50 Round Handgun Training Manual

Dry Fire Drills

NOTE: All Drills should be performed using your Every Day Carry Clothes and Gear, The point is to be ready when an actual situation occurs.

Ideal Draws (10-15 minutes daily)

Start from a loose, comfortable standing position. At random you will put your hands up like you’re surrendering then draw your firearm and point it straight at the mirror using your reflection as both a target and to study your form.

This drill can be broken into 4 parts 0) Clear

1. Reach
2. Draw
3. Transition
4. Thrust

We’re dividing the act of drawing the gun into these four sections (sometimes five) so we can focus on the muscle movements involved in each step to help isolate issues. I do these as slowly as I need to train perfection and then as fast as I can to train speed. Combined, we’ll hopefully get from holstered to on target in the blink of an eye.

0. Clear

If you’re going to carry concealed you need to figure out what you will most likely wear or train in a different yet standardized outfit. We’re doing this because clearing the path to your firearm is obviously the first step in drawing it and we don’t want anything in the way. If you chose to open carry, congrats! You’ve mastered this part.

1. Reach

We’re building consistent draws reinforced by muscle memory. Its important that you get a perfect grip on your firearm right here as this is the only chance you have to really secure that firearm. I practice from a shoulder height hands up and rotate my arm at the shoulder to reach for my firearm. You may have to dig into yourself with your thumb if your firearm is particularly tight against you.

2. Draw

Maximize the force you will draw your firearm here, but not at the cost of consistency or control. Make that gun leave your holster fast but do not let it deviate from a path to the center of your chest. You need to maintain as control of your firearm here and be HYPER aware of its position and all you fingers because this is where a Negligent Discharge may happen and you shoot yourself. This is a dry fire, but you’re training for an under pressure live fire and do not forget that for a second. I use the tip of my thumb I’ve already jabbed into myself as a guide to feel where it is and what direction my gun is pointed.

3. Transition

Your firearm is traveling up your side and towards the middle of your chest. Make sure your other hand is there to catch it. Slowly bring your firearm from pointed down to right in front of you. Watch and see how you want to naturally do that and how you want to train your grip. Try to get your off hand to be in the center of your chest waiting for the dominant hand with the firearm. It is here that you will point the firearm at your “Threat”.

4. Thrust

Your firearm should be right in front of or the handle is touching your chest. You now need to THRUST the firearm at the threat and simultaneously take your gun off safety. You are trying to get an immediate sight picture here and then click because we’re dry firing. Freeze and observe the stance you ended up in. Note your feet and legs. Are they Parallel? Knees bent and ready to move in case the fight has gone from a stand your ground to a find cover scenario? Note your grip and gun. Is your sight picture on the threat? Is your firearm straight? Did you successfully disengage the safety?

Bonus) Look Around In an actual self defense scenario, you need to look around for more threats. Once you have this motion down to a point you’re confident in your draw skills: look around. Train spatial awareness. Conclusion)

Journal Time Write down what things you want to improve. Note issues with clothes you wear or uncomfortable moments with your firearm. Use that data to inform future gun purchases, clothing choices, and holster placements. Also note times just to watch yourself numerically grow (gamification is great!)

Coin Trick/Dry Firing (5 minutes daily)

After some time drawing your firearm, transition into the coin trick or just bog standard dry firing. With your unloaded gun, rack the slide and hold it like you’re about to fire. Use a mirror again and think about your grip. Is it comfy? Is it strong? Then pull the trigger until all the slack is out, but you haven’t discharged the firing pin/dropped the hammer. This is where you really need to internalize how hard it is to pull the trigger. You don’t want to think or be shocked when the travel time is what it is. Then fire and freeze. Once you here the dry fire click, freeze and observe where your gun is pointed relative to where you wanted it to be pointed. Is it too far left? Try putting more finger on the trigger or changing the grip angle.

Eventually you want to be able to put a coin on the gun before you pull the trigger and not have the coin slide off before or after the pull.

Clearing Drills (5 minutes daily and 2 times at the range)

Dry fire - Load a magazine with a few empty casings or a set of snap caps. Run a normal dry fire drill, but as quickly as you can, rack the slide every time you hear the click of your empty gun. Train yourself to associate that click with an immediate reaction to rack the slide as hard as you can and continue the fight.

Live Fire – Put some empty brass in your magazine loaded with your regular rounds. If you’re doing a Mozambique drill and it doesn’t go bang, rack the slide and continue like nothing happened. Ideally, have a comrade load your magazine for you so its a total surprise if/when it happens. The point is to not think ever about a misfire if there’s just a click and a closed gun (if there’s a very soft bang that could be a squib and you should treat it differently).

Live Fire Drills

Warm-up/Accuracy(20 shots)

Load you magazine in 5 shot increments, start at low ready with your safety on, then bring it up to high ready and disengage the safety, and fire them at your center of mass sized target. Note how the groups are shaped and just work on getting that group as small as possible. Use notes taken during your coin drills at home. Make sure to note which holes on paper are from the last volley and what you changed between volleys. If you want to be extra tedious, practice the entire presentation step for every shot (Low Ready + safety, High ready – safety , fire, Low Ready + safety, etc). Or even more tedious, you start with your firearm on the bench to practice getting an instant perfect grip.

Mozambique (12 shots)

Load your magazines with 3, 6, or 12 rounds. Most ideal is 4 magazines with 3 rounds in each to practice reloads. Then start at Low ready + safety, and quickly transition from High Ready – Safety into firing two shots in center mass of your target and 1 shot to the head as fast as you can and as accurately as you can. This drill is supposed to ready you for an approaching threat that might be wearing armor. Center mass is the easiest target to hit and thus the most like target to stop the threat, but they might be wearing body armor. So practice transitioning into the head.This drill is more about training reaction time. Obviously the more accurate the better, but as long as all shots are in the kill zone its not the end of the world if its not a single hole grouping. It’s also a pretty fun drill.

Off hand/injured hand drill (8 shots)

All of the other live fire drills are at a fixed range (whatever distance you want to get better at), but this drill changes distances. Start off at the maximum distance you think you can hit with an ideal, dominant handed grip on your gun or 10 yards. Then go through acquisition/presentation of your firearm and shoot one(1) normal shot at the target. Now, engage the safety and put your gun on the bench/drop to low ready + safety and if you’re at an indoor range, move the target up to 7 yards otherwise (if at all safe) advance on the target by 3 yards. With your dominant hand ALONE, High Ready - safety, and fire two(2) shots at the target. Make the firearm safe, swap the firearm to YOUR NONE DOMINANT HAND and find a proper off hand grip, High Read – Safety, fire three (3) shots on target. Make the firearm safe, move the target closer/advance by 2 yards and WITH YOUR OFF HAND ALONE, fire two(2) final shots. We’re training to get better at using our off hand for whatever reason. Just in case you have to use a firearm that shoots brass out weird or your dominant hand gets injured. You should be able to operate most guns

Cadence Volleys (10 shots)

Load your magazine with 5 rounds, load your gun and hold at Low Ready + Safety, then go to High Ready – Safety and fire all 5 shots as fast as you can get a good sight picture. Reload, and do it again.

Mag dumps are fun and its important to work on speed. You combine everything you’ve worked on at the range and you’re implementing it into a final test as it were. You can keep track of these numbers(group diameter and shot time) to really see progress.

Alterations

Try to incorporate as many reloads and unexpected clears into your routine as possible. Modern guns are fairly reliable, but you never know when you find the .01% dud bullet or you get just a little too much dirt in your slide. As you get better at different aspects of shooting, feel free to move shots around. Maybe you do the Mozambique twice as much but equally on each hand. Maybe you realize your punching one hole in paper consistently, increase the range and run everything again. Don’t worry about changing things up when it gets ingrained into you. Eventually you will get this stuff down to a T and you’ll probably be able to design your own routine