Beginner question: How to get rid of a nasty flinch

C

Chaosgundam

Inactive
Hi guys.

Im new here and also new to firearms in general. I have bought a Ruger LCP and am waiting on my licensing for my next firearm - a Glock 19 gen 3.

I am interested in getting into sport shooting and I try to go to the range every second week or so.

I noticed that I have one hell of a flinch when firing my firearms. Do you guys know of any techniques or exercises in order to reduce the amount of flinching? Maybe some good vids on youtube you can refer me to?
 
I'm not sure where you are with marksmanship.

Review sight alignment and trigger control.
Dry fire. Focus.

The gun is not going to hurt you. You know that,you know you flinch

Overwhelm the urge to flinch with focus .

Dry fire is practice doing it right.

Now call your shot dry firing.See your sights when the trigger breaks.Be able to say " Seven ring at 9 oclock."

You can only do that with your eyes open.

Make calling the shot part of every shot,dry or live.

You must retain the image of the sight alignment or crosshairs on the target as the shot breaks.

If you can,have a target at your firing point. Point or even mark the target where you call the shot.

Its nice if you can verify with a spotting scope,but the key is mental focus

You MUST see the sight alignment on the target as the gun fires.

If you can,your eyes were open,if you can't your eyes were closed.

Its as if you turn up the volume on focus to drown out the fear of the gun firing.

Good luck!

A 22 or airgun is very useful. Noise and recoil of larger cartridges covers up errors.

Remember each shot is training,burning habits into your brain. Don't practice doing it wrong. Make each shot as perfect as you can.

If you are squeezing the trigger and the flinch cringe begins,STOP! Don't let it win.Regroup,breath,focus.

Better you shoot 5 good shots than 100 sloppy ones.

And do wear good ear protection. That helps a lot
 
That pretty much covers it. Focus is the key, it helps block out the noise which is a big part of it. I shot hot magnums in my .41 for over 30 years and in my senior years have developed a bit of a flinch. Shooting DA has helped a lot and I almost exclusively shoot DA now other than light target rounds or standard .38 sp. Also work on your grip strength to help steady yourself. This is where the dry firing comes in, learning how to be steady. I dry fire head shots at the bad guys on my TV.
 
I will assume that you are using hearing protection and eye protection. If not the flinch is a natural body reaction to loud noises. By the way it will also save your hearing. Don't ask me how I know.

Bob
 
1. Dry fire. Dry fire. Then dry fire some more.

2. When going back to firing live ammunition, double up hearing protection: foam ear plugs and then good ear muffs.

3. Buy or borrow a .22 and shoot that -- a lot. If you can get it, start off with subsonic ammunition. Next best would be standard velocity. Possibly even CB caps or Colibres -- but he sure those will make it out the barrel of your firearm.

4. Before moving from dry fire back to live ammo, consider going to Walmart (or Pyramid Air of Air Gun Depot) and buying a BB gun or airsoft that's the same model as your real gun, or as close to it as possible. Spend trigger time on the air gun to make yourself shoot without noise or recoil to induce flinching.

5. When you get back to shooting live ammo -- even the .22 -- start off shooting from a seated position at a bench, shooting off a rest. Don't be sloppy, but don't worry too much about shooting one-hole groups. Concentrate on the basics: sight alignment, sight picture, breath control, TRIGGER CONTROL, and follow through. Follow through means keeping your eyes and the muzzle on the target (to the greatest extent possible) after the shot.

6. Don't transition back to the centerfire firearm until you are comfortable shooting a .22 with no flinch. Once you're back to the centerfire, once again begin by shooting off the bench with a rest. Once again, don't obsess with whether or not you're putting every shot in the X ring. Focus on the basics, for each shot: sight alignment, sight picture, breath control, TRIGGER CONTROL, and follow through.
 
Thanks. Currently I am shooting at a shooting range so I am using hearing protection.

Thank you so much for all the advice. It seems that it is a case of practice makes perfect. I will for sure start to implement your advices in order to get more comfortable when firing my pistols.
 
The indoor range I go to now requires you to use both plugs and muffs.

The advice about dry firing is excellent.

I agree with everybody above that concentration is an excellent thing to practice to improve your accuracy and get rid of your flinch.

One thing hampering you is that you've got a Ruger LCP, which IMhO, is an excellent handgun but a nasty little beast sound/blast/recoil wise. I'd recommend that when you go to the range and shoot it, when you find yourself flinching call it a day with the LCP and either quit shooting for the day or switch over to something easier to handle and that leads me to recommend a Ruger Mark 4 .22LR with adjustable sites and a big heavy barrel. It's fun, it's cheap ammo and again IMhO is what folk should learn to shoot with and avoid getting a flinch in the first place.

Good luck.

P.S. A Buckmark is also a really good .22LR as is an S&W Victory.
 
My son has that Ruger in 380. Says it recoil's pretty bad. If that's true, I suspect it is, get a 22 RF hand gun and practice with it till the flinch goes away or, better still, start handloading and casting your own bullet's. Shoot med loaded cast bullet and recoil should pretty much go away. As I recall that Ruger is a very small light gun with a very short barrel. With factory ammo that, to me, is a recipe for disaster. I have fairly small hands and that Ruger is much to small for me, can't get a good grip on it, little finger can't get on the stock. I carry a S&W Shield 9c. With the 7 rd magazine I have the same problem. You can get an extension for the S&W magazine that fix's the problem. Don't know that you can for the Ruger.
 
Get a cheap Airsoft gun and a lot of rounds. Then shoot it a lot.
Many of those have pretty marginal triggers and if you can control one of those a real pistol gets easy. Plus they are cheap and ammo is cheaper and no noise means that cause of flinching goes away.
And you can shoot in your basement or other room (don't let neighbors see you through the window though).
 
If I haven't been shooting for a while, I'll start flinching with handguns, even 9mm.

What I've taken to doing is starting my shooting session with mag in, but empty. And go through the exact same motions as when I live fire and dry fire. A lot of times, I'll flinch on that first one. Then I rinse and repeat until the flinch clears up.

Once I get going on training regularly again I'm fine.
 
chaosgundam said:
Thank you so much for all the advice. It seems that it is a case of practice makes perfect. I will for sure start to implement your advices in order to get more comfortable when firing my pistols.
Click to expand...
"Practice makes perfect."

Yes ... and emphatically NO! Do NOT try to power through a flinch. The correct expression is "Perfect practice makes perfect." If you practice with a bad habit (such as a flinch), you only reinforce the bad habit and make it more difficult to overcome. So to overcome a flinch, you need to practice shooting without any flinch. That's why I -- and others -- have recommended dry fire. Lots of dry fire. It's also why I have suggested a BB gun or an airsoft, and then a .22 using standard velocity or (better) subsonic ammunition. You need to train your body as well as your mind to shoot without a flinch. A flinch is an involuntary reaction to something, so continuing to do that something and hoping that you'll miraculously just stop flinching is probably counterproductive.
 
I seldom see this mentioned: SHOOT WITH BOTH EYES OPEN! One eye focused on the sights. Takes a little practice, but becomes natural pretty fast. This will not help your accuracy a whole lot, but it will better keep you ready for a real gun fight where keeping situational awareness can save your life.

The single thing in all of the above that I think is most important regarding flinch is to make sure that you SEE the sights jump on every shot. If you don't see that, you are flinching.

The way I personally got over flinching was that to do that I bought a 338 Win Mag rifle that kicked like a mule in heat. I put a nice Leupold scope on it. First shot, on the bench, my glasses went flying ... and it hurt like h*ll. I couldn't get the d*mned thing sighted in. Shots kept walking all over the target. Then I noticed that the scope was getting hammered back in the rings from the recoil. Back home, I removed the scope, got some very fine emery paper, roughed up the inside surfaces of the rings, and around the scope where it was under the rings, applied a good dose of violin bow resin to the rings, and re-mounted the scope good and tight. Next trip to the range, the scope stayed put and I got it sighted in. My flinch was horrible, that thing kicked HARD. I was not seeing the cross hairs move when the shots broke. It was an exercise in ZEN to BLOCK the coming recoil from my mind, and finally I could shoot the d*mned thing accurately.
 
A man I met at a muzzle loader shoot ,Ron Long,was known to be a pretty darn good shot. Something about the Olympics ,Coors Scheutzen trophies...
I don't have a bio on him,but the guy could shoot.
I was listening to his conversation. He had a Clausing lathe in his shop.
And he had a pellet pistol,with a pellet trap and target.

Several times a day,when he would start a power feed cut on the lathe,

He'd squeeze off a pellet at the target.

What I'm getting at is if you can find one or two minutes to dry fire just a few very focused,perfect shots a day,or twice a day, I think you can establish squeezing off perfect shots as your "normal"

I'm not sure a person will maintain that standard of focusing on "perfect" for 50 or 100 shots

Training into bad habits can be very hard to reverse.

Most modern centerfires can handle dry firing,but investing in some snap cap dummy rounds might not be a bad idea.

I can understand why you selected the Ruger LCP,and I understand why you selected a Glock 9mm for your next purchase. Those are two good guns for self defense.

As good as they are for self defense,they are not what I would recommend for learning handgun marksmanship.

A basic,used standard model Ruger 22 would be a good choice. There are a lot of them out there.Thats probably the most economic choice. There are other good choices,of course.The bull barreled Target model is even better.

You won't regret having a good 22 pistol.

In case you have not already learned this,your eye cannot focus on the sights and the target at the same time.
Its critical you focus on the sights. You'll see your target. But you must focus on equal light gap on both sides of the blade in the notch,and the top of the blade and the top of the notch being level. As you hold that alignment,the gun will wander around on the target. Thats OK. Wander all over getting a 7 or 8 or 9 or 10.
Let the sights be mis aligned and you can miss the paper.

Now,when I say "focus",you know what to focus on.
 
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3. Buy or borrow a .22 and shoot that -- a lot.
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THis is the next step beyond dry firing. Dry firing is useful, but there is no "bang" and no recoil. Both of which are contributing components in developing a flinch and things that must be overcome to overcome the flinch.

A .22 gives you the least practical amount of blast and recoil. Work on those, until they become inconsequential. THEN, move up to the next bigger gun and do the same with it.

While the thinking part of your mind isn't scared of the loud noise and recoil, the unthinking part is, and it flinches. Repeating what scares it in the first place seldom does anything but re-enforce that fear.

Repetition with very light blast and recoil, and focus on shooting will eventually teach that unthinking part of our minds that its not really going to hurt, and that's the beginning of eradicating a flinch.
 
Your flinch is likely due to anticipation. As long as it won't harm the gun (check your owner's manual), dry-fire it for 10 minutes a day. Be calm.
 
Originally Posted by chaosgundam
Thank you so much for all the advice. It seems that it is a case of practice makes perfect. I will for sure start to implement your advices in order to get more comfortable when firing my pistols.
Click to expand...

I disagree; Practice does not make perfect; PERFECT practice makes perfect;m if you are doing things wrong and ingraining them into your memory, it will be hard to "unlearn" them. Personally, I find the LCP a handful to shoot - it is very thin, great for pocket carry, but that also makes it difficult for me to get a good consistent grip on the gun.
 
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This video by Rob Leatham made the biggest difference for me shooting handguns. ignore the title. The title was written to create an emotional response, which unfortunately worked on me, which is why i didn't bother to actually watch it for several years after it initially came out.

But once I did, and realized how intelligent Leatham's comments and training concepts were, and finally put them into practice, my shooting took a dramatic turn for the better.

https://youtu.be/li0rGtXh23I

The other thing that helped me all those years ago was to double up on my hearing pro. until I did that i never realized just how distracting the report of a gun was.
 
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