Drills/Exercises for shaking during trigger pull

[PirateJohn]

I have been doing a lot if dry firing and SCATT training recently with the goal of reducing my random shaking during the trigger pull, but I am still getting several shots out of 60 in which the gun shakes a lot as I pull the trigger. It's not in any one specific direction, but seems ti be caused by my flexing muscles other than the trigger finger during the trigger pull.

Does anybody have any good drills or exercises for training the proper trigger pull to minimize shaking?

[Gwhite]

How tightly are you gripping the pistol? There is a natural tendency to try to CONTROL the pistol when it starts to shake, and if you tighten up your grip, you are likely to just make matters worse.

Several years ago, I went out and bought a grip force meter: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00A8K4L84/ for the team I help coach.

It's not ideal but it helps. Andrew Berryhill printed some "adapters" for us that make it feel more like a pistol grip. We have students dry fire for a bit, and then try to duplicate their grip force while we watch the meter.

We had a bunch of our top shooters try it, and the average was between 2 and 2.5 pounds. The catch is that the meter won't actually read below 2 pounds, and there were some students where we couldn't get a good reading because of that. I suspect 2 pounds is a good average.

We then tried it on several students who were struggling to shoot well, and who we suspected were over-gripping. One of them was at 9 pounds! We had him play with the gauge to get a sense of what a lighter grip would feel like, and his group size was instantly cut in half. Since then, we've helped a lot of students by getting them to chill out in the grip department. Air pistol is a sport of finesse, not brute strength, and your grip should reflect that.

My first Coach was a National Champion with a .45. His mantra was "the tighter the grip, the tighter the group". When I was younger, I could shoot OK with a much tighter grip. Now that I am on the far side of 70, the lighter a grip I can get away with, the less I shake. The downside is that the lighter the grip, the more perfect your trigger control needs to be so as not to move the pistol when firing.

[B Lafferty]

Interesting. Thank you for sharing that information.

[PirateJohn]

I have learned to keep my grip loose, but I think I have a tendency to sometimes flex more than just my index finger when I fire, and that is causing the shaking. So I'm looking for exercises I can do to get better at not flexing.

[KDZ]

Maybe some weight training? Shaking can be from exertion and muscle fatigue. Making the arms/shoulders (deltoid) stronger can reduce the effort needed to hold.

I use free weights. Here coach Dina A. shows some other ways:

https://vimeo.com/616718469?embedded=tr ... =151166467

[PirateJohn]

Thanks for the link. For strength training, I use a hand gripper with individual fingers so I can train both my grip and my trigger finger. It does help somewhat.

[David M]

Trigger finger exercise and smooth trigger pull, use a good double action revolver and dryfire.
Shoot everything on tv ( also a little light polish in the action will give you smooth action at the same time).
Now was I training the finger or polishing the action ???

[1066les]

I found https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZJTenjAh5A to be a very useful way to train a trigger finger. If you don't have an empty cartridge case, then just about anything similar can be used. And yes, it works just as well for 4.5mm AP as it does for 9mm etc.

[PirateJohn]

I found https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZJTenjAh5A to be a very useful way to train a trigger finger. If you don't have an empty cartridge case, then just about anything similar can be used. And yes, it works just as well for 4.5mm AP as it does for 9mm etc.

Thanks! I'll have to give that a try. I'll have to head to the sporting goods store to get that kind of gripper.

[kqrxbn]

I have a similar problem but—and this is about me and my experience but may be useful to someone else—believe it is mental. When I dry-fire in any which way, my trigger pull is usually smoother. As soon as I fire actual pellets or bullets against a target, it is harder to pull smoothly. I think this is simply because I'm "trying harder". This means that I am way too careful in lining up the sights and finding the absolutely optimal aim point and when I get to the point of actually starting to pull the trigger, the finger has turned into the famous chicken. One way I manage to unlock it is by "pumping" the trigger: I pull a little bit, ignoring any shakes and deviation of the sights, realign the sights while relaxing the finger and then immediately pull more confidently to fire basically at once. I'm not focused on attempting to fire faster, so doing a lot of drills with a timer giving me between 6 and 10 seconds to take the shot.

One thing I've learned from that is that it doesn't matter (that's a bit of an exaggeration for argument's sake) where the gun is pointing as long as the sights line up, but over time I tend to forget it and I need to run some of those times drills again.

[PirateJohn]

Yeah, I hear you about the "trying harder" part. I do a lot of dry fires and might get the sights shaking 2 out of every 100 dry fires, but then in a match I'll have shaking in at least 4 or 5 shots out of 60.