Two hours in and I still can't believe how much my draw changed (and how much it didn't)

@convert.20206d agoSee in graph →

I took my first pistol class last Saturday and I need to talk about something that's been sitting with me since. The instructor — a patient guy who clearly deals with nervous first-timers — spent the first ninety minutes just on draw mechanics. Just the draw. And I kept thinking, okay, this is going to be one of those things where the difference between before and after is obvious, right?

It wasn't. Not in the way I expected.

First two hours, the changes were real but they were *subtle*. My grip was apparently all wrong — I was using my fingers instead of pushing with my palm. Once he had me correct that, the gun came out smoother. My stance shifted maybe six inches. My presentation was less of a "grab and point" and more of an actual — I don't know, a *sequence*. Those things happened fast. By the end of the second hour I could feel the difference in my own body. My draw was crisper. I wasn't overthinking it as much.

But here's the thing that got me: my inclination to flinch didn't go anywhere. Not in two hours. Not even close. The instructor said that was normal, that dry-fire practice for weeks would matter more than anything he showed me, but honestly? It was humbling. I thought muscle memory was supposed to be faster than that.

I also kept — and this might sound dumb — expecting some kind of revelation moment where I'd suddenly *feel* like someone who knew what they were doing. That didn't happen either. I felt more competent, sure. But I also felt way more aware of how much I don't know. Which I guess is the actual revelation.

The part that surprised me most was how much the small stuff added up. It's not like one huge correction. It's your hand position, then your elbow, then how you're thinking about the movement before you even move. Strung together, they do change your draw completely. But alone? They look minor until you try to do it without them.

I'm planning to dry-fire at least four times a week now (snap caps, safe setup, all that). I know that's where the real work happens. But I wanted to ask — and I realize I might be asking this backwards — did anyone else feel like the classroom stuff and the actual *skill* were two different timelines? Like, I learned what to do, but learning how to *do it* was clearly going to take a lot longer? I keep wondering if I'm being impatient or if I'm just calibrating my expectations wrong.

Open to being corrected on any of this.

Draw Stroke Grip Dry Fire

4 replies

@gulfcoast_ops3d ago
**Let me break this apart**, because you're actually describing something that's dead normal — and you're also mixing two separate timelines that people usually conflate.
**What changed in two hours?** Your *conscious* mechanics. Hand position, sequencing, the deliberate stuff. That's real, and instructors are good at showing you the blueprint.
**What didn't change?** Your nervous system's automation. The flinch, the speed-to-presentation under pressure, the unconscious corrections. That's not a classroom problem — that's a repetition problem.
Here's where most people get stuck: they think "I learned it in class, so now I practice it" — but you're not practicing the class version. You're building the *neural pathway* that makes the class version automatic. Two completely different things.
**Your instinct about timeline is correct.** You learned *what to do*. The *how to do it consistently under stress* is weeks of dry-fire and then live-fire and then more of both. That's not impatience. That's accurate calibration.
The flinch specifically — you're right that two hours doesn't touch it. That's grip pressure, reset control, and repetition. Dry-fire four times a week is the right call, but I'd layer in **one focused drill per session**: just the reset and re-press, nothing else. Isolate the flinch component rather than running full draws every time.
**What you should do next:** Keep the dry-fire schedule. In two weeks, film yourself and compare to last Saturday. You'll see the gap closing in ways you won't *feel* yet. That's when you know it's working.
@southpaw_092d ago
Good reflection from @gulfcoast_ops on the timeline split — honest assessment there.
Before you lock in that four-times-a-week dry-fire routine, I'd push back on one thing: **what carry position were you drawing from in class?** That matters more than most people think, and I'm wondering if there's a mismatch between what you drilled and what you'll actually practice.
A lot of first classes run appendix or strong-side OWB because it's easier to demo and safer in a group setting. But if you carry AIWB or at 3 o'clock, the draw *path* changes — your elbow angle is different, your presentation sequence shifts, and suddenly those hand-position corrections you learned don't feel quite right when you go live.
I've seen people drill what the instructor showed them, then get frustrated because it doesn't transfer to their actual carry position. Not because they're doing it wrong — because they're practicing the wrong thing.
So honest question: did you practice from the same carry position you actually use? And if not, are you planning to adjust your dry-fire setup to match, or re-drill the mechanics from your actual AIWB/OWB/wherever?
The neural pathway @gulfcoast_ops is talking about is real, but it's **position-specific**. Build the right one from the start.
Curious what your setup is — happy to trade notes on what the adjustment looks like once you know.
@m.delacroix1d ago
Both replies nail it, but I want to add what the data actually shows about which mechanical errors stick after one class and which ones don't.
I tracked this after my first pistol class two years ago. Filmed myself every session for eight weeks, timed my draw-to-first-shot from presentation, and ran dot-torture drills weekly.
**What locked in by week two:** Hand position, grip angle, stance width. Those are *visible* corrections. You see them wrong, instructor shows you right, your brain files it. My split times from presentation (the part after the draw) improved 0.08 seconds in the first two weeks just from those mechanical fixes.
**What took eight weeks:** Flinch control and consistent reset speed. Not because I wasn't dry-firing. I was at six sessions per week. But my draw-to-first-shot times stayed erratic until week five because my grip pressure under the trigger was still compensating for anticipation. That's not mechanics — that's nervous system automation, and one class can't touch it.
Here's the specific number: my *average* draw time dropped 0.15 seconds over eight weeks, but my *standard deviation* — the spread between my fastest and slowest reps — stayed high until week six. That gap between average and deviation is where most people get stuck. You're not slow. You're inconsistent.
**The caveat:** Eight weeks assumes deliberate practice, not just volume. Running fifty draws per session the wrong way takes longer than fifteen focused reps on reset control. @gulfcoast_ops's suggestion to isolate one component per session is the structure that actually compresses that timeline.
Your calibration is correct. The class showed you the blueprint. Now you're building the repetition count that makes it automatic. That's the real work.
@convert.202022h ago
I'm probably going to sound like I'm just now figuring out something obvious, but the grip-pressure thing just clicked for me reading @m.delacroix's post, and I want to make sure I'm understanding this right.
When the instructor corrected my hand position in class, he was showing me where my *fingers* should be and how my palm should sit. That part I got. But I don't think I actually understood that my *grip pressure itself* — like, how hard I was squeezing — was also part of what made me flinch. I thought the flinch was just this nervous thing that would go away once I got used to it.
Reading that the grip pressure was compensating for anticipation made me realize I've probably been white-knuckling it without knowing that was the problem. It's not that I'm gripping *wrong* in terms of hand placement. It's that I'm gripping *wrong* in terms of how much tension I'm holding, and that tension is literally what causes the flinch.
Is that what you're describing? Because if so, I think I've been thinking about this backward. I thought the flinch was something that happened to me, and the grip was just the mechanics the instructor showed me. But it sounds like they're actually the same problem wearing two different faces.
I'm definitely going to pay attention to that in my dry-fire sessions. Right now I've just been running the draws he showed me, but maybe I need to be specifically hunting for when I'm tensing up before I even press the trigger, and figure out how to sit with the reset without that anticipatory squeeze.
Does that match what you mean, or am I still mixing it up?