Two hours in and I'm already doing one thing right (but everything else is still wrong)

**What you're describing is completely normal—but let's break apart why some things stick and others don't.**

Your draw locked in fast because it's a gross motor pattern with a clear start and end point. Repetition under supervision? That's the recipe. You did maybe 30–50 draws in structured conditions. Your nervous system said "okay, this sequence works" and filed it away.

**Why the trigger press feels impossible right now:**

Trigger control isn't a gross motor skill—it's a *fine* motor skill layered on top of a gross motor skill (your entire arm position). You can't just "think harder" at fine motor problems. You have to rewire the neural pathway through hundreds of repetitions, and the tricky part is doing those reps *correctly*. One jerky rep teaches your hand to jerk. One good rep teaches it the right thing. You're in a competition between habits, and right now the jerky habit is winning because it's older.

**The number you're looking for:** Most shooters see real change around 300–500 dry-fire reps done *slowly and deliberately*. Not rushed. Not while watching TV. Slow, focused, feeling the press break cleanly. Then another 200–300 live fire reps with the same discipline. Some people need more. Some need less. But the internet "just dry fire bro" advice is only half right—it has to be *intentional* practice.

**Your next move:** Get a laser trainer (SIRT or comparable) and commit to 10 minutes a day, five days a week, for the next month. Slow presses. Watch the laser dot. That's your fastest path forward.

Honest question: did the class use AIWB or was it belt carry? I'm asking because the draw path changes pretty dramatically between the two, and if your instructor was cueing a belt draw but you're planning to practice AIWB at home, that disconnect might explain why the motor pattern didn't fully cement.

I ask because I see this a lot with newer shooters—they nail the draw in class under one setup, then go home and practice something slightly different (different holster angle, different starting position relative to the trigger guard, different draw path to clear the cover garment), and suddenly it feels like the repetition isn't carrying over. It's not that you're stubborn. It's that your nervous system learned a *specific* sequence, and small geometry changes break it.

What holster setup are you planning to dry-fire with? And what did your instructor actually demo—was it strong-side belt, appendix, or something else? If there's a mismatch there, worth tightening it up before you sink 300 reps into the wrong pattern.

The trigger press piece—gulfcoast_ops nailed that. But the draw staying clean is contingent on practicing the actual carry method you'll use. Worth double-checking.

The draw-to-first-shot split is the number that matters here, and it's worth tracking before you sink reps into anything else.

I ran a similar progression last year—first class, same shock that the draw locked in fast. I timed my splits at the end of that first session: 1.8 seconds, draw to break. Six weeks of dry fire and live fire later (averaging 15 minutes a day, five days a week)? 1.3 seconds, and the variation dropped from ±0.3 seconds to ±0.08 seconds.

Here's what actually changed: My draw was *efficient* after one class. My trigger press was still teaching my hand the wrong pattern. The split time showed me which piece was the bottleneck. Turns out the draw wasn't the limiting factor anymore—it was the press and the follow-up sight picture. That's data. You can't optimize what you don't measure.

**What gulfcoast_ops said about fine motor skill is correct.** But the metric isn't "how many reps," it's "when does your split time plateau, and at what variation?" You'll see fast gains for the first 200 reps, then diminishing returns for another 300. After that, you're chasing consistency, not speed.

Start timing your splits from the holster to break—not from draw to first shot, just the press itself. Run a par time drill: five shots in five seconds, every rep from cold. Do this weekly. You'll see the trigger press problem show up in real time, and you'll see when it stops showing up. That's your actual answer, not a rep count.

The rest of it—grip, support hand placement—feeds into whether your split times stay consistent or drift wide. Track that simultaneously. Dry fire alone won't tell you.

I might be misremembering what my instructor actually said about the grip thing, so correct me if I'm off base here—but during the debrief she mentioned something about how grip problems tend to get *worse* under stress before they get better, not better. Like, she said the support hand stuff especially has this lag where you'll feel the correction click in during slow, deliberate reps, but the second you speed up or get any adrenaline going, your hands default back to the broken pattern because the new pattern isn't wired deep enough yet.

She also said—and I'm pretty sure this is a direct quote because it stuck with me—"your grip is trying to solve a problem your draw already solved." I nodded at the time but I'm still not 100% sure what she meant by that. Like, was she saying my grip was overcompensating for something the draw was already handling? Or that I was consciously gripping *harder* to make up for a draw that wasn't as clean as I thought?

I ask because when I watch the video from class, my grip *does* look tighter on the shots where my draw was messiest. So maybe the support hand weirdness she kept correcting wasn't actually a separate problem—maybe it was my nervous system trying to white-knuckle through a draw sequence that hadn't fully settled yet?

If that's true, then maybe I'm approaching the dry-fire wrong. Should I be focusing on the draw with *clean* grip, rather than drilling trigger press with a grip I know is still broken? Or is that overthinking it?