Smooth out and speed up your drawstroke, transitions, and visual acuity

Ox here again with 3 more high-speed metronome drills. Yesterday, we talked about using a metronome in your dry fire practice to work on smoothing out your trigger control. Today, we’re going to cover 3 more metronome drills that will smooth out and speed up your drawstroke, transitions, and ability to focus on the front sight to a level that you may not have thought was possible.

If you want videos demonstrating the process, comment and let me know.

Metronome Drill #2. Use the metronome for your drawstroke. This has been moved to it’s own page.  To see it, go >HERE<

Metronome Drill #3. Use the metronome to engage multiple targets.

This is a basic transition drill that I’ve seen help even more “advanced” shooters smooth out and speed up their transitions.

Set your metronome to 60 cycles per minute

If you’re doing dry fire, stand 10 feet away from a wall with 2 targets, 10 feet apart. You can be between the targets, lined up on the left one, or lined up on the right one. If your room is smaller than that, stand 8 feet away from a wall with the targets 8 feet apart.

With each cycle of the metronome go through the following steps

• Look at the left target
• Aim at the left target
• press the trigger
• “throw” your focus to the right target, leaving your head/body/gun pointed at the left target
• aim your head/body/gun at the right target
• press the trigger
• repeat

Again, this starts out mechanical and choppy, but as you develop neural pathways, you’ll eliminate wasted movement, smooth out the process, and your speed will increase.

What you’ll notice is that as you speed up, your head will begin the transition a mere instant before your gun starts the transition, but that instant head-start will translate into less overtravel and a significantly faster transition.

Metronome Drill #4 Use the metronome to speed up your ability to diverge & converge your focus.

It takes the average shooter .25-1 seconds to converge their focus from their target to their front sight, depending on the person and the distance to the target.

If you have older eyes or if you stare at computer screens all day, this time is probably on the longer side. Fortunately, it is something that you have control over, and this exercise can drop the length of time that it takes to transition from a hard focus on your target to a hard focus on your front sight by a significant amount.

Start by standing 5-20 (but no more than 20) feet from a poster, sign, cereal box, or something else that you can read clearly.

Hold a business card or book with small print at arms length that is as small as you can see clearly.

With a stopwatch at the ready, focus at arm’s length.

Hit the start button on the stopwatch and switch your focus to the distant object and back to the arm’s length object 10x. Don’t cheat. Make sure that you have crystal clear focus on both the near and far objects, regardless of whether or not you are wearing bi-focals or tri-focals.

Divide that time by 10…so if it took you 18 seconds, you’d have 1.8 seconds.

Divide that time by 2. 1.8 divided by 2 is .9 seconds.

Divide 60 (seconds) by that number (.9) = 66 cycles/beats per minute, and set your metronome to that rate.

Now, with the metronome and whatever platform you’re using for dry fire practice, practice diverging (focusing on your target) and converging (focusing on your front sight) your focus in time to the metronome in sets of 10.

Your focus (pun intended) with this drill shouldn’t be on speed. Your focus should be on being honest with yourself and going at whatever pace/cadence you need to in order to achieve clear visual focus every time you shift where you’re looking. Don’t be afraid to slow down.

PLEASE trust me here…go as slow as you need to to do 10 perfect reps per set. If your eyes are sore after 10 reps, STOP. Wait until the next day, slow your pace down 10 cycles per minute, and try again.

This exercises the (small) muscles of the eyes and as you get smoother and more consistent, you will develop neural pathways for shifting focus to arm’s length (your front sight). As you get smoother, more consistent, and develop these neural pathways, your ability to quickly transition your focus from your target to your front sight and release your first round will increase to a shocking degree.

If you own a set of Dry Fire Training Cards, you’ve been doing these drills for up to a year or more–just without the metronome. Don’t have a set of Dry Fire Training Cards yet? If you’re a serious shooter, that’s just silly.

National Tactical Officers Association Tested and Recommended

They’ve been tested and recommended by the National Tactical Officers’ Association.

Tier I and Tier II units from multiple countries use them in their training…even with nearly unlimited budgets. In fact, one senior 18B special forces instructor has made Dry Fire Training Cards almost mandatory for the guys on the teams he works with to use Dry Fire Training Cards on their own before he’ll work with them!

Law Enforcement agencies across the US are buying them in bulk to maintain and improve their officers’ and deputies’ shooting skills in a time of shrinking budgets.

And competitive and concealed carry shooters are buying them in mass because they know they need every training edge they can possibly get.

To get yours now, head on over to DryFireTrainingCards.com

Questions? Comments? Any experience with training with a metronome? Please share by commenting below: