Anticipating recoil.

First topic message reminder :

Is there a sure fire way to rid one's self of anticipating recoil with the .45? I think I'm getting worse instead of better. Maybe someone can give me that one bit of advice that I have yet to try and it will cure this slump I'm in. I'm shooting near Expert scores with the .22 in training today, but couldn't break 700 with the .45 if my life depended on it. Toss the advise out there, verbally abuse me if necessary, I can take it, I need it. Thank you.

Mike, now you gotta shoot a match and prove your 45 scores are as good as your 22 scores. It took me 3 years and 15000+ rounds to get on my way to overcoming my flinch, I feel I was pretty sensitive to recoil from the start. I recently broke 2500 but still feel I have a long way to go still.

I've only been in two matches in my life.  I've got a long way to go, in getting decent with a 45, assuming I ever get there.   I bought 1000 rounds of bullets from Magnus, and will start loading them instead of using the WWB.

I'm not saying I'm "good", only that after firing 100 rounds of WWB the flinch went away.  If I keep using WWB, it will probably come back, and I'll have to do this over again, but I have a better plan, using Terry's bullets and the load he suggested, 2.8 grains of Bullseye.


I bought a pair of "wrist weights", 1.5 pounds each, and started wearing them for half of each dry-firing session, with whatever gun I was working with.  My Les Baer used to feel like a block of steel, and holding it up was tiring.  Put these weights on for half of a session, and my arms started quivering towards the end - but when I took them off for the second half of the dry-firing, the gun might just as well have been made from plastic.  Try it.

With the Model 41 I'm doing the same thing, and little by little the red dot seems more likely to stay put where I want it.  Again, removing the weights after using them for a while, and the gun weight seems to vanish.

Load up some blanks (no primers or powder) or have someone load them mixed with live rounds in your magazines. Start shooting. When it goes click without movement, remember that. Dry firing kind of helps. Shoot more. The wrist muscles are the hardest to develop, the stronger they are the easier to overcome anticipation.

Jon Eulette wrote:11# recoil spring and 3.5gr BE with 185 or 200 gr lswc should work fine. You can use same load for long & short line.
Jon

What is going on with my gun?  I have loaded 185 swchp and 3.5 BE and it fails to eject almost every time with a 10# spring and also with a 9# spring. The 200gr and 3.5 BE works perfect.  Prior to this I had an 11# spring and shot 185 and 4.1 BE with no issues. The 3.5 feels so much better.  I have an ultra dot on top just for reference.  

What can I do?

Typically swaged bullets require a tad more power than a hard cast bullet.  I run the Magnus  185 SWCHP with 3.8 BE  and a 10 lb spring. Slide mount 

Every gun is a bit unique.

200 lswc seats deeper into the case and will have more pressure than a 185. Some guns might complain and not shoot a 185 with smaller powder charges. In my experience I can run 3.5 in 99% of the pistols I work on. I have a really heavy slide (no front cuts) with rib and Aimpoint Micro that will shoot 3.4 but only with 200's. It's difficult to diagnose your pistol online
Jon

Keep in mind that the shooter becomes part of the equation. First is poor hold, everyone understands that but body mass must also be considered. A 1911 working fine for a shooter that weighs 250 lbs.but will have problems when someone in the 90 lbs class shoots it. Even the AMU has the problem, young new shooter being much lighter have problems that the older heavier shooters are not having and occurs when using the same gun. When Adam first started shooting he was much less than 90 lbs was having problems with loads that shot well with me shooting the same pistol. Yeah I was a few pounds (probably quite a few) too many and near 200 lbs at the time.

Things are moving in a positive direction for me and this .45. Trained this morning. Dry fired 5 times at the line, then loaded 3 mags. 15 shots of timed fire at 25 yards. 3.3 grains of Titegroup and 185 grain LSWCHP bullets. Very manageable recoil. 10 of 15 shots in the black, the remaining 5 would be 8 ring, which should be into Sharpshooter territory. Things actually remained about the same for the 50 rounds I fired today. It can be done!

Froneck wrote:Keep in mind that the shooter becomes part of the equation. First is poor hold, everyone understands that but body mass must also be considered. A 1911 working fine for a shooter that weighs 250 lbs.but will have problems when someone in the 90 lbs class shoots it......

Maybe, at 140 pounds, that is something I need to consider.  The old books said to hold a 1911 as tight as you can, up to the point at which you start shaking.  I'm still trying to improve how I hold and shoot, so the gun feels stable and doesn't move when dry firing.  

It says in the fine print that if the sights are aligned properly, and the shooter doesn't mess that up while firing, the hole in the target will be very close to what you're aiming at.  Therefore the reverse is likely true, if the hole is off, then either the sights weren't aligned correctly, or the gun moved.  The biggest cause of the gun moving is...  anticipation.  I no longer think it can be eliminated, but I believe it can be controlled.  The better the control gets, the better the shooting will be.  Right?   :-)

mikemyers wrote:....The biggest cause of the gun moving is...  anticipation.  I no longer think it can be eliminated, but I believe it can be controlled.  The better the control gets, the better the shooting will be.  Right?   :-)

I debate that trigger control (or lack there off) is the largest cause of gun movement.  Several high master have told me they know the gun is going off they anticipate it, but the focus is fully on good trigger control.

Dry firing conditions your subconscious to what a perfect trigger release is.  The more it is ingrained in your subconscious the less you have a poor trigger release due to your focus changing to the coming recoil and preacting to it.
- Dave

'dronning', when you're standing there, ready to take your shot, and you've done your best to hold the gun as still as possible, and you're ready to start to fire, keeping the sights lined up, if it isn't a poor release that causes the bullet to miss, then what is the largest cause of movement?  

I think you're saying it's the shooter's hands, as they are holding the gun (anticipation), not the finger that is applying pressure to the trigger.  Is that what you mean?

Mike,

Either I am reading what you're saying incorrectly, or you're missing something.
Recoil anticipation means that the gun is moving without proper control just before the shot actually goes off. This means that the shooter is thinking: "In just a moment, there will be this loud noise, bright flash and the gun will slam into my palm and jerk it all over the place. I don't like this! I am a bit afraid of it! Here it comes, oh, boy!"
Obviously, in an average person's head these thoughts are not articulated so well, but this is what happening. Therefore, the shooter moves either or both, their hand (squeezing the gun tighter with all or some fingers) and their trigger finger (moving it in a quick uncontrolled fashion - jerking the trigger) in an anticipation of the unpleasant events, which are sure to happen when the shot goes off.

Therefore, your hold (arc of movement) has nothing to do with recoil anticipation. How hard you are squeezing the gun (hard or soft hold - in this case, hold has a different meaning) will help, because a hard hold will limit the uncontrolled squeezing of the gun. However, your trigger control (not quickly jerking it) is the biggest contributing factor to recoil anticipation, and mastering trigger control is the largest battle in reducing recoil anticipation.

But the best way to eliminate it is to follow your shot process. For a beginner shooter, the shot process should be very detailed, especially for the time between lifting the gun from the bench until the shot goes off. Your shot process should specify continued, uninterrupted, steady movement of the trigger (or applying steadily increasing pressure on the trigger, which is the same thing). If the trigger press feels wrong, relax the trigger finger, bring the gun down and start again. Focus so much on this trigger movement that you have no time left to wonder what will happen when the gun goes off.

Hopefully it helps - this line of thinking helped me and I spent a lot of time writing things like this in my shooter's journal.

Regards,
Oleg.

Oleg G wrote:......Focus so much on this trigger movement that you have no time left to wonder what will happen when the gun goes off....

Oleg, understood, thanks.  Lots of good information there.  I'm already trying to do what you wrote, but for one thing.  My brain seems to do best when it's concentrating on one thing at a time, rather than "multi-tasking".  I have a choice of paying the most attention to the trigger or the sights.  One or the other seems like it needs to be left to my sub-conscious, which is already busy looking at so many other things.

Keeping the sights in perfect alignment is what I'm mostly concentrating on now, although sometimes I go back and forth between that and the trigger.  I spend a lot of time dry-firing, and once I see zero movement in my front sight when the gun 'fires', I pay more attention to the sights.  If I suspect the gun moved, I go back to the trigger.  By the end of half an hour, I'm much more pleased now than I was before.

For me, concentrating on both sights and trigger would be like trying to write the numbers from 1 to 10 with my left hand, while writing the alphabet with my right.  I would need to do it the same way a computer does multi-tasking, switching back and forth.  Is that what the best shooters do?

Mike,
We can ONLY focus on ONE thing at a time. That's why we train each fundamental independently; grip, sight aligment, breathing, stance, trigger pull.
That way each fundamental is in your subconscious mind. So when you focus on trigger squeeze the subconscious does the rest.
Don't over analyze everything. Just learn each fundamental correctly and belive in it! When we think too much we don't shoot as well as letting subconscious do it for us.
Jon

Jon beat me to it but I'm going to post it anyway.

Simply put, if you jerk the trigger because you expect a bang the gun will move up down right or left.  All fundamentals are important, but the very last thing you do is release the trigger/follow through.

My comments are about focusing and executing a smooth trigger release being the key.  If you try and stop "anticipation" it's like trying to solve a math problem by focusing on all the wrong ways to do it, in order to get it right.  Our nature is to fix things but following that instinct means we spend too much time analyzing what went wrong when we should be focusing on what we did when it went right. 

This is a simple sport:
Learn what it takes to get a 10 then repeat it, 
it's not an easy sport 
We are easily distracted (squirrel)

Your shot process should keep your mind on task, if it doesn't then it's not a good shot process.
- Dave

Mike my weight response was to make others understand why bullet weight/powder charge/spring weight/ ect. might work for some shooters and and not others. I did what was needed to make Adams gun work not try to duplicate someone's load. If the mind is on fundamentals anticipation isn't a problem. Understand that recoil is after the bullet left the barrel. The old saying about the 45 was to grip it until the oil started to come out of the grips. That's not good, the tighter you grip the harder it is to move the trigger finger. When shooting ball back when 230gr US issue was provided at Perry and only ammo allowed in the National Match and Presidents 100 I had problems holding the gun due to missing my trigger finger and using the middle finger. After shooting the first shot the gun would pivot slightly in my hand therefore changing my grip and finger placement on the trigger no matter how tight I gripped the gun. Floyd Aikman (2650 shooter and good ball shooter) demonstrated his hold. To see him shoot it looked as if the loads he was using were extremely hot because of the amount of perceived recoil. What he did was to hold long enough to allow the gun to function then relax and allow the gun to move freely which actually isn't that much. I adopted that hold, the gun no longer pivoted and I went to to become Distinguished and get the Presidents 100 tab. Later I was shooting in the 280's in the National Match.

Hi, and thanks again.  Gee, this thread was by Mike38, so maybe he's the one that should be mostly involved in the discussions.  I get so involved in these discussions that I read everything, and I find that so much of it relates to me.

The things that all of you have posted have proved invaluable to.  I'll post today's target below  -- this is the first time with my 45 that out of 50 rounds, only one was what I'd call "wild", and even then, it is close enough that it might just count as a bad shot.  Maybe I've gotten rid of my own 45 caliber anticipation.

Memorizing the shooting process was helped by doing the same thing over and over and over when dry firing, trying to do everything exactly the same each time.  To make certain I was doing what I thought you guys meant, I only loaded one round in a magazine, took the single shot, then set the gun down.  I know my hands were in the same place for every shot, as was the trigger finger.  Using the lighter "target ammo", I think my "anticipation" was gone.  With good ear muffs over good plugs, there was minimal noise, the recoil was also minimal, and I had been dry firing so many times, my body just did what I had got it into the habit of doing.

Jon made suggestions a while back, and they are all now part of my routine.  I tried today to let the sight alignment take care of itself, and concentrate on the trigger.  This went OK in targets 1 and 2 below, fired "slowly", and not so well in target #3 where I tried to smoothly add more pressure to the trigger, doing it much more quickly.  Not good.  So, for the last target I did what I think you guys described - concentrated SO much on the trigger press that everything else was blanked out.  

For better or worse, here's the target, 25 yards, target ammo,  Les Baer, 10 rounds at each target.


It is VERY much appreciated how so many people here offer valuable advice.  I'm not so sure I realize how valuable it is, until I try it!   Then I wonder why I did it differently for so long... 

One more thing that I can blame on "anticipation" I think.  I posted the target in the previous response, because several people here offered advice that helped me, but it wasn't really showing up in my results.  I thought I did things better, but the targets didn't show much of any improvement.

I went to the range today for yet another chance to figure out what I was doing wrong, and also to try out one-handed shooting.  The targets were set up at 25 yards, as before.  After shooting another target just like the ones up above, I put up a plain piece of white paper, no bull.  As I fired off 10 rounds (one at a time, reloading the magazine after each one) I was amazed at how something had changed - they were more precise than I have been able to do at even 15 yards.   Maybe seeing the bull is part of what agitates the anticipation?  The best guess I can make is that my concentration, that should have been 100% on the front sight, was being influenced by the target.  If I wasn't really SEEING the front sight, that would also explain it.

With no "bull", there is no longer any way to miss the target.  There is no effort to put the bullet in any specific place, or even in a specific area.  It just aligning the sights, and applying pressure to the trigger smoothly.  Honestly, I didn't expect to get even a decent target, let alone a good one.




The other target was shot one handed, left hand in pocket.  I've never done this before - I thought with a 45 it would be very hard on me.   There wasn't any time for anticipation to be a problem, as the gun seemed to double in weight, and every so often my hand decided to "quiver", and an shooting was more difficult so I didn't have any left over ability to anticipate.  I'm amazed all 10 rounds are on the paper - I thought one of them was off the paper until I just looked more carefully.


Back to anticipation - when there's only one round in the gun, and there's no target, therefore no anxiety at hitting something, and the ammunition is mild, there is very little left to cause any anticipation.

The blank target (no bull) drill is to teach you how to accept your wobble/hold and align the sights without distraction of a target bull. The target contributes to seeing your wobble and your eye may be focusing on the target instead of the front sight. This is why dry firing on blank wall is vital to learning the fundamentals when broken down individually. Good job!
Jon

Mike,
 you mean we weren't lying, blank targets actually help someone progress. it's almost like some of us have years coaching others to help them improve?

Jon, that makes perfect sense.  I'm already mostly dry-firing at a blank wall, so I can see if/when my front sight moves.  As to "focus", my post-cataract eyes can't focus, and my shooting glasses don't have the perfect prescription, so I'm using my regular "progressive" glasses, positioned to make the front sight sharp...  but I think you're right, my brain "wants" to see the target.   Hey, thinking back, that's also what made it so easy to align the sights in front of a piece of white paper!!!

Knowing all that, I need to find a way to keep my concentration where it belongs, on the front sight.  I think that most Bullseye shooters keep their front sight dull black.  A dull black front sight in front of a black bull makes it difficult.  Any advice on how to improve that?  What am I missing??


Robert, nope, you guys (and that old book!) are spot on.  I never expected it to help THIS much though.  Wow.  That's twice that the "old ideas" are still valid - along with shooting a box of hardball to cure flinching!

Mike,

Keep reading those old books.  Here's the tip from the Army Marksmanship Unit Advanced Guide. Please read the entire book, if you haven't already done so.

Please follow this link and look at figure 2-4c:

http://www.bullseyepistol.com/chapter2.htm

The sight picture shows you:
1. Holding the sights BELOW the bull, known as the 6-o'clock hold. This way you can see the front sight clearly. You can even use the sub-6-o'clock hold, leaving some white space between your sights the bottom of the bull
2. Focusing on the front sight, should result in seeing the bull blurred, which is exactly what you want, since you don't really need or want to see the scoring rings, but instead want to have your sights (the front one) in sharp focus.

Regards,
Oleg.

Oleg, that would be wonderful for precision, but not too good for accuracy.  I shoot at many different targets, large, small, even a page full of small "dots" every so often.  The 6-o'clock hold isn't good for that.

Mike,

You wrote:

"...most Bullseye shooters keep their front sight dull black.  A dull black front sight in front of a black bull makes it difficult.  Any advice on how to improve that?  What am I missing??"

I gave you the answer from a perspective of a Bullseye shooter and the rationale behind employing this method for Bullseye shooting.
For other pistol shooting styles, of course you will have to use a different aiming and holding technique.
Unfortunately, one size, in this case, does not fit all...

Regards,
Oleg.

Kid: "I want to hit home runs!!!"
Coach:"Great, let's go to the batting cage and learn fundamentals"
Kid: "I don't want to learn fundamentals I want to hit home runs!!"
Coach:"I understand, if you learn fundamentals you can hit home runs"
Kid:"I don't want to learn fundamentals I just want to hit home runs!!"
Coach:"Do you know what fundamentals are?"
Kid: "I want to hit home runs!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"


loop this as many times as you want....