No Time To Practice? Here’s 4 1-Minute Dry Fire Drills You Can Do In Your Car Or On A Plane

When I’m talking with shooters, the biggest reason people give for not doing the dry fire training is time.

I get it.  Sometimes, my days are so crazy that I don’t even have 10-15 minutes to do things that I know I need to do.

So, today, I’m going to share 4 drills with you that you can SAFELY do in your car at a stoplight, on a plane, in a crowded restaurant, or even in your kitchen with kids and pets swarming all around.

They take almost no setup time, are basically free, don’t take a gun or anything that looks like a gun, and they’ll help with some of the most common problems that shooters face.

Let’s start with a moving and shooting drill.

It’s great to practice bending your knees, dropping your hips, and gliding across the floor while keeping a steady sight picture, but you can get 90% of the benefit by using the phone on your camera and trying to keep the image stable or a full cup of coffee or a full glass of water and walking without spilling.

Regardless of whether you’ve got a gun, camera, or liquid in your hands, the fundamentals are the same–learn to move with a steady head and hand.

Even more important is to figure out just how fast you can move and keep a steady relationship between your head and hands so that you can default to that speed without thinking when you’ve got a pistol in your hands.

Next, let’s look at a high leverage vision drill you can do…

As I mentioned a few days ago, the following is a typical chain of events that all shooters can relate to…

1. You see a target you want to shoot.
2. You bring your pistol up.
3. You shift your focus from the target to your sights.
4. You get frustrated that it’s taking too long to see your sights & just mash the trigger, hoping it’s good enough. 🙂

Yes, we’ve all been there…but it doesn’t have to be that way.  Fortunately, vision is a skill you can train.

What if you set a macro or a jig in your brain for the exact spot in space where your front sight will be when you’re shooting?

And what if you practiced shifting your focus from distant objects to that exact spot in space?

Two things would happen…

First, you’d get faster at shifting focus to that specific distance.  It’d be like preset on your stereo.

Second, you could start shifting your focus to the spot where your front sight is going to be before your sights even got there so that you can make an aimed shot faster.  (Re-read that if you need to…it’s huge)

As we talked about the other day, even if your front sight is a little blurry to start with, your brain can upregulate how it focuses the eye and processes the image over time if you stick with it.

Here’s one way that I practice this drill…

When I’m in my truck, the gauges on my dash are the same distance from my face as my front sight is when my arms are outstretched and I’m shooting.

So when I’m stopped at a stoplight, I’ll practice shifting my focus back and forth between the license plate of the car in front of me and a dot or number on my dash.  You can do this with one or multiple objects in the distance, use it for near/far drills as well as for transition drills.

Here’s a video I did on this awhile back…

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The muscles around the eye are pretty small and easy to over-exert.  DON’T OVERDO THIS DRILL.  Slow down and reduce your range of motion if you feel discomfort or stop altogether for the day.  A few seconds of this drill, once or a few times a day will give you huge results in visual performance.

This is an easy drill to cheat at.  Make sure that you keep looking at objects until they are clear.

Once you get the hang of this drill, I suggest using a metronome app on your phone.  I’ve almost doubled the speed that I can shift focus since I started doing this drill and it’s impacted almost every area of my life.

A “Magical” Trigger Finger Isolation Drill…

Another issue that a lot of shooters have is how to hold isometric tension with their middle, ring, and pinkie finger while relaxing the thumb and rapidly articulating their trigger finger.

This is way easier for people who type fast, play piano or do other activities that require precise/isolated movement of the fingers.

It’s also easier for magicians.

Why?

Because they practice individual finger dexterity so that they can hide and move things in their hands.

A couple of months ago, a magician suggested I start having shooters try rolling a coin across their fingers to help with trigger finger isolation.

Trigger finger isolation has always been a challenge for me with my left hand, and I started seeing marked improvements after only a couple of weeks of rolling a challenge coin for a couple minutes per day.  (literally 1-2 minutes per day)

I do it while I’m waiting for food/drinks.  I do it with one hand while I’m reading/scrolling on my phone with my other hand.  I even do it at stoplights.

It was so effective that I had 21 Day Alpha Shooter challenge coins made.  I just got the first batch of them in and here’s what they look like…

We’re in the final stages of a new course that will include one of these challenge coins…stay tuned for more details.

Steering Wheel Squeeze

There’s a ton of confusion about how tight you should grip your gun.  Ratios and percentages get thrown out like they’re gospel, but they really don’t mean anything.

The right grip intensity is different based on whether you’re shooting a single shot or a string of 100 shots.  It’s different based on whether you have all the time in the world or need to shoot a fast followup shot.  It’s different based on the recoil of the gun that you’re shooting.

But what I can tell you 100% for sure is that you never want to grip so tight that it keeps you from being able to smoothly articulate the trigger with your trigger finger.

This is something you can train.

You may never have the grip of an ironworker, but I can almost guarantee that you can develop a stronger grip than you have now while still having a fast, nimble trigger finger.

One drill that I do for this is to squeeze my steering wheel as tight as I can with my middle, ring, and pinkie finger, relax my thumb, and repeatedly articulate my index finger(s) like I’m shooting.

Typically, I’ll hold it for 20-30 seconds, making sure to re-tighten my grip every few seconds.  I can’t tell you why, but even if I THINK I’m keeping a tight grip, if I don’t continually re-tighten, my grip gets weaker over the course of several seconds.

This drill does a couple of things:

First, since you’ll be actively looking for and aware of that edge of the performance envelope where your grip is tight and your trigger finger is nimble, it will get anchored in your brain and you’ll start defaulting to that level of flex when you’re shooting.

Second, you get better at anything you practice.  You REALLY get better at anything you practice and measure or pay attention to.  So, over time, this will improve your ability to quickly and precisely apply the perfect amount of grip force every time you pick up a pistol.

There’s another HUGE benefit to this drill.  If you have a problem with recoil anticipation, don’t be surprised if you catch yourself flinching as you do this drill at first, even though you’re holding your steering wheel.

There are other factors at play, but it’s valuable to train the brain to go through the motions of shooting without flinching.  This simple drill may not eliminate flinch, but it will definitely help…especially if you catch yourself flinching while doing the drill at first.

To be clear, you don’t need a steering wheel for this drill.  You can use a broom handle, the edge of a thick book, a GripMaster, or even a tennis ball.

I want you to think about this quickly…

These 4 drills are essentially dry fire practice.

You don’t need a pistol or anything that looks like a pistol in your hands to do them.

They only take a few seconds to a minute to do.

There’s almost no setup.

And they will help you with some of the most frustrating problems that people have with shooting…vision, trigger finger isolation, grip, flinch, etc.

How’s that for high leverage?

You can do them almost anywhere…especially anywhere where you need to “kill” a few minutes waiting.

A lot of people play games on their phones, surf the web, check email, or look at social media during those times…you can do these drills instead of that OR you can even do some of them at the same time.

If you’ve gone through the 21 Day Alpha Shooter course already, you’ll recognize some of these drills and you probably already know how powerful they are and how quickly they can have an impact on your shooting.

If you haven’t gone through the 21 Day Alpha Shooter course, you should really check it out by clicking >HERE<

It’s jam packed with incredibly high leverage tricks and hacks to help you shoot better than you thought you could in less time than what’s possible with traditional firearms training.  It takes a brain based approach to shooting that’s completely different (and more effective) than traditional firearms training methods.

If you own a firearm for self defense, you really need to learn more about the course now by clicking >HERE<

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