Dry Practice Training – What is it?
Dry Practice training is learning new skills with the assistance of a trainer without ammunition. This is where proper techniques are developed and confirmed. In a Dry Fire environment, each element can be examined in an isolated way. This is much more productive than trying to do this with live ammunition. Without a skilled trainer present, training scars (bad habits) can be created and reinforced. That is why it is so critical to learn and train using proper techniques.
Dry practice is anything you can safely do at home without ammunition after the skills have been properly established.
We use Blue Plastic inert non-firing guns, Chamber snake Barrel Blocks when training unless we are at a range working with live ammunition.
Barrel Blocks—Chamber Snake
* Safely disables firearm for training purposes. * Provides visual evidence of disabled firearm even with chamber closed. * Firearm cannot be fired with barrel block in place.
Things to practice with a barrel/chamber block. 1 trigger press. Hold the now inert gun in front of your belly and look down at it. Pay attention to the front sight. As you work the trigger look for front sight movement. A tiny shudder won’t be enough to miss the target. Once you start moving your trigger finger don’t stop until the gun goes click. Reset the trigger and repeat. 2 use a timer with random start signal enabled. Start with your finger inside the trigger guard but do not touch the trigger. When the timer beeps pull the trigger quickly while paying attention to the front sight. 3 with your inert gun in a ready position, look at a spot on the target that you want and move your gun so that your sight shows up on the target. Move the gun from target to target by repeating the exercise.
Blue guns.
The only gun I draw from my holster in dry practice is an inert blue gun that looks exactly like my everyday carry gun. I do not point any guns blue or otherwise at any humans, pets or myself. I draw my blue inert gun from concealment to a ready position. This is the same ready position that I start my live fire exercises from at the indoor range (where holster draw is not allowed). I can focus on moving my hands from various starting positions. I can stop at the moment my hand establishes a quality grip before the draw. I can move as I’m drawing. Take the time to do things like tucking in your undershirt between draws. Reholster slow for safety practice. Make sure you’re not muzzling yourself. (pointing the gun at yourself is a bad habit). It is not necessary to practice drawing the gun from concealment to a sight picture. We are mainly focused on establishing a quality grip and moving quickly to the ready position.