Do you notice that, when you’re training at the range, some of your groups are inexplicably wide, even at close ranges?
This may be because of a most unwelcome phenomenon called flinching, which is rather more common than that it is fortunate.
It is a bad habit that must be corrected, regardless of your reasons for shooting or carrying. Here’s what to know.
Why We Flinch
Flinching is a bad habit that is fundamentally quite simple. For one reason or another (usually in anticipation of recoil), you move before the trigger breaks.
That this is bad hardly merits further explanation, but what happens is that flinching moves your point of aim before the trigger even breaks and the bullet has started moving through the barrel.
And so, what precipitates is that you shoot wide of where you’re aiming. Sometimes inconsequentially, sometimes quite consequentially.
The bigger issue here is that this is a correctable and thereby preventable habit that is only made worse when firing high-recoil defensive rounds like Federal HST or +P ammo.
Why It’s a Problem with Specific Rounds (Like Federal HST)
If you shoot defensive ammo like Federal HST or Hydra-Shok, and you routinely flinch, or even inconsistently, for that matter, it will become impossible for you to train effectively.
It’s natural not to like recoil, and the problem is only worse with high-pressure rounds. But the problems are self-explanatory, and it is dangerous to carry and use ammo with which you are neither confident nor proficient.
The reasons here should be self explanatory, but to be quite clear, if you’re going to carry you need to be able to handle and shoot confidently, and the crux of that is hitting what you’re aiming at.
There is really only one effective way to fight flinching, to be explored below.
How to Fight Flinching
The best thing you can do to fight flinching is practice in dry weapons training. This is the opposite of live-fire training, with live ammunition.
There are special dummy rounds out there called snap caps that are the same size and dimensions as live ammo that can be used and which are in fact designed for the very purpose.
Go slow when you’re dry fire training. What you want to watch out for here is movement – literally any movement – that occurs right before the trigger breaks.
A jump, a jitter, a start, even a little tremor – all of these things constitute flinching and all of them will throw your point of aim off of the spot where you want it to be.
Practice dry-fire training until you no longer notice any sort of flinching whatsoever. Then you can transfer your newly formed good habit to live-fire training, and hopefully your accuracy will respond in kind.
An important note here is on safety. Dry fire training should only be performed at the range with snap caps and the firearm should still be handled as though it were loaded. Never allow the muzzle to cover anything which you are not willing to destroy.
There is one lesser thing that you could theoretically do to help fight flinching, and that is to shoot slightly less powerful ammo that produces less recoil.
When you’re shopping for ammo, look at muzzle energy. All else being equal, the lower the number is, the lower the force of felt recoil will be. That may also prove effective at helping you break the bad habit of flinching
Till then, get to the range and get drilling. Practice may not make perfect, but it does “make better.”
