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I’ve often been asked for advice on how a shooter can improve his or her proficiency at arms, and it seems that the questioner is almost always expecting some magical tidbit of “gouge” that will bring out their “A” game. Apart from analyzing form and talking about mechanics, one thing that I universally recommend, and almost always find lacking in the normal routine of many shooters, is dry practice.
The term “dry practice” includes many things, but to put it simply and encompass all applications, it is firearms training conducted without live ammunition. Far from a replacement for live fire training, dry practice is, however, an essential and exceptionally useful tool in improving everything from presentations to reloads to trigger control and beyond. Its application to a program of training can help with any firearm related endeavor, and if you aren’t doing it now, you should consider adding it to supplement your live fire training.

So, how does one go about this dry practice? First, one needs a safe place to conduct it. We are training without live ammunition, but human fallibility still applies, so a safe backstop is requirement number one. In the event that a live round finds its way into the mix despite all our precautions, which we will discuss shortly, a safe backstop will limit the event to an embarrassment instead of a possible tragedy. I often use a 40mm ammo can filled with sand to affix my target to, and place this in front of a stout exterior wall. Basement walls are ideal for this. Ballistic panels, such as those made by Second Chance and Point Blank, also work well to affix targets to, and you are really limited only by your imagination, as long as your backstop will reliably stop the caliber of arm you intend to conduct training with, even if you were to not strike your intended aim point. Targets can be anything from the actual targets used in a competitive discipline to scaled silhouettes replicating distance in the confines of the practice area to squares of tape or target pasters. Col. Jeff Cooper even recommended the “televisor” as a dry practice aid, as he stated he could get along quite nicely without it. (Placed against a safe backstop, of course!) Your mileage may vary on this one, for many reasons. I would recommend saving yourself a potential television replacement trip to Best Buy and using more mundane targetry. Other considerations for the training area include floor composition—when conducting pistol or carbine reload drills you don’t really want to be dropping magazines onto a concrete floor hundreds of times (cardboard and carpet are your friends!)—and also separation. You want your practice area well-defined so that all sources of live ammunition can be kept out, and your mental focus can be devoted to the task at hand. One final note: no mirrors. While one may think that a mirror will help to observe and debrief practice sessions, their effect is always negative. Your attention will be focused away from where it should be, and the result will be negative training. No mirrors on the backstop, no mirrors anywhere in the area. If you want to be able to debrief performance, use a video camera.

Additional equipment includes dummy cartridges and “snap caps”. Snap caps, for the purposes of this treatise, are generically defined as inert cartridge simulations which include a semi-rigid or spring loaded surface in the primer area to cushion firing pin or striker fall. Some arms designs are better suited than others to omitting such aids, but I’ve always thought it wise to use them in all my dry practice to avoid striker/firing pin abuse. Snap caps can be found in nearly any caliber or gauge from Brownell’s, Midway, and other sources, and are made by A-Zoom, Armsport, Precision Gun Specialties, and other manufacturers. When practicing reloads and manipulations, dummy cartridges can be used to add appropriate “heft” to magazines. One does not reload with empty magazines, so it should not be so in practice. Dummy cartridges can be obtained from the same sources as snap caps, or can be manufactured if one is a reloader. I use cartridges reloaded with appropriate real projectiles sans primer and powder. My manufactured dummy rounds for this purpose are all marked “DUMMY” on the side of the case with a blue Sharpie pen, and projectiles are likewise colored blue. For dual purpose training aids on the cheap, dummy cartridges can be assembled with short length of nylon rod of the appropriate diameter (available at any hardware store) inserted into the primer pocket. The nylon rod will cushion the firing pin fall and last for a good long while.

Apart from these items, the appropriate firearm, magazines, holsters, and magazine pouches, are of course requisites, as is a container for live ammo downloading at the entrance to the practice area for use when practicing with a carry weapon that is normally kept loaded and on the person.

Dry Practice Safety Rules

This brings us to safety and prep. First and foremost, eliminate all sources of live ammunition. When entering the practice area, download your carry firearm, if appropriate, and place all rounds and loaded magazines into the live ammo container at the entrance to your practice area or range. A sealed container is best. Pat yourself down and check weapon condition before proceeding. Enter your practice area. I keep dedicated practice magazines and snap caps/dummy rounds in a box that gets placed on a stool in my practice area. Ensure that this box is visibly different from the live ammo container. Now, inspect all magazines and training cartridges to be sure they are what they are supposed to be. Inspect the primer area of all dummy cartridges, and check weapon condition again. Do this every time you begin practice. If, for any reason, you are interrupted during your training, stop everything, and do not begin again until you have come back and completed the inspections again. Now conduct your training. Dry practice sessions should be no more than 15-30 minutes depending upon the discipline and intensity. After this, we get into the realm of diminishing returns and incorrect repetition. At the completion of training, Stop. Flip a mental switch out of practice mode. No more trigger squeezes, no more manipulations. Check weapon condition. Police up training aids and store them. Exit the training area and place the weapon in the desired condition at the live ammo area. Done.

So what do we actually “practice” in dry practice? As stated before, these sessions can be put to a myriad of uses. I tend to begin and end each and every session with pure fundamentals. Stance, grip, sight alignment, sight picture, slow steady trigger “roll”, drop the hammer/striker on a snap cap, follow-through, recover, repeat. For pistol, I include dominant hand and less-dominant hand only work as well. In the meat of my sessions, I pick out several items to work on ahead of time and concentrate on these areas. This is a great opportunity to work on presentations, especially in the case of pistol if you are unfortunate enough to be limited to live fire at a facility that frowns on holster work. End each presentation with sight alignment, sight picture, and I mix it up between stopping there and continuing through to trigger actuation. This prevents creating a conditioned response of always pulling the trigger after presenting your weapon. Work slowly and concentrate on form at first, gradually pick up to full speed, then push it past your limits a bit. Don’t get too carried away here, and if form deteriorates, it’s time to pull it back. After pushing it past the redline, I always come back to slow and deliberate again, and finish with normal full speed. This formula works for just about any area in which you wish to increase speed. Rifle bolt manipulations for hunting arms, tactical and speed reloads, malfunction drills, assuming firing positions, and many other drills can be incorporated. Drills do not always have to include trigger actuation. One of my staples is multiple target drills where I simply practice taking a sight picture on each of several Aimpoints, working on decreasing my target to target splits. Your imagination is the limit here, and further guidance on dry practice drills can be obtained from numerous books by the best and brightest in the shooting world.

On frequency of practice, this is up to the shooter. When deployed in harm’s way, I have dry practiced nearly every day in one form or another with primary and/or secondary weapons systems. When stateside, my frequency drops off a bit depending on the minutiae of everyday life, but at a minimum, I can find at least one or two times a week to devote to dry practice, no matter how hectic things get, and usually more. It’s not hard to find 30 extra minutes a week if you make it a priority. This small investment in time will quickly show its many rewards in your live fire training. Remember to use a safe backstop, separate yourself from all live ammo, check and recheck weapon condition in all phases of practice, and remember, above all, that you are handling a live firearm—do not treat it as anything else, and remember to observe all basic safety rules.