Beginner question: How to get rid of a nasty flinch

[dontcatchmany]

After you have done all the many dry fire drills try this.

Bread down every move you make in moving the gun to firing.

Slow down your presentation to slow motion and concentrate deeply on every thing up to and including grip (grasp), the trigger pull, recoil control and reset.

Concentrate on each part of it with full attention to that part and on to the next part.

Your concentration should be so intense on each part of the movements that actual firing of the bullet will become secondary.

I never really had much problem with flinch until last year when i was recovering from cancer treatment and for some reason I picked up a constant flinch. I think the loss of physical strength in all of my body brought on the flinch.

I started back to square one in shooting and even had to sit to shoot. Gradually my confidence in each move returned and the flinch took care of itself and went bye bye.

Worked for me! YMMV!

Good luck! It is a great feeling to conquer it! The flinch and cancer!

[Bottom Gun]

The following is an excellent write-up on flinching that I copied from another forum. I was given permission by the author to share this with others. I hope some find it to be useful.

I. Why discuss flinches?

The flinch is, by far, the most common and most serious marksmanship problem in handgun shooting. There are more pistol-shot targets at a typical range with a low-left pattern than without. It is ubiquitous among newer shooters.* For many, the problem persists for years. Some never overcome it.

The flinch is particularly pernicious because its root cause - the blink - basically imposes a roadblock to further development. Improving one's handgun shooting is often a matter of making incremental refinements to a variety of techniques and fundamentals - there's always something to work on - but if a flinch is present and persistent, not a lot of headway can be made on other things until it is solved.

As one might expect, a problem that is both common and serious generates a lot of threads. Unfortunately, these often begin with a vexed shooter posing the wrong question. They may ask about trigger control or sight alignment or even grip, when they are simply flinching and shoving shots low and left without any visual awareness. They will get lots of advice that is relevant to the question they asked (which was derived from their own self-diagnosis), but irrelevant to their actual problem. They get good medicine - for someone else's ailment.

I thought it would be useful to have a post - and subsequent thread - that deals directly and unflinchingly (ha!) with this issue. I hope that it may help someone.

II. Why I am writing this

I'm not an expert in very much when it comes to shooting. I'm a passable USPSA/IPSC shooter, and I can hit things that casual shooters struggle to hit, but I'm not a national champ (nor am I likely to ever be). I know lots and lots of people who are better pistol shooters than me.

But I DO know what it is like to struggle against a profound and persistent flinch - and what was required for me to overcome it. I know what it is like to be unable to consistently hold the A-zone of an IPSC target (or the -0 zone of an IDPA target) at 10 yards when under no time pressure. I know what it is like to fill target after target with a pattern that looks like a comet, with a few centered shots and a long, diffuse tail of many more shots trailing out to the low and left (I'm right-handed).

I know a bunch of things that people told me or that I read online that were supposed to cure this problem. I know which of those things did not work (a lot of them), and even which made the problem worse (again, a lot of them).

Fortunately, I also eventually learned what worked. I know that I have shared this information with a number of other people over the years who were struggling with a persistent flinch, and I have seen it work for them. I think this is a topic I know and understand well, from the perspective of both patient and physician.

III. What is a true flinch?

In handgun shooting, for purposes of this discussion a flinch is: A reflexive/subconscious anticipation of the shot firing that manifests in both a blink/fluttering of the eyes and a pre-ignition push of the gun opposite the anticipated recoil.**

OK, let's unpack that.
1. "A reflexive/subconscious anticipation of the shot firing..." We're talking about a phenomenon that begins without (and even against) a conscious decision. Our brains are pre-programmed from birth to protect our most precious sensory organs - our eyes. Loud noises and rapid motions near our faces are things that our brains - the very old parts of our brain, not the human-defining prefrontal cortex stuff - understand as needing to generate a protective response. This is happening at a reflexive, not deliberative/intentional, level.​

After we've fired a gun a few times, our brain knows that, once the trigger gets pressed far/hard enough, the pistol suddenly takes on an apparent "life" of its own, albeit a brief one. It makes an instantaneously violent sound so loud as to be beyond what our ancestors would likely have ever encountered in their hunting and gathering. This explosively loud sound is accompanied by the sensation of the previously-inanimate object in our hands suddenly having a will of its own, moving back and up towards our face with a sudden drive that can be resisted, but not completely.

Human brains are very good at noticing patterns, and then predicting future events based on that pattern (if you've ever tapped your foot or bobbed your head along with a song that you've never heard before, that's what you're doing). Given the virtually 1-to-1 correlation between the trigger and the big-noise-object-jumping phenomenon, our brains notice this pattern very readily. Once our brains recognize this pattern, our brains start to anticipate it. As the trigger gets closer to breaking, our brain starts to prepare for what it knows is coming (ignition, noise, and motion)... and it does it at a subconscious level.​

2. "that manifests in [] a blink/fluttering of the eyes" Human beings relay 80-90% on visual inputs for information about the world. In prehistoric times, a blind hunter/gatherer was basically as good as dead. We are strongly disposed to protect our eyes, and our eyelids are a part of that.

Unfortunately, as soon as we allow our subconscious to activate the protective effects of our eyelids, that shuts down the visual data coming into our brain. Now, we blink many times every minute just to keep our eyes lubricated/moisturized, and that doesn't seem to pose big problems in terms of our general awareness of the world... but most of the time, we're not trying to observe fraction-of-a-second events. Shooting is something that happens, though, in a fraction of a second. So losing our primary data stream for the duration of even a rapid blink can effectively blot out all record of the moment of ignition and what was happening with the sights in few hundredths of a second beforehand.

It is this "redaction" of the record that defines a true flinch, and distinguishes it from most other bad shots. It literally blinds us as to our own actions, and what might be done to fix them. Once you are getting visual input, you will begin to make rapid and easy improvements in marksmanship, because you will be able to literally see your mistakes as you make them, and you will be able to self-cure the vast majority of them. It's like driving a car... if you kept blacking out on the road, not only would you have lots of accidents, you wouldn't learn anything from them and wouldn't get better as a driver. But if you were able to start maintaining awareness, you'd learn to drive acceptably well in short order.

3. "and a pre-ignition push of the gun opposite the anticipated recoil." If all that happened was a closing of the eyes, theoretically we could still make the same hits. If the gun was aligned with the target, and then we kept it there and pressed the trigger, the bullet would go to the same place.

But that's not what happens. The same subconscious reflex that closes the eyes causes some amount of force to be input to the gun in anticipation of recoil. For right-handed shooters, this will generally be a shove down and to the left.

The special hell of the flinch is that, because we closed our eyes just before we began to shove the gun off the target, we don't see this happening. We decide to pull the trigger, we blink, we shove the gun, the gun goes off, we open our eyes (no need to anticipate it any more, the gun already did its noisy thing), and we are baffled and frustrated at yet another low-left hit (or outright miss).

There are other more subtle marksmanship errors that cause occasional misses, including low-left misses. Desire to fire a shot while the sights are "perfect" and immobile, a focus on getting the next shot ready even while the prior shot is still underway, and failure to isolate the trigger finger's contraction from the rest of the hand - these are all other errors that can and do cause misses and off-center shots. But these are all different than a true flinch - and are comparatively easy to combat with conscious effort, as opposed to the brain-stem-driven flinch.​

IV. How do I know if I've got a flinch?

There are several good ways to determine whether you've got a flinch. The most definitive way is to get some high-resolution slow-motion video of yourself shooting. With the quality of cameras on smart phone these days, this is very doable for most people. Get the camera positioned so that your dominant eye is in the frame and in-focus. Turn on the slow-motion camera (or have a friend do it). Shoot some shots. Watch the video. If your dominant eye is fluttering, blinking, closing, or squinting just before/as the gun goes off: you have a flinch.

Another method common before slow-motion cameras were in everyone's pocket was the old ball-and-dummy drill. Have a friend load the magazine or cylinder of the gun with a mix of live and dummy rounds (or, if you haven't got dummies, just an unknown number of rounds). Shoot at a target. If the times when the gun doesn't go off you shove the gun dramatically downward and notice that you blinked as you did it, you have a flinch.

Note: The ball and dummy drill is slightly too sensitive. Almost all shooters who care about recoil control will develop a timed push down against recoil... but they will push after the shot, and without a blink. It is unrealistic to expect the gun to stay totally still on a dummy (although many people will say that it should). What you are looking for is a big dip, usually with the muzzle dipping in an angular fashion (as opposed to a muzzle-level straight down displacement of the whole gun, which is more common with a post-ignition return-from-recoil input) and a blink. As I will explain below, the ball and dummy drill is not a treatment for a pronounced flinch - it's a diagnostic tool.

V. How do I stop flinching?

If you've recognized that you've got a true flinch, congratulations. A lot of people never make it that far. For some reason, people who are flinchers don't like to acknowledge it, even to themselves. Rather than recognizing that it indicates that they have good reflexes, they think it signals something about fear. Well, that attitude won't help them solve the problem. A simple recognition that you have a flinch is the first step to the cure.

A. The eyes have it

What next? To cure a flinch, there is one key insight that you need to have: The key role of the blink in the flinch. Shooting is, first and foremost, a visual activity. When we blink, we turn off our conscious awareness of where the gun is aimed... and the subconscious reptile-brain impulse to push against the gun's impending recoil takes over. Worse, because our eyes are closed, we cannot monitor the sights and we cannot even see the flinch in action. We just see shots straying far from the last point-of-aim that we saw, and it's baffling/frustrating. Once shooters manage to keep their eyes open and visual perception running well enough to see the push happening, they're pretty quick to stop doing it.

B. A matter of trust

OK, so can we just decide to keep our eyes open? Well, some people can. These are the people who quickly move through any flinch phase. But for those of us who struggle with a persistent flinch, the subconscious fights against the conscious intent to keep the eyes open. And it is fundamentally a question of trust.

Remember that the blink reflex/anticipation in a flinch is a subconscious action. The fundamental problem is that your subconscious thinks that allowing the gun to go off while the eyes are open is dangerous. Our rational brains can recognize that the projectile comes out the other end, that we have enough grip on the gun to prevent it from whanging us in the face, that we are wearing eyepro against any small debris, etc., but our subconscious doesn't trust that. It wants the extra security of covering our precious eyeballs with eyelids.

Thus, the long-term cure is to build up enough "trust" in your subconscious that the gun will not harm you just because it fires while your eyes are open. The bad news is that there is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem here. The only way for your brain to begin to "trust" that keeping your eyes open throughout the shot is safe is to accumulate instances of keeping the eyes open with no injury resulting. The good news is that every time that happens, the trust grows. The trust is not diminished by the gun going off with the eyes closed. So you're not going to damage your shooting by trying-and-failing to keep the eyes open on shots... you're only going to improve (on those occasions when the gun goes off and you see it go off).

Your job, then, is to accumulate enough instances where your eyes are open at the moment the gun goes off for your subconscious to accept that this is a safe event and that it can knock that blinking stuff off. Different people's subconsciouses require different amounts of proof. I cannot tell you how many instances you will need. I needed quite a few, spread over multiple sessions. But there is such thing as "enough," and you can get them.

C. Seeing it all

So step #1 of curing a flinch is to pile up instances of seeing the gun go off. OK, how do we do that? Attention on seeing. Spend some time shooting without any concern over group size. In fact, shoot without any target at all. Just aim at the backstop and watch the gun go off. See how much you can see. See the brass eject. See the slide move or the hammer fall. See the muzzle flash (lots of people have never seen their own muzzle-flash!); with a revolver, see an B/C gap flash. Once you can reliably see the gun going off, you can focus your attention on the sights. Once you can reliably see the sights through the shot, then it's worth adding a target. Until then, don't worry about targets or groups.

What if this is proving especially difficult? The good news is, there are a bunch of tricks we can use to try to mess with our perception and reflexes just enough to start piling up instances of seeing the gun go off.

D. The bag of tricks
• Maximize insulation from blast/flash/noise. Double plug (earplugs under muffs).
• Find the lower threshold of what is blink-inducing, and shoot a lot of that. If a .22lr only induces a blink some of the time, shoot a lot of that until you blink 0% of the time with that power level. If an airsoft gun is enough to set off a blink, shoot that a lot. (I actually had a blink that was so sensitive that I did this... just the CO2 puff from an airsoft gun with a reciprocating slide would induce a blink from me. So I spent time in my house "firing" an airsoft gun that had gas, but no pellets, just to desensitize myself to it.)
• Conversely, sometimes it helps to shoot a few rounds of something that has a lot more blast and flash. Shoot a few rounds of full-power 10mm and even +P 9mm will seem soft by comparison. Sometimes it just helps to reset levels of what your subconscious considers "a lot" of blast and flash.
• Try firing 4-6 shots as fast as you can pull the trigger. You may time up the eyelid-flutter with the first shot or two, but you will eventually get out of sync (if you are really shooting fast) and see the muzzle flash. Every time that happens, it builds trust. You just need enough of those instances to start being able to keep your eyes open through single shots.
• Try firing a gun with an unfamiliar trigger. If your brain is very used to "timing" the blink with a semi-auto's short trigger, you may be able to "surprise" it with a DA revolver pull. You may flinch once halfway through the pull, then re-open your eyes as the trigger stroke nears the end.
• If the exercise of seeing the gun go off is proving very difficult, if you can, have an experienced shooter go stand next to you. Hold the gun in a firing grip pointed towards the berm, but with your finger off the trigger indexed on the frame. Allow the other person, standing safely to the side, to put their finger in the trigger. When you think the sights are aligned on the target, tell the other shooter you are on target. They will wait a short, but random period of time. You may feel your eyes fluttering as your brain tries to guess when the gun will go off, but within a few tries, your brain will guess "wrong" and accidentally see some shots go off. This can sometimes kick-start a willingness in the brain to "see" more with greater trust that nothing bad will happen just because the eyes are open at the moment of ignition. Chances are good you might shoot a really good group this way, too!
• Don't give up. When I was working through my flinch, I went to the range with a 500 round box of .22lr ammo and shot it all out my .22 pistol. I did this once a week for several weeks. I gradually got desensitized to it. Then I started piling up reps with centerfire guns.
• Have an experienced shooter check your grip. Grip has a huge influence on how the gun moves in recoil. An ineffective grip can make the gun jump around more, which is part of the input that makes your subconscious want to blink and shove the gun around. An effective grip can settle the recoil down quite a bit, and make it easier to trust that nothing crazy is going to happen when the gun goes off.
• Try shooting with both eyes open. When you close your non-dominant eye, that tends to partially close the dominant one. Leaving both open will cause a double-image issue, but remember that our goal is to see the gun go off, not do a lot of precise alignment. Once you get the blink eliminated, you can decide whether you should be a squinter or a both-open shooter... but for now, do anything you can to keep your eyes open and relaxed.
• Don't shoot into bright light. If you're shooting in bright conditions, wear tinted lenses. Again, don't pre-close your eyes at all. You want relaxed face muscles. Some people find it helpful to even slightly open their jaw/mouth. You want to be dispassionate, an impassive observer.
There are other tricks I have not listed. Maybe others will chime in with some.


E. Stuff that doesn't work

I don't want to go into an exhaustive list of things that are unproductive, but I do want to address three things that are often floated as a cure for flinching - but are not, in my experience..

Dry fire: Dry fire is awesome. I am a huge believer in it. I would say I dry fire at least a little 5+ days per week. There's all kinds of stuff you can learn in dry fire. But, remember, your brain is good at noticing patterns. Your brain knows that an empty gun doesn't go boom. It knows there is no flash or blast or recoil coming, so it doesn't feel any need to protect the eyes or shove the gun around. Lots and lots and lots of people can dry fire with perfect accuracy and have a horrendous flinch with live ammo.

Ball and dummy drills: This is a diagnostic tool, and can be useful to get someone to "feel" how much force they are really applying in the pre-ignition push, but I do not think it is a method for curing a flinch. Worse, if done in significant volume, you can train a kind of "free recoil" shooting, which can be usable for leisurely-paced shooting, but is totally at odds with the kind of recoil control needed for any kind of rapid shooting (which most people think is applicable to self-defense).

Focusing on trigger control: I suspect this works for a percentage of flinchers, but for many people an acute focus on the sensation of the pressure building towards the sear break generates an unbearable level of anticipation and cranks flinching into the stratosphere. This is good medicine for some other marksmanship issues, but is generally not the cure for a true flinch.

Alright, that's all I've got to say about this topic right now.

Follow up comments by the author:

I think it is helpful to acknowledge that the fear and/or startle components are normal human behavior. Many, many people spend their whole shooting lives with a flinch, because curing a flinch generally requires acknowledging that you have a flinch. If you don't accept that you are flinching, you can waste a long time working on "trigger control" or trying to figure out what sight picture to use or how you keep getting defective guns that shoot left, etc.

So why don't people who are flinching accept that they are flinching and start working on their cure? Ego protection. Admitting you have a flinch feels too close to admitting cowardice to some, a failure of character or willpower. No. It's just a normal human reflex. Different people have different levels of reflex. Being at one point on that spectrum versus another doesn't make you tougher or brave-er or more determined. It's just an innate characteristic. It's normal to have a flinch. It's abnormal to not have one.

But this is a case where developing an abnormal (non-)reaction is beneficial. So it's worth spending the time and effort to create the new, abnormal pattern.

Also, sometimes people have a worse flinch with a 1911-ish trigger than, say, a revolver's DA trigger because the DA has so much travel that it's harder for people to know exactly when the shot is going to break. In contrast, you get a nice SAO semi-auto trigger and it's going to break as soon as you apply more than a trivial amount of force to it.

I remember the first shot I took with a friend's revolver that had been slicked up for PPC competition (big Aristrocrat rib, etc.). The first shot went dead in the center of the bullseye because it was truly a surprise break. That trigger was so smooth that I had no idea the gun was about to go off when it did. It was pointed at the center of the target, but it was virtually an AD in terms of my level of surprise! It was a true "surprise break" - and, of course, there was no pre-ignition push or flinch to mess up the aiming I had done.

Even without that grade of trigger, I find there's some anti-flinch medicine in watching revolver sights through the DA pull. Unlike a semi-auto, where it's easy to fool ourselves into thinking that aiming and firing are two separate and distinct steps, with a DA revo trigger, the sight is going to move around during the pull, so aiming has to continue throughout the shot. Unless you just give up and snatch the trigger completely, or try to fool around with "staging" it, it's easier to get wrapped up in watching and controlling the revolver's sights... and forget to blink in the process.

[stinkeypete]

Lots of great advice above so I will only add what I think is missing:
1. Join a club. If none available in your area, see if your range has a .22 pistol league. Shooting regularly and making new friends and keeping your targets with dates on them is fun, helps you stay motivated, and inspires you to improve. Top shooters are generally very willing to help newbies. Club members often have quality used equipment at a fraction of new prices.

2. Get a book. I found “the pistol shooter’s treasury” 2nd ed. A collection of chapters published by Gil Hebard to be very good. I expect copies can be found via the interwebs. The US Army has a basic pistol shooting manual and a pistol marksmanship manual. You can find those as PDFs using the Google thing.

3. More than just trigger control, a pellet air pistol can be shot in your basement. If you have 10 meters (33 feet) you have an international air pistol range almost already set up. I have not kept up with which models or prices but surely there is a budget model out there that is still literally a tack driver at 10m but doesn’t break the bank.

4. In addition to all the good tips already posted, start working on your hand strength. Squeezing a rubber dog ball while watching Netflix works great.

5. When shooting, squeeze the pistol so hard it cries for it’s momma. Squeeze it HARD. So hard your hand shakes then ease up just a tad. There are lots of reasons to do that, one being that moving your trigger finger alone won’t affect any other muscles in your hand because they are already nearly overloaded. Another is mechanics of recoil, another is psychological... if you are working on grabbing hard as possible you may forget the gun is going to make a loud noise.

6. Keep your eyes open for a big centerfire pistol too. Heavy steel guns in .38 like a Ruger Blackhawk .357 (for fun plinking) or a CZ75 ( common entry for guys competing at shooting steel plates) or a nice 1911 in 9mm (can be as accurate as you are willing to spend and something everyone wants even if they won’t admit it) all make decent Boise and flash but soak up hand slap.

We have these discussions about ‘what gun to introduce people with’ and I am of the airgun/.22 camp because once that recoil sensitivity gets in your head, it’s hard to get out!

Keep at it, you can untrain your reflexes.

If it’s any consolation, you started with one of the most difficult pistols out there, in my opinion. You are lighting off a fire cracker in your hand with about nothing for a sight radius. Any reasonable person is going to flinch unless trained not to.

[jackstrawIII]

I see some folks have already mentioned what I was going to say, but I'll say it again.

My #1 piece of advice (which I've seen work for new shooters many times) is this: acknowledge that the gun won't hurt you, fly out of your hands, or any of that stuff. Just focus on squeezing the trigger slowly without moving the sights and let it surprise you when it goes off. Let the gun recoil however it wants, then slowly reacquire the target. Your shooting WILL improve dramatically.

Also, get a 22LR for practice. Shoot lots of rounds through it. Pay attention to how it feels to confidently squeeze the trigger without flinching.

Then grab your 9mm and do the same things mentally.

[bamaranger]

The old ball and dummy drill with an auto: chamber a round, remove the magazine....then two controlled trigger presses on target. Of course, the first press will get you a shot......than the second press, if the design of the lockwork will allow (no magazine safety) will get you a "click" on an empty chamber. If one has a heck of a flinch, it will show on the second press.

Eventually, one can learn that with no shot, the second press is a dud, and the shooter will control that press, but still jerk the snot out of the first round. Then it is time for the "dirty trick test". Have an assistant SAFELY manage the weapon, and randomly chamber a live round, or pass the shooter a cocked but empty weapon (magazine removed in each instance, again, lockwork allowing). Repeat the drill, alternating loaded and dry firearm as the assistant desires.
Flinches will be apparent. Work towards being as steady as possible, but a small reaction is not necessarily a bad thing.

[Rangerrich99]

Originally Posted by DaleA

Thanks for the video recommendation Rangerrich99. It's no mystery why Rob Leatham is considered something of a maverick. I really enjoyed it and its only about 6 minutes long. I used this link (from your post) to get to it.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/li0rGtXh23I

Thx. For some reason i thought I could just embed the video. I fixed my OP with a proper link now.

I didn't know that Leatham was considered a maverick. That's interesting.

I like Leatham's videos because he disseminates information as concisely as possible, and yet he still explains his reasoning very completely. Bottom line, he just makes a lot of sense to me.

i'll give one quick example to explain.

Jerry Miculek has a video on proper gun grip, as does Rob Leatham. I won't go into great detail here (everyone can simply look up either video to see exactly what I'm talking about), but Jerry at one point says 'to grip the gun as tightly as you can,' or words to that effect. He doesn't really explain how or why, he just says "grip it really tightly to help control recoil," and basically leaves it at that.

Leatham actually explains how he grips the gun and exactly why he's gripping it as tightly as he does. And gives you a physical/visual example of why gripping the gun the way he does actually works. And he does all of that in about 2 minutes flat.

Not saying that Jerry is a bad instructor or anything like that, let's not misunderstand. It's a difference of style of instruction more or less. My brain is simply wired to receive information more efficiently from an instructor more like Leatham than Miculek, that's all.

It's similar to when I was a flight instructor. sometimes the instructor and student don't click, but they might with a different instructor, so you'd hand them off, or have a student handed off to you. Most of the time it worked.

[Aguila Blanca]

Originally Posted by Rangerrich99

i'll give one quick example to explain.

Jerry Miculek has a video on proper gun grip, as does Rob Leatham. I won't go into great detail here (everyone can simply look up either video to see exactly what I'm talking about), but Jerry at one point says 'to grip the gun as tightly as you can,' or words to that effect. He doesn't really explain how or why, he just says "grip it really tightly to help control recoil," and basically leaves it at that.

Leatham actually explains how he grips the gun and exactly why he's gripping it as tightly as he does. And gives you a physical/visual example of why gripping the gun the way he does actually works. And he does all of that in about 2 minutes flat.

And Massad Ayoob says to grip a pistol about as hard as a firm handshake.

Several decades ago, when I was in college, one of the guys on my dorm floor was on the fencing team. He gave a couple of us some informal instruction and, in fact, my freshman roommate went on to join the fencing team. One of the things he explained to us was how tightly to grip a fencing foil:

"Hold it like you would hold a small bird in your hand. If you hold it too loosely, it will fly away. If you hold it too tightly, you'll kill it."

[Rangerrich99]

Originally Posted by Aguila Blanca

And Massad Ayoob says to grip a pistol about as hard as a firm handshake.

Several decades ago, when I was in college, one of the guys on my dorm floor was on the fencing team. He gave a couple of us some informal instruction and, in fact, my freshman roommate went on to join the fencing team. One of the things he explained to us was how tightly to grip a fencing foil:

"Hold it like you would hold a small bird in your hand. If you hold it too loosely, it will fly away. If you hold it too tightly, you'll kill it."

That's exactly how I was instructed to grip a golf club back in the day. Of course, the club isn't trying to jump out of my hands every 0.2 seconds, but it works perfectly.

Handguns I grip a little firmer than that, for obvious reasons.

[SIGSHR]

There was the old technique where an instructor/coach would load a revolver with alternate live rounds and fired brass to check for a flinch.

[Chaosgundam]

Originally Posted by RKG

Purging a flinch once it has developed isn't easy.

The way to avoid developing a flinch in the first instance is to build a core set of skills. Primary are sight picture and trigger break. Others include grip, stance and follow through. Most of those who have done this started with a .22, and that should tell you something.

As an instructor, I have seen far too frequently people whose first forays into handgun shooting started with a center fire pistol -- often a Glock .40 or .45 -- who then spend a fortune buying expensive factory ammo developing well conditioned bad habits and wondering why they can't hit anything.

Thanks for all the advice. Would love also buying a .22 for practice purposes but where I live its sort of difficult as our gun control laws are very strict. Its not easy to buy a firearm and it takes a very long time to get your licensing in order. Thus my first choice for the LCP. As it is a practical decision. I will consider buying one later for now I will for sure follow the advice as listed herein above. I have to work through it and plan my training properly. Cant wait to get to the range and test out what I have learned from you guys - sucks that there is a ammo shortage on this side of the world so will probably not go to the range for the next month in order to save what I currently have.

[Chaosgundam]

I have seen videos on youtube where they do this. Also where they load fake ammo into a mag of a pistol for the same effect.

[Chaosgundam]

Originally Posted by Bottom Gun

The following is an excellent write-up on flinching that I copied from another forum. I was given permission by the author to share this with others. I hope some find it to be useful.

I. Why discuss flinches?

The flinch is, by far, the most common and most serious marksmanship problem in handgun shooting. There are more pistol-shot targets at a typical range with a low-left pattern than without. It is ubiquitous among newer shooters.* For many, the problem persists for years. Some never overcome it.

The flinch is particularly pernicious because its root cause - the blink - basically imposes a roadblock to further development. Improving one's handgun shooting is often a matter of making incremental refinements to a variety of techniques and fundamentals - there's always something to work on - but if a flinch is present and persistent, not a lot of headway can be made on other things until it is solved.

As one might expect, a problem that is both common and serious generates a lot of threads. Unfortunately, these often begin with a vexed shooter posing the wrong question. They may ask about trigger control or sight alignment or even grip, when they are simply flinching and shoving shots low and left without any visual awareness. They will get lots of advice that is relevant to the question they asked (which was derived from their own self-diagnosis), but irrelevant to their actual problem. They get good medicine - for someone else's ailment.

I thought it would be useful to have a post - and subsequent thread - that deals directly and unflinchingly (ha!) with this issue. I hope that it may help someone.

II. Why I am writing this

I'm not an expert in very much when it comes to shooting. I'm a passable USPSA/IPSC shooter, and I can hit things that casual shooters struggle to hit, but I'm not a national champ (nor am I likely to ever be). I know lots and lots of people who are better pistol shooters than me.

But I DO know what it is like to struggle against a profound and persistent flinch - and what was required for me to overcome it. I know what it is like to be unable to consistently hold the A-zone of an IPSC target (or the -0 zone of an IDPA target) at 10 yards when under no time pressure. I know what it is like to fill target after target with a pattern that looks like a comet, with a few centered shots and a long, diffuse tail of many more shots trailing out to the low and left (I'm right-handed).

I know a bunch of things that people told me or that I read online that were supposed to cure this problem. I know which of those things did not work (a lot of them), and even which made the problem worse (again, a lot of them).

Fortunately, I also eventually learned what worked. I know that I have shared this information with a number of other people over the years who were struggling with a persistent flinch, and I have seen it work for them. I think this is a topic I know and understand well, from the perspective of both patient and physician.

III. What is a true flinch?

In handgun shooting, for purposes of this discussion a flinch is: A reflexive/subconscious anticipation of the shot firing that manifests in both a blink/fluttering of the eyes and a pre-ignition push of the gun opposite the anticipated recoil.**

OK, let's unpack that.
1. "A reflexive/subconscious anticipation of the shot firing..." We're talking about a phenomenon that begins without (and even against) a conscious decision. Our brains are pre-programmed from birth to protect our most precious sensory organs - our eyes. Loud noises and rapid motions near our faces are things that our brains - the very old parts of our brain, not the human-defining prefrontal cortex stuff - understand as needing to generate a protective response. This is happening at a reflexive, not deliberative/intentional, level.​

After we've fired a gun a few times, our brain knows that, once the trigger gets pressed far/hard enough, the pistol suddenly takes on an apparent "life" of its own, albeit a brief one. It makes an instantaneously violent sound so loud as to be beyond what our ancestors would likely have ever encountered in their hunting and gathering. This explosively loud sound is accompanied by the sensation of the previously-inanimate object in our hands suddenly having a will of its own, moving back and up towards our face with a sudden drive that can be resisted, but not completely.

Human brains are very good at noticing patterns, and then predicting future events based on that pattern (if you've ever tapped your foot or bobbed your head along with a song that you've never heard before, that's what you're doing). Given the virtually 1-to-1 correlation between the trigger and the big-noise-object-jumping phenomenon, our brains notice this pattern very readily. Once our brains recognize this pattern, our brains start to anticipate it. As the trigger gets closer to breaking, our brain starts to prepare for what it knows is coming (ignition, noise, and motion)... and it does it at a subconscious level.​

2. "that manifests in [] a blink/fluttering of the eyes" Human beings relay 80-90% on visual inputs for information about the world. In prehistoric times, a blind hunter/gatherer was basically as good as dead. We are strongly disposed to protect our eyes, and our eyelids are a part of that.

Unfortunately, as soon as we allow our subconscious to activate the protective effects of our eyelids, that shuts down the visual data coming into our brain. Now, we blink many times every minute just to keep our eyes lubricated/moisturized, and that doesn't seem to pose big problems in terms of our general awareness of the world... but most of the time, we're not trying to observe fraction-of-a-second events. Shooting is something that happens, though, in a fraction of a second. So losing our primary data stream for the duration of even a rapid blink can effectively blot out all record of the moment of ignition and what was happening with the sights in few hundredths of a second beforehand.

It is this "redaction" of the record that defines a true flinch, and distinguishes it from most other bad shots. It literally blinds us as to our own actions, and what might be done to fix them. Once you are getting visual input, you will begin to make rapid and easy improvements in marksmanship, because you will be able to literally see your mistakes as you make them, and you will be able to self-cure the vast majority of them. It's like driving a car... if you kept blacking out on the road, not only would you have lots of accidents, you wouldn't learn anything from them and wouldn't get better as a driver. But if you were able to start maintaining awareness, you'd learn to drive acceptably well in short order.

3. "and a pre-ignition push of the gun opposite the anticipated recoil." If all that happened was a closing of the eyes, theoretically we could still make the same hits. If the gun was aligned with the target, and then we kept it there and pressed the trigger, the bullet would go to the same place.

But that's not what happens. The same subconscious reflex that closes the eyes causes some amount of force to be input to the gun in anticipation of recoil. For right-handed shooters, this will generally be a shove down and to the left.

The special hell of the flinch is that, because we closed our eyes just before we began to shove the gun off the target, we don't see this happening. We decide to pull the trigger, we blink, we shove the gun, the gun goes off, we open our eyes (no need to anticipate it any more, the gun already did its noisy thing), and we are baffled and frustrated at yet another low-left hit (or outright miss).

There are other more subtle marksmanship errors that cause occasional misses, including low-left misses. Desire to fire a shot while the sights are "perfect" and immobile, a focus on getting the next shot ready even while the prior shot is still underway, and failure to isolate the trigger finger's contraction from the rest of the hand - these are all other errors that can and do cause misses and off-center shots. But these are all different than a true flinch - and are comparatively easy to combat with conscious effort, as opposed to the brain-stem-driven flinch.​

IV. How do I know if I've got a flinch?

There are several good ways to determine whether you've got a flinch. The most definitive way is to get some high-resolution slow-motion video of yourself shooting. With the quality of cameras on smart phone these days, this is very doable for most people. Get the camera positioned so that your dominant eye is in the frame and in-focus. Turn on the slow-motion camera (or have a friend do it). Shoot some shots. Watch the video. If your dominant eye is fluttering, blinking, closing, or squinting just before/as the gun goes off: you have a flinch.

Another method common before slow-motion cameras were in everyone's pocket was the old ball-and-dummy drill. Have a friend load the magazine or cylinder of the gun with a mix of live and dummy rounds (or, if you haven't got dummies, just an unknown number of rounds). Shoot at a target. If the times when the gun doesn't go off you shove the gun dramatically downward and notice that you blinked as you did it, you have a flinch.

Note: The ball and dummy drill is slightly too sensitive. Almost all shooters who care about recoil control will develop a timed push down against recoil... but they will push after the shot, and without a blink. It is unrealistic to expect the gun to stay totally still on a dummy (although many people will say that it should). What you are looking for is a big dip, usually with the muzzle dipping in an angular fashion (as opposed to a muzzle-level straight down displacement of the whole gun, which is more common with a post-ignition return-from-recoil input) and a blink. As I will explain below, the ball and dummy drill is not a treatment for a pronounced flinch - it's a diagnostic tool.

V. How do I stop flinching?

If you've recognized that you've got a true flinch, congratulations. A lot of people never make it that far. For some reason, people who are flinchers don't like to acknowledge it, even to themselves. Rather than recognizing that it indicates that they have good reflexes, they think it signals something about fear. Well, that attitude won't help them solve the problem. A simple recognition that you have a flinch is the first step to the cure.

A. The eyes have it

What next? To cure a flinch, there is one key insight that you need to have: The key role of the blink in the flinch. Shooting is, first and foremost, a visual activity. When we blink, we turn off our conscious awareness of where the gun is aimed... and the subconscious reptile-brain impulse to push against the gun's impending recoil takes over. Worse, because our eyes are closed, we cannot monitor the sights and we cannot even see the flinch in action. We just see shots straying far from the last point-of-aim that we saw, and it's baffling/frustrating. Once shooters manage to keep their eyes open and visual perception running well enough to see the push happening, they're pretty quick to stop doing it.

B. A matter of trust

OK, so can we just decide to keep our eyes open? Well, some people can. These are the people who quickly move through any flinch phase. But for those of us who struggle with a persistent flinch, the subconscious fights against the conscious intent to keep the eyes open. And it is fundamentally a question of trust.

Remember that the blink reflex/anticipation in a flinch is a subconscious action. The fundamental problem is that your subconscious thinks that allowing the gun to go off while the eyes are open is dangerous. Our rational brains can recognize that the projectile comes out the other end, that we have enough grip on the gun to prevent it from whanging us in the face, that we are wearing eyepro against any small debris, etc., but our subconscious doesn't trust that. It wants the extra security of covering our precious eyeballs with eyelids.

Thus, the long-term cure is to build up enough "trust" in your subconscious that the gun will not harm you just because it fires while your eyes are open. The bad news is that there is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem here. The only way for your brain to begin to "trust" that keeping your eyes open throughout the shot is safe is to accumulate instances of keeping the eyes open with no injury resulting. The good news is that every time that happens, the trust grows. The trust is not diminished by the gun going off with the eyes closed. So you're not going to damage your shooting by trying-and-failing to keep the eyes open on shots... you're only going to improve (on those occasions when the gun goes off and you see it go off).

Your job, then, is to accumulate enough instances where your eyes are open at the moment the gun goes off for your subconscious to accept that this is a safe event and that it can knock that blinking stuff off. Different people's subconsciouses require different amounts of proof. I cannot tell you how many instances you will need. I needed quite a few, spread over multiple sessions. But there is such thing as "enough," and you can get them.

C. Seeing it all

So step #1 of curing a flinch is to pile up instances of seeing the gun go off. OK, how do we do that? Attention on seeing. Spend some time shooting without any concern over group size. In fact, shoot without any target at all. Just aim at the backstop and watch the gun go off. See how much you can see. See the brass eject. See the slide move or the hammer fall. See the muzzle flash (lots of people have never seen their own muzzle-flash!); with a revolver, see an B/C gap flash. Once you can reliably see the gun going off, you can focus your attention on the sights. Once you can reliably see the sights through the shot, then it's worth adding a target. Until then, don't worry about targets or groups.

What if this is proving especially difficult? The good news is, there are a bunch of tricks we can use to try to mess with our perception and reflexes just enough to start piling up instances of seeing the gun go off.

D. The bag of tricks
• Maximize insulation from blast/flash/noise. Double plug (earplugs under muffs).
• Find the lower threshold of what is blink-inducing, and shoot a lot of that. If a .22lr only induces a blink some of the time, shoot a lot of that until you blink 0% of the time with that power level. If an airsoft gun is enough to set off a blink, shoot that a lot. (I actually had a blink that was so sensitive that I did this... just the CO2 puff from an airsoft gun with a reciprocating slide would induce a blink from me. So I spent time in my house "firing" an airsoft gun that had gas, but no pellets, just to desensitize myself to it.)
• Conversely, sometimes it helps to shoot a few rounds of something that has a lot more blast and flash. Shoot a few rounds of full-power 10mm and even +P 9mm will seem soft by comparison. Sometimes it just helps to reset levels of what your subconscious considers "a lot" of blast and flash.
• Try firing 4-6 shots as fast as you can pull the trigger. You may time up the eyelid-flutter with the first shot or two, but you will eventually get out of sync (if you are really shooting fast) and see the muzzle flash. Every time that happens, it builds trust. You just need enough of those instances to start being able to keep your eyes open through single shots.
• Try firing a gun with an unfamiliar trigger. If your brain is very used to "timing" the blink with a semi-auto's short trigger, you may be able to "surprise" it with a DA revolver pull. You may flinch once halfway through the pull, then re-open your eyes as the trigger stroke nears the end.
• If the exercise of seeing the gun go off is proving very difficult, if you can, have an experienced shooter go stand next to you. Hold the gun in a firing grip pointed towards the berm, but with your finger off the trigger indexed on the frame. Allow the other person, standing safely to the side, to put their finger in the trigger. When you think the sights are aligned on the target, tell the other shooter you are on target. They will wait a short, but random period of time. You may feel your eyes fluttering as your brain tries to guess when the gun will go off, but within a few tries, your brain will guess "wrong" and accidentally see some shots go off. This can sometimes kick-start a willingness in the brain to "see" more with greater trust that nothing bad will happen just because the eyes are open at the moment of ignition. Chances are good you might shoot a really good group this way, too!
• Don't give up. When I was working through my flinch, I went to the range with a 500 round box of .22lr ammo and shot it all out my .22 pistol. I did this once a week for several weeks. I gradually got desensitized to it. Then I started piling up reps with centerfire guns.
• Have an experienced shooter check your grip. Grip has a huge influence on how the gun moves in recoil. An ineffective grip can make the gun jump around more, which is part of the input that makes your subconscious want to blink and shove the gun around. An effective grip can settle the recoil down quite a bit, and make it easier to trust that nothing crazy is going to happen when the gun goes off.
• Try shooting with both eyes open. When you close your non-dominant eye, that tends to partially close the dominant one. Leaving both open will cause a double-image issue, but remember that our goal is to see the gun go off, not do a lot of precise alignment. Once you get the blink eliminated, you can decide whether you should be a squinter or a both-open shooter... but for now, do anything you can to keep your eyes open and relaxed.
• Don't shoot into bright light. If you're shooting in bright conditions, wear tinted lenses. Again, don't pre-close your eyes at all. You want relaxed face muscles. Some people find it helpful to even slightly open their jaw/mouth. You want to be dispassionate, an impassive observer.
There are other tricks I have not listed. Maybe others will chime in with some.


E. Stuff that doesn't work

I don't want to go into an exhaustive list of things that are unproductive, but I do want to address three things that are often floated as a cure for flinching - but are not, in my experience..

Dry fire: Dry fire is awesome. I am a huge believer in it. I would say I dry fire at least a little 5+ days per week. There's all kinds of stuff you can learn in dry fire. But, remember, your brain is good at noticing patterns. Your brain knows that an empty gun doesn't go boom. It knows there is no flash or blast or recoil coming, so it doesn't feel any need to protect the eyes or shove the gun around. Lots and lots and lots of people can dry fire with perfect accuracy and have a horrendous flinch with live ammo.

Ball and dummy drills: This is a diagnostic tool, and can be useful to get someone to "feel" how much force they are really applying in the pre-ignition push, but I do not think it is a method for curing a flinch. Worse, if done in significant volume, you can train a kind of "free recoil" shooting, which can be usable for leisurely-paced shooting, but is totally at odds with the kind of recoil control needed for any kind of rapid shooting (which most people think is applicable to self-defense).

Focusing on trigger control: I suspect this works for a percentage of flinchers, but for many people an acute focus on the sensation of the pressure building towards the sear break generates an unbearable level of anticipation and cranks flinching into the stratosphere. This is good medicine for some other marksmanship issues, but is generally not the cure for a true flinch.

Alright, that's all I've got to say about this topic right now.

Follow up comments by the author:

I think it is helpful to acknowledge that the fear and/or startle components are normal human behavior. Many, many people spend their whole shooting lives with a flinch, because curing a flinch generally requires acknowledging that you have a flinch. If you don't accept that you are flinching, you can waste a long time working on "trigger control" or trying to figure out what sight picture to use or how you keep getting defective guns that shoot left, etc.

So why don't people who are flinching accept that they are flinching and start working on their cure? Ego protection. Admitting you have a flinch feels too close to admitting cowardice to some, a failure of character or willpower. No. It's just a normal human reflex. Different people have different levels of reflex. Being at one point on that spectrum versus another doesn't make you tougher or brave-er or more determined. It's just an innate characteristic. It's normal to have a flinch. It's abnormal to not have one.

But this is a case where developing an abnormal (non-)reaction is beneficial. So it's worth spending the time and effort to create the new, abnormal pattern.

Also, sometimes people have a worse flinch with a 1911-ish trigger than, say, a revolver's DA trigger because the DA has so much travel that it's harder for people to know exactly when the shot is going to break. In contrast, you get a nice SAO semi-auto trigger and it's going to break as soon as you apply more than a trivial amount of force to it.

I remember the first shot I took with a friend's revolver that had been slicked up for PPC competition (big Aristrocrat rib, etc.). The first shot went dead in the center of the bullseye because it was truly a surprise break. That trigger was so smooth that I had no idea the gun was about to go off when it did. It was pointed at the center of the target, but it was virtually an AD in terms of my level of surprise! It was a true "surprise break" - and, of course, there was no pre-ignition push or flinch to mess up the aiming I had done.

Even without that grade of trigger, I find there's some anti-flinch medicine in watching revolver sights through the DA pull. Unlike a semi-auto, where it's easy to fool ourselves into thinking that aiming and firing are two separate and distinct steps, with a DA revo trigger, the sight is going to move around during the pull, so aiming has to continue throughout the shot. Unless you just give up and snatch the trigger completely, or try to fool around with "staging" it, it's easier to get wrapped up in watching and controlling the revolver's sights... and forget to blink in the process.

This is fantastic advise. Thank you so much.

[WyMark]

I have a recurring flinch, when it rears it's head I use a drill I first saw on this site. If you have an auto that will fire with no mag or a revolver it's easy to do. Chamber a round and drop the mag, pull the trigger and try not to flinch, then pull it again and see if your sights stay on target or move. With a revolver I skip load every other chamber and do the same thing. The point is that whether it's a click or a bang the sights don't move.

[TRX]

With revolvers, the usual thing was to use primer-powered "indoor shooting" ammunition. It's just a primed case and plastic bullet. Made a decent bang, and reasonably accurate at across-the-basement distances, and just the thing for practicing trigger control.

[Hal]

With revolvers, the usual thing was to use primer-powered "indoor shooting" ammunition. It's just a primed case and plastic bullet. Made a decent bang, and reasonably accurate at across-the-basement distances, and just the thing for practicing trigger control.

There is a little more to that....

Simply using a primed case usually results in the primer backing out of the flash hole and binding up the cylinder.

You need to take a drill and drill out the primer pocket & enlarge the flash hole.
(Or - get some of the Speer plastic cases.)

An alternative to that is to go "old school" - & use wax bullets - but - the primer pockets still need enlarged.

A word of caution about the plastic (Speer) bullets.
Despite them being plastic - they can still do a considerable amount of damage.
I shot them into a cardboard box in my living room - using magnum primers. They went through to carbard box and embedded themselves in the 1/2" drywall.
Thank the Almighty I was single at the time & had no wife to deal with...

[RAfiringline]

>I was told to let the discharge “surprise” you. And let it happen, don’t make it happen.<

Exactly right. Smooth uniform trigger -press- equals good shooting.
If nothing else works, get a 12 gauge, buy 100 rds of inexpensive birdshot and just bang away. Then shoot your regular weapon and see if the flinch thing just sort of disappears.

[dyl]

I would disagree with this:

E. Stuff that doesn't work ...Dry fire....Focusing on trigger control

Based on the author's own argument (and my experience) giving the eyes a role, job to focus on allows one to focus on one element at a time. Everything up to the point of firing can be the same whether with or without live ammo. When someone is dealing with multiple elements of a flinch - the anticipation, the blink, it's a struggle to develop consistency: trigger control, grip pressure, stance. Removing the explosion from the equation lets the learner fine tune these things in a low pressure environment, observing keenly what works and what doesn't. It gives a chance to give the eyes a job to do. Being able to focus on the sight picture then the front sight without the pressure of live fire makes a world of difference. There is so much chaos and multitasking that any technique to improve each element one at a time is helpful to those that need it.

Your brain knows that an empty gun doesn't go boom. It knows there is no flash or blast or recoil coming, so it doesn't feel any need to protect the eyes or shove the gun around. Lots and lots and lots of people can dry fire with perfect accuracy and have a horrendous flinch with live ammo.

Yes your brain knows when it is live fire and not. Are we saying it doesn't help at all to learn unless it's on a live range? So someone learning piano doesn't benefit from practice at home, only performing under the pressure of a concert?

[jetinteriorguy]

I think dry firing would help from the standpoint of developing muscle memory, helping to overcome the tendency to flinch. Anytime a function becomes an automatic thing through training it helps overcome bad habits associated with that function, really the main reason why we train.

[Hal]

So someone learning piano doesn't benefit from practice at home, only performing under the pressure of a concert?

Well...one things probably for sure with that approach - it's one lesson you won't ever forget... .