Like many of you, we have been sheltered in place for what feels like several months now. During this time a lot of people have been complaining that they haven’t been able to go to the range or practice. Which is bizarre to me, because 80% of my practice happens at home already! I use my range time to confirm what I’ve been doing at home is working. So, with that in mind, here are a few things you can do at home to keep training.
Everything is built on dry firing. As always, make sure your gun is safe. MAKE VERY SURE! You are in the house with your family, triple check the gun! Getting familiar with your pistol on an intimate level doesn’t need fancy lasers. You can practice reloading, drawing from concealment, and more from your couch. One thing I like to do is to give myself a target to react to on TV. For instance, anytime I see a TV, or a plate, or a car while watching a show I need to draw from concealment and dry fire on the target before its back off screen. You will find this is harder than you imagine because those kinds of images are usually only on screen for a second or 2 in the background. But those quick targets can really help push you.
There are a huge amount of options from laser cartridges, SIRT practice pistols, and targets, like those from Laserlyte, that you can use to do more interactive drills. These are active feedback systems where you aim, and fire and it gives you immediate feedback. Depending on the system it could be timing you or showing your groupings. Now these systems can get expensive, going upwards of $150 for home use. There are also bigger and more complex systems like those from LASR that use virtual courses of fire.
Another great option is to give yourself a course of fire or a drill to do. For instance, you need to get out of bed and run to the front door, turn and dry fire on 3 predetermined targets in your house. Or you can set up a bunch of cups at varying distances and dry fire on them in a certain order, kind of like a memory game. All of our phones have timers on them so you can add a level of increased pressure the more you do these kinds of drills.
Just because we are stuck at home, doesn’t mean our skills need to atrophy. Take the time, 5 minutes a day, to do some training. Assemble and disassemble the gun without looking, practice reloading without looking, or do some of these dry fire exercise. And again, I can’t stress this enough, make sure the gun is unloaded before you start pulling the trigger in your home! We have all been given the luxury of time at home to train and be better than we were yesterday. Stay safe and keep training.
