First 30 Days of Dry Fire: Building the AIWB Draw from the Ground Up
A structured approach to dry-fire training that prepares you for concealed carry without skipping steps
AIWB is the fastest draw position available—but that speed only works if your fundamentals are built on a solid foundation. Most new carriers want to jump straight to speed work. That's backwards. The first 30 days of dry fire should be about establishing draw path integrity, trigger control, and sight picture consistency. Speed comes after those three things are automatic.
## The Problem with Rushing
I see this repeatedly in students who move to AIWB from other positions. They've trained elsewhere, they're comfortable with a gun in their hand, so they assume they can compress the learning curve. What they don't account for is that AIWB has a different geometry. Your draw path is tighter. Your trigger guard is under your shirt longer. The gun travels closer to your body. If you haven't internalized that path through slow, deliberate repetition, you'll either develop bad habits or, worse, you'll compromise safety.
Honest caveat: some of what I'm about to describe will feel slow. It will feel inefficient. That discomfort is the point. You're teaching your nervous system a new motor pattern, and that requires patience.
## Weeks 1–2: Draw Path and Garment Management
Start with the holster on your body, fully dressed in what you actually carry in. Not a belt. Not a range shirt. The clothes you wear. This matters because your brain needs to integrate the actual draw environment, not a fantasy version of it.
For the first two weeks, do nothing but draw and re-holster. No trigger press. No shot timer. Just the motion.
**Each session: 10 draws, twice a day, five days a week.** That's 100 repetitions over 14 days. Do them slow enough that you can feel every part of the motion. Your hand should be able to clear the garment cleanly. Your trigger finger should stay straight and outside the trigger guard until you're on target. Your support hand should meet your firing hand at the proper position for your grip. These aren't things to think about once—they're things you're carving into muscle memory through repetition.
If your draw path is sloppy here, it will still be sloppy in week four, except faster. Fix it now.
## Week 3: Presentation and Sight Picture
Once the draw path is consistent, add the sight picture. This is the stage where you present the gun and align your sights on a specific point on your wall. A small point—a nail hole, a mark you've made with a pen.
**Each session: 10 draws with a one-second sight picture hold, twice a day, five days a week.** After you present, hold the sight picture for a full second before re-holstering. You're training your eyes to find the same sight picture from the same position every time. Consistency first, speed second.
Honest check: if you're not seeing a clear sight picture here, your draw position or your stance needs adjustment. Don't move into trigger work with a broken front sight. Go back to week 1 if you need to.
## Week 4: The Press
Only now do you add the trigger press. At this point, your draw is automatic, your sight picture is repeatable, and your trigger finger discipline is developed. You're ready to integrate the press without sacrificing the fundamentals.
**Each session: 10 draws with presentation, sight picture, and a single deliberate press (no dry fire ammunition, of course—safety check your firearm before every session). The press should be smooth and straight back. No jerking. No flinching. You're looking for consistency, not speed.** Twice a day, five days a week.
This is the stage where most shooters start thinking about a shot timer. Don't. No-tech dry fire beats timer-assisted dry fire for most shooters most of the time. Your timer will reward speed over control, and you don't have enough control built yet to safely pursue speed.
## What You're Building
After 30 days of this structure—roughly 500 repetitions—your AIWB draw has become nearly automatic. You don't have to think about clearing your garment. You don't have to hunt for your sights. Your trigger press doesn't surprise you. That's when speed training makes sense, because speed becomes an acceleration of something solid, not a scramble to make something broken work.
## The Right Fit and the Wrong Fit
This routine is right for anyone new to AIWB who wants to carry responsibly. It's also right for shooters transitioning from other positions, because AIWB geometry demands its own foundation.
It's wrong for someone who already has solid dry-fire discipline and is just changing positions. If you've done serious dry-fire work elsewhere, you can compress this timeline—but you'll still need to reset the draw path. The geometry is different. Your old motor pattern will interfere.
Honest note: 30 days of slow, deliberate work won't feel like progress. Your Instagram feed will show faster shooters. Resist that comparison. You're building something that works. They might be building something fast that fails under pressure. Which would you rather have?
Once these four weeks are done, you have a foundation. That's when you can start experimenting with shot timers, partner drills, and speed work. But not before.
- @m.delacroix25d ago
This is solid foundational work. Four weeks to 500 reps on draw-to-presentation is the right volume. Where I'd add structure: assign par times to each week so you're measuring consistency against a baseline, not just reps.
Week 1–2 draw should hit 1.2–1.5 seconds from ready. Week 3 draw-to-sight-picture, 1.8–2.1 seconds. Week 4 draw-to-press, 2.3–2.8 seconds. These aren't speed targets—they're *consistency targets*. You're tracking that each rep hits the same window, not that you're getting faster.
I ran this exact progression with AIWB after moving from strong-side hip. My W1–2 splits: 1.19, 1.21, 1.18, 1.24, 1.22 over five days. That consistency meant the motor pattern was locked. Week 3 tightened faster because I wasn't chasing time—I was just adding the sight picture to something already repeatable.
Without par times, you lose the signal. You *feel* smooth, but you don't know if you're actually repeating or just moving sloppy at the same speed. Video helps here too. One rep per session, recorded. You'll see drift in your draw path before you feel it.
One caveat: this works if your AIWB position is already dialed. Holster fit, cant, ride height—if those are wrong, reps won't fix them. Sort the hardware first.
- @gulfcoast_ops15d ago
Let me break this apart, because the par-time framing works for what m.delacroix is measuring—but it misses something that matters more for carry-specific draw work.
**What actually matters here?** Not that your draw stays in a 1.2–1.5 second window. What matters is that your support hand integrates early enough that you're not fighting your grip when the shot breaks. And that's not something par times catch.
Here's the thing: you can hit 1.3 seconds consistently while your support hand is still arriving late to the party. Your draw is *fast-and-smooth-looking*, but under the stress of actual presentation—especially if you're drawing from concealment in a real scenario—your support hand fails to meet your firing hand cleanly. You end up with a compromise grip. That's where people lose precision and follow-up capability.
**Where I'd adjust the progression:** Add support-hand-only reps earlier. Week 2, not week 3. Dedicate half your reps to drawing, presenting, and locking your support hand in place *before* your firing hand takes the trigger. This forces your nervous system to sequence the grip correctly. Par times won't expose a late support hand. Video won't always catch it either. But reps dedicated specifically to that integration will.
Your draw-to-press window in week 4 should feel locked because your hands are already coordinating automatically, not because you're moving fast and hoping it works out.
**For your specific carry setup:** If you're running AIWB and actually carrying, do 5 reps of firing-hand-only draw, then 5 support-hand-focused, then 5 full-press, twice daily. It's the same volume, better sequencing. Skip the shot timer for the first 30 days. Just film one rep per session. Watch for support-hand integration. That's your real baseline.
- @new_shooter_questions9d ago
I'm reading both of these and they're helpful, but I have a question that's probably obvious to everyone else here: do I need snap caps for this progression, or am I genuinely dry-firing with an empty chamber?
I ask because I'm the newest shooter in this thread, I ended up with a bone-stock M&P Shield Plus, and the trigger on that thing is... it's fine, but I'm paranoid about striker fatigue. I've read conflicting stuff online—some people say modern strikers are fine, some say snap caps are mandatory, some say it depends on the gun.
The OP's post doesn't mention snap caps at all, just "safety check your firearm before every session." But when I watch dry-fire videos, half of them are using snap caps and half aren't. I don't want to build a whole month of motor memory on the wrong equipment, and I also don't want to trash my gun.
For context: I'm doing this progression indoors, in my apartment, with a dedicated wall corner (no furniture behind it, clear sightline). So the safety part feels solid. I'm just stuck on whether the snap cap thing is a real concern or internet noise.
Also—small hands question, since I'm mentioning it: does support-hand integration work differently for people with smaller hands, or is it the same sequencing? I'm wondering if that timing window gulfcoast_ops mentioned shifts at all based on hand size.
- @southpaw_095d ago
On the snap cap question: you don't need them for dry fire on a modern striker-fired gun. The M&P Shield Plus striker is fine with regular dry fire—that design has been tested on thousands of rounds of dry fire in training and competition. The internet noise comes from people who learned on older hammered guns where striker fatigue was actually a thing. It's not.
What *does* matter: safety-check the gun every single session before you start. Visually inspect the chamber. Physically run your finger along the barrel. Make it a ritual. That's your actual safety protocol. The snap caps are security theater in your case.
Honest note on the small-hands question: hand size doesn't shift the sequencing gulfcoast_ops described, but it might shift the *positioning*. Smaller hands sometimes arrive at support-hand integration from a slightly different grip angle. Not later or earlier—just from a different geometry. When you film those reps (and you should), watch where your thumbs meet. If they're stacking naturally, you're good. If you're having to shift your support hand position after the press, that's worth addressing before speed work. But the integration timing stays the same.
On the broader thread disagreement: m.delacroix's par times are useful *if* you're disciplined about what they measure (consistency, not speed), and gulfcoast_ops is right that support-hand integration is what actually breaks down under stress. These aren't contradictory—they're different signal channels. Par times catch drift. Support-hand-specific reps catch sequencing problems. Both matter.
I'm curious whether you've actually found tension between those two approaches in your own progression, or if they just feel like different priorities on paper?