Avoiding Flinching

Thoughts?
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Standard recipe for flinching has traditionally been - - step down to a .22.

I used to follow that - - until I began shooting a .22 nearly 100% of the time & developing a flinch with the .22.

The big question there became, where does one go from a .22?
- Dry fire?
- BB gun?
- Something else?

I stumbled on a cure by accident. I got the flinches once at the range & only had a 1911 in .45 acp with me along with the .22. Actually, I had a Ciener .22 conversion on my Kimber and I had the .45 acp magazine and upper along with me & a box of .45 shells.

Since I didn't want to waste the hour drive to the range and the hour drive back home, I decided to shoot the .45 - just for the heck of it.

To my surprise, after a magazine, the flinch disappeared. I put the .22 conversion back on and went through a brick of .22's without so much as a hint of a flinch.

Since then, I've come to believe that it's the change from one thing to another that's important - - not the actual lack of recoil or increase in recoil.
Anything that can "override your brain" - and force you to concentrate on the basics will work.
 
Zorro said:
But .38 Special isn't a hard gun to shoot.
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That's true. And to minimize recoil from even the very mild .38 non-plus-P (like American Eagle's) for practice and flinch mitigation, I bought a heavy (40 oz) 686 to shoot it in. But I was surprised that even with that minimal recoil, I STILL tend to flinch. No matter how light the recoil is, as long as I'm expecting a bang (no matter how trivial), instead of a click, the flinch is still there. And for me, at this stage, the flinch doesn't seem to vary with different amounts of recoil (all the way up to full-spec .44mag in a 37 oz Model 69. For some crazy reason, there is a "night and day" difference for me between dry-firing (where I KNOW I'm going to get a click) and live-firing (where I KNOW that I MAY get a bang, even a mild one). That's the truly AMAZING and BIZARRE thing about flinching!
 
If you're still flinching from light loads I would recommend doing some rapidfire sessions. Sometimes a flinch develops because you were so concentrated on lining up those sites perfectly and thinking about when the trigger is going to break that you don't have a smooth even follow through.
I have found that the best way to deal with that is to shoot at least 1000 rounds in draw and rapidfire type scenarios where there is no time to think not much time to lineup sites and you really have to just worry about getting the shots out instead of when they're going to break. I would recommend Looking up the tyro course in the NRA action pistol rulebook and see if you can get a draw and all your shots out in half of the maximum time allowed for each string. You'll be lucky if you can get shots off that quickly every time but pushing yourself to that limit while at the same time focusing on accuracy will do wonders to push through any flinch issues you have imho.
 
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