t get to the firing range on a regular basis. If you’re not familiar with it, dry fire training is the intentional deliberate practice of aiming and firing your weapon without using live ammunition so that you can get the practice of aiming and firing into your neurology, into muscle memory.
Other skill sets outside of firearms use this same concept. For example, if you play a music instrument, it’s likely that you have practiced scales on your instrument so that you can play those scales without thinking about them.
Or take martial arts. Bruce Lee is reputed to have recommended repeating the same kick 1,000 times because he didn’t fear the man who could do a thousand different kicks. He had a healthy respect, though, for the man who could execute an action right consistently over and over and over. That’s what dry fire training does for your shooting skills.
But, dry fire training, like anything else, has its downsides. A writer going by the name of Ray I writes about it this way:
If you’re not doing dry fire training you really should give it a try, it’s a great way to help you become a much better shooter without having to go to the range. I try to get in some dry fire trigger time almost daily. The only downside of dry fire training is having to constantly re-rack your slide after every triggerpull in order to reset the trigger. It interrupts your flow and becomes tedious after a while.
That’s the aggravation. The interruption can keep you from getting into the practice groove. However, if you own a Glock, Ray also mentions a solution to this problem:
Well the folks over at glocketrainer.com have come up with a simple yet clever solution.
Their Glock E-Trainer is a device that attaches to the slide of your Glock and allows you to dry fire your gun without having to cycle the slide. The Glock E-Trainer installs in seconds and works with most Glockmodels with normal slide serrations, sorry fish gill Glocks. The only downside I see with this product is it actually prevents the trigger from breaking, so if you’re working on your trigger control this may not work for you. For other training situations it may fit the bill however.
Think about it. If you’re dry fire training, you’ll be able to draw, aim, fire (without it breaking), holster your firearm, and repeat. Over and over and over. You’ll be able to become the person that can the job done when you need to because you’ve practiced it hundreds and thousands of times in dry fire training.
So, if you have a Glock, you may want to consider this Glock trainer, and, if you have another make of firearm, you still should consider adding dry fire training into your daily routine. All it takes is one incident to make all that training worthwhile.