Tubb's Tips: Serious Dry Firing

Everyone dry-fires, or at least knows they should, but how sincerely do you treat this exercise? I think some people can get up there and dry-fire 20 shots and duplicate a run on a record target while others wouldn't learn a thing through the same activity.

The idea behind dry-firing is working through technical and mechanical skills and using the feedback for direction. It's a great tool that's convenient and also allows you to really focus on what you're doing. When there are fewer distractions such as recoil, you get better information.

I dry-fire all the changes I make in technical or mechanical elements, and I often discard the change without ever firing a round downrange with it.

Given enough experience with similar things in the past and also the proper amount of attention devoted to the dry-firing session, there's certainly nothing wrong with discarding a change if the feedback you get through dry-firing is telling you the change isn't working.

I always hope that dry-firing a change will lead to something else to try, and that's another positive feedback from the exercise. Changing and tuning go hand in hand. The key to benefiting from dry-firing is learning to discriminate.

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