By George E Emanuel
All of us, at one time or another, will develop a flinch. The insidious thing about a flinch is that we may not be able to recognize it during our regular practice regime.
A flinch is your subconscious reaction to the “anticipation of recoil and muzzle blast.” That pesky subconscious must be trained to accept these as a regular part of firing a gun. It will help with practice!
Flinches manifest themselves as low, left hits for right-handers and low right hits for lefties, or misses on our target. But, of course, these hits may also be caused by other faults, such as milking the gun or the trigger.
Suffice it to say they have a deleterious effect on our performance.
Dry firing can be effective in helping to overcome a flinch and can even diagnose the problem.
It sometimes reveals itself by shutting the eyes as the gun goes bang or in anticipation of it doing so.
But, it is the very sneaky flinch that can be difficult to catch.
We must first define what causes a flinch. This is easy.
A flinch is your body’s initial reaction to loud noise or violent movement. The movement we can mitigate with a proper grip. The noise is a different animal that even hearing protection does not always counteract. Your body disconnects and reacts on its own and is independent of your conscious state. The flinch dwells in the very difficult-to-reach subconscious. Flinching results from stress transmitted by the neural pathways in the brain to the subconscious. They have effectively told your brain to anticipate the shot and to flinch in reaction to that anticipation.
I can’t see it, can’t hit it!
We can train the subconscious to resist the flinch reaction with a simple drill that reveals the flinch and promotes the remedy. Kind of a twofer.
You can not use a gun with a magazine disconnect for this drill. I hope you don’t carry such a pistol, but that is for another time.
The Drill:
Empty and clear your gun
Load five rounds into your magazine
Insert the magazine, rack the slide, and set the safety if equipped
Remove the magazine
You now have your pistol loaded with a single round only and no magazine from which to strip a second shot.
Put your sights on the target.
Turn off the safety if equipped, and fire the shot. Ensure that you hold the trigger to the rear until your sights have settled back on the target.
You will now reset the trigger and pay careful attention to your sights as you press the trigger until the shot breaks.
What did your sights do as you heard and felt the “click”? Was the alignment correct throughout, and did you maintain a good sight picture with no movement? Or did the muzzle drop?
If it dropped, you found that elusive flinch you might not have seen during “live” fire.
Now for the next part of the drill. It is conditioning your subconscious. You will repeat the above with the remaining rounds in your prepped magazine. With each press of the trigger, both live and dry fire, you will concentrate on not flinching.
Repeat this with a second magazine if necessary.
If the flinch has stopped, continue with your practice session; if not, you can resume loading magazines and go through this drill at home and dry fire. Dry firing at home is much preferred over continuing live fire. It saves a lot of ammo and ineffective practice. We always practice what is right even when we don’t know what is wrong!
Your mind doesn’t know nor care that every other shot is live or dry; your concentration is training it to act the same in either case. It is just as simple as it sounds; don’t complicate or overthink it!
There is no sense in trying to practice other skills with a known flinch. Yes, it is a PITA, but you must get rid of it first. Like most problems, they must be diagnosed in order and repaired when found. I offer you a few adages I was given by a mechanic years ago. “Don’t fix what isn’t broken.” And, “Don’t change multiple things at once, or you may never know which was the true problem.” It’s no different with shooting; eliminate one thing at a time while adding skill on skill to the best of your ability until you have reached your maximum potential. (Your full potential is much higher in my mind than in yours, so keep going and continue improving)
At home, you can continue to train your brain with dry fire. Just remember to concentrate on not flinching, just as you did at the range with each trigger press. When you are no longer focusing but simply executing, go back to the field, and you will see a big difference.
Fixing a well-entrenched flinch is not hard, but it can take considerable dry-fired time to build the new neural pathways to eliminate it. Dry firing ten minutes a day for a month may be necessary before you head back to the range.
Good Luck
A gunfight is no place to say, “oops”