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Old March 13, 2012, 11:23 PM   #4
JohnKSa
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Join Date: February 12, 2001
Location: DFW Area
Posts: 24,910
I use that technique most often to prove to a shooter who doesn't think he's flinching that he really is. Once a shooter knows he's flinching, then he can start working to correct it. There's no longer any need to prove that it's happening.

It's normal to jump a little when a loud noise occurs and something moves abruptly right in front of your face. But over time, if you don't learn to control the reflex, it develops an aspect of learned behavior as well.

The bottom line is that you'll have to minimize the reflexive aspect and untrain yourself of the learned aspect. It can take some dedication and time.

First, train yourself to not flinch. You do that by practicing in such a way as to disassociate muzzle blast and recoil from the act of pulling the trigger. Basically, practice your trigger pull using some method that doesn't result in significant recoil or muzzle blast. Some double up on hearing protection and shoot .22LR firearms. Some dryfire. Some use airguns. It doesn't really matter how you do it as long as you get your brain used to the idea that pulling the trigger isn't automatically associated with a loud noise and abrupt movement.

Dryfiring is actually quite effective for this although it's not terribly interesting. It's also essentially free which is nice.

The problem is you can't dryfire a couple of times until you stop flinching and call it good. It takes a good bit of work to ingrain the good habit of not flinching and to get rid of the bad habit of flinching.

Once you feel like your trigger control is working well for you based on your non-shooting practice, you can begin to re-introduce live fire to your practice, but not with long shooting sessions. When your groups start to open up and you can feel yourself begin to start flinching again, take a break, do a little dryfire practice or even quit for the day.

When you do dryfire, concentrate on watching the front sight instead of focusing on the target. Besides the fact that a front sight focus will help your accuracy, it also helps with flinching, in my experience.

When you focus on the target, recoil is an intrusion into that focus. The gun is moving up in front of your face to block the target. It's an unwelcome thing--like someone waving their hand in front of a book that you're trying to read. When you focus on the front sight, recoil is now something interesting. You WANT to see what is happening to the front sight, because when it moves back onto the target again, you're going to break the next shot.

Suddenly recoil isn't something that's unexpectedly blocking your view of what you want to see, it's simply part of the shooting experience. It's not the hand waving in front of the book anymore, it's now the focus of what you're doing. Like keeping your eye on the ball if you're playing sports.

However, remember that flinching is, to some extent, natural--automatic. Which means that this is something you'll likely have to work on throughout your shooting "career". I still jerk the trigger once in awhile and I still dryfire on a pretty regular basis, partially to help keep my brain trained that trigger pulling is a routine thing that doesn't automatically require reflexive action.
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