By George Emanuel
Well, snowflake let me put a big pin in that bubble right from the get-go. Bullshit!
You can practice the wrong things or the right things improperly and you will succeed in imprinting your brain with garbage. Remember computers, “garbage in, garbage out”? Well don’t take this the wrong way but your brain is a computer. I can be smart or stupid. It will be what you teach or accept it to be.
Perfect practice makes perfect. Practicing imperfectly, or at least not doing the absolute best you can is just practice. Practice is a waste of good ammunition, so it should be done at home utilizing dry fire techniques and drills.
The range or live fire is validation that your practice is having the desired effect. You are thus getting the most of your value range time and resources.
With all of the training aids available to us today there is no excuse to not practice when you have even just a few minutes. The advent of laser training systems has really advanced our ability to train virtually anywhere, anytime. So no how busy you are, you do have time to practice.
There should be if any stress when you practice other than perhaps the stress you generate in trying to do each movement and repetition perfectly.
You are actually building neural pathways in the brain which are being programmed to repeat a specific action as they receive them. You have heard of garbage in, garbage out. Well, your brain and its neural pathways are like a computer, you put the wrong thing in and you will not get out the right thing.
With each repetition of an exercise, you are insulating these neural pathways with Myelin which is produced to insulate and protect the axiom. The myelin sheath not only helps protect the axiom, it also increases the speed at which instructions are transmitted and acted upon. ( any doctors out there please forgive me if I have butchered this explanation, I am not a doctor (obviously) but I do sometimes stay at a Holiday Inn)
We need to be mindful of this when learning any new skill. The brain needs to be taught what we want to do so that it can do its job according to our instructions efficiently.
One of the wonderful things about the brain is its ability to separate and isolate different stimuli and input. By this I mean that muscle movement prior to the actual ignition of the primer is identical to the brain whether done in dry fire, or in live fire. Simply put in practical terms your brain is as dumb as a rock and can’t tell live fire from dry fire. We will leave the discussion of recoil and noise management for another time, but these can also be mastered more quickly by dry firing. That, however, is another article for another day.
So OK Myelins, Neural Pathways, Axons, enough of the neurological terminology already!
OK, OK I get it. And now you do too.
With several thousand good, perfect repetitions of a movement, you program your brain to perform it without you even being conscious of the performance.
Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. Start slow, but perfectly. Speed will come as
a natural part of the process. Do not interfere by adding the stress of trying to do it quickly until you do it consistently and, perfectly without thought.
So what’s a good ratio of dry fire to live fire? It depends somewhat on the individual and how often they dry fire as well as the quality of the time spent. Quality will always trump quantity where the practice is involved. I would suggest that 25 to 1 is not an unreasonable ratio of dry fire to live fire. This can likely be done in ten to twenty minutes per day and would only take ten days.
Think seriously about a laser training system for your dry fire. for the cost of the saved practice ammunition, you can purchase the gear and shoot for free after the first 2000 dry snaps or less. And you can get instant visual feedback with many systems, as well as session-to-session performance tracking
Perfect Practice Makes Perfect.