My son and I, along with three good friends, were blessed with excellent handgun training from Jim Crews today, and will experience more of the same tomorrow.
Jim started out by having us simply fire three good shots into a group with no time limit. We repeated essentially the same exercise several times through the day.
Will and I were talking tonight about the results, front sight wobble, and trigger control. I had previously kidded with him about "Love your wobble, embrace your wobble, be one with your wobble", and wasn't really kidding. To more accurately summarize the concept
To shoot your best group, shoot your best group.
Except for the rawest beginner, most of us have a pretty consistent degree of sight wobble when trying to hold our best sight picture and sight alignment. We should be able to maintain that degree of hold while pressing the trigger to fire. What tends to happen instead is that we are watching the front sight slowly orbit our aiming point or bullseye and we think "Oh boy, that looks perfect RIGHT NOW" and try to ambush or snatch the shot. We invariably hit well outside of where the shot would have printed had we simply accepted our "baseline" wobble and continued with a consistent press.
With practice, we can decrease the size of our wobble zone and shrink our groups. We can't shrink our groups by trying to choose the perfect moment to shoot. Particularly with position rifle shooting, I find I can adjust my position and decrease my wobble, and that's fine. But once you've achieved that "minimum wobble position", accept it and let the shot happen.
Don't ask me if a 1911 has Buddha-nature. Going "MU" bothers the other shooters.
Jim started out by having us simply fire three good shots into a group with no time limit. We repeated essentially the same exercise several times through the day.
Will and I were talking tonight about the results, front sight wobble, and trigger control. I had previously kidded with him about "Love your wobble, embrace your wobble, be one with your wobble", and wasn't really kidding. To more accurately summarize the concept
To shoot your best group, shoot your best group.
Except for the rawest beginner, most of us have a pretty consistent degree of sight wobble when trying to hold our best sight picture and sight alignment. We should be able to maintain that degree of hold while pressing the trigger to fire. What tends to happen instead is that we are watching the front sight slowly orbit our aiming point or bullseye and we think "Oh boy, that looks perfect RIGHT NOW" and try to ambush or snatch the shot. We invariably hit well outside of where the shot would have printed had we simply accepted our "baseline" wobble and continued with a consistent press.
With practice, we can decrease the size of our wobble zone and shrink our groups. We can't shrink our groups by trying to choose the perfect moment to shoot. Particularly with position rifle shooting, I find I can adjust my position and decrease my wobble, and that's fine. But once you've achieved that "minimum wobble position", accept it and let the shot happen.
Don't ask me if a 1911 has Buddha-nature. Going "MU" bothers the other shooters.