The First Month of AIWB: Building a Draw from the Ground Up
Why your dry-fire routine matters more than your holster choice
You picked AIWB. Maybe you researched it. Maybe you know it's the fastest draw position available if you do it right. Now comes the harder part: actually getting it right.
Honest assessment: most new AIWB carriers either skip structured dry fire entirely, or they treat it like a speed drill from day one. Both paths end badly. The first leads to sloppy presentation under stress. The second teaches your hands to move faster than your eyes can follow the sights—and that's a training debt you'll pay later.
The first 30 days aren't about speed. They're about building a draw stroke that works every time, from any level of alertness, with the trigger press as the weakest link you're solving for.
## Week One: Grip and Presentation
Start dry and unloaded. Strip the mag. Leave the gun on the table. You're not drawing yet.
Focus on getting your hand to the gun the same way every time. AIWB sits between your hip and groin—that draw path is short and straight, but "close" means your hand needs a clean, repeatable approach angle. Too much flare outward and you're telegraphing. Too much inward and you're fighting your own body geometry.
Do 50 reps of grip-only: hand on the gun, establish your master grip, confirm the trigger finger is straight and off the trigger. Then release and reset. That's it. No holster, no presentation, no sight picture. Just grip consistency.
Then move to presentation with the gun in the holster. 50 reps of drawing to a loose ready position—muzzle downrange, hands centered on the gun, finger off the trigger. Focus on the draw path being smooth, not fast. If you're jerking or fighting friction, you have a holster problem or a body-positioning problem. Solve that now, not in week three.
Don't time yourself. Seriously.
## Week Two: Sight Picture and Trigger Press
Now you're presenting from the holster and moving to a proper sight picture. Your eyes should be looking through the sights at the target as the gun comes up. This is harder than it sounds because your brain wants to look at the gun as it moves. Fight that impulse.
Do 30 draws per session, twice a day. Each draw: present from the holster, drive the gun to your natural aiming line, confirm a front sight picture, dry press once, and reset. The press should be smooth, deliberate, and slow enough that you could stop it halfway if you needed to. This is the opposite of a speed drill.
The trigger press is where most shooters fail at AIWB. Because the draw is fast, people assume the press should be fast too. That's wrong. **The press is independent of the draw.** You can present in 0.8 seconds and still need a clean 2-second press to call the shot.
If you're jerking the trigger, reset to 50 reps of grip work and slow everything down. There is no "pushing through" a bad press habit.
## Week Three: Building Rhythm
You've got repeatable presentation and a deliberate press. Now add spacing.
String together 5 draws in a row, all from the holster, all with a sight picture and a dry press. Do this 3 times. Rest 2–3 minutes between strings. The goal is to feel the rhythm of draw, sight, press without sprinting. You should feel yourself settling into the sights before the press breaks.
If a press is jerky or the sight picture is confused, don't make a note to "work on it later." Stop the string, reset, and run it again from the beginning. This is honest feedback about what's working.
Add 2 of these sessions to your week—maybe Tuesday and Thursday if you're shooting on weekends. That's 30 dry reps per session, structured.
## Week Four: Sustain and Test
Keep the rhythm work going. Add one "performance" session: 10 consecutive draws with clean sight pictures and deliberate presses, no resets mid-string. This isn't a pass-fail test. It's a mirror. Does your presentation break down on rep 7? Does your press get jerky when you're working back-to-back? These are the things you now know to train.
## What You're Not Doing Yet
No speed drills. No shooting on the move. No drawing from retention positions. No one-handed work. No low-light draws. Honest assessment: if you can't draw and press cleanly from the holster in bright light, standing still, with both hands, then everything else is a distraction.
## The Holster Question
One thing worth noting: if your draw path feels bad, the holster may be the culprit. A too-rigid holster, the wrong ride height, or a cant that doesn't match your body geometry will make these drills miserable and teach you bad habits. Right now, in week one and two, this is your signal to swap gear if needed. Don't grind through four weeks trying to make a bad carry position work.
The gun should come out of the holster cleanly, with zero binding, and return reliably when you reholster. That's your baseline.
## After 30 Days
You've got a repeatable draw, a clean trigger press, and rhythm. That foundation is what speed is built on. Not the other way around.
From here, you can begin to tighten the timeline, add complexity, and stress-test the mechanics under pressure. But you're not there yet. Give yourself the month. The speed will come.
- @m.delacroix19d ago
Solid framework. I'd add a par time to each week—not to chase speed, but to establish whether you're actually improving or just repeating.
Week One grip work: 50 reps in under 90 seconds. That's ~1.8 seconds per rep. You're not sprinting; you're confirming the grip cycle is automatic.
Week Two presentation + sight picture + press: 30 draws, 2:00 par for all 30. That's 4 seconds per rep. If you're running 3:45, you're moving efficiently. If you're 5:30+, your sight picture or press is eating time—and you need to know that before you move to strings.
Week Three rhythm strings: 5 draws per string in 20 seconds. That's 4 seconds per rep at rhythm, not at speed. Same metric; now you're running it back-to-back without reset.
Week Four performance session: 10 draws in 40–45 seconds. If rep 7 falls apart, you'll see the jump in your time. That's diagnostic.
The par times aren't targets—they're data points. If you hit them, you know the mechanics are efficient. If you miss them, you know where to spend next week's dry fire.
I measured my AIWB draws for three months before I went live. Dry-fire split times tracked almost exactly to live-fire. Grip consistency and press control drove the correlation. Speed followed.
Caveat: these pars work for a solid stance and a reasonable holster. If your presentation is fighting geometry or your draw path has binding, the times are meaningless until you fix the hardware.
- @gulfcoast_ops11d ago
Let me break this apart, because the par-time framing misses something more fundamental.
**What's actually being measured here?** Delacroix is tracking rep efficiency, which is useful data. But here's the thing: you can hit 1.8 seconds per grip rep and still have a draw path that doesn't work in your body or your holster setup. The par time tells you *speed*. It doesn't tell you whether you've solved the actual problem.
**What's the environment doing to your draw?** Before you start timing anything, you need to know: Where are you dry-firing? Are you at a table? Standing in your bedroom? Drawing from your actual daily carry position and clothing? Because a grip that works over a bare kitchen counter at 6 AM doesn't mean it works when you're sitting in your car, wearing a jacket, at 2 PM.
I'd flip the first week entirely. Skip the par times. Instead, spend week one in *your actual environment*—your car, your couch, the clothes you actually wear. Do 30 draws from your daily carry setup. Slow. Just repeatable. Find out whether your holster, your body position, and your clothing play well together. If they don't, no par time is going to fix that.
Once you know the draw path actually works across your real-world contexts, *then* delacroix's pars become diagnostic.
Concrete recommendation: Before you time anything, answer this—where are you actually going to carry this gun, and have you dry-fired in that context with that setup? If the answer is "no," that's your first week.
- @solo.range7d ago
I've been running a notebook system for three years now—every dry-fire session gets logged: date, reps, par times if I'm timing that week, and one line on what broke or what held. Started because I wanted to know whether I was actually improving or just showing up.
Here's what the notebook taught me: par times are diagnostic *only if you're also logging the context*. Delacroix's pars work. I've hit them. But gulfcoast_ops is right that they don't tell you why you're hitting or missing them.
My approach: I log the environment in week one. Holster used. Clothing. Position (standing, seated, driving position). Temperature. Time of day. Then I run the grip reps and note whether the draw path felt clean or stuck. No timer. Just honest notation—"binding on presentation," "grip felt rushed," "sight picture delayed."
Week two, I add the par times *and keep logging the same variables*. Now when I'm running 4.2 seconds instead of 4.0, I can look back and see: was it the holster? Was it the clothing? Was it a tired day? The par time tells me something changed. The notebook tells me what.
After 30 days, I have 60+ reps logged with context. That's the real data set. When I move to live fire, I'm not guessing what carried over. I already know which conditions my dry work actually covered.
Starting without the notebook—just timing against par—you get speed metrics but no traceability. You hit 1.8 seconds on Tuesday and 2.1 on Thursday, and you don't know why. Spend the first week logging context. Add the timer in week two. That's when the pars become actually useful.
- @new_shooter_questions4d ago
I'm reading all three of these and I'm stuck on a practical question: how do you actually know when you're ready to move to live fire? Like, objectively.
Because I'm the newest shooter in this thread—I got my first pistol four months ago, small hands, ended up with a Sig P365—and I've been dry-firing AIWB for about six weeks now. I'm hitting the par times delacroix laid out. My notebook (I started one after reading solo.range's post) shows consistent presentation across my car, my couch, standing in my apartment. No binding. Sight picture is there. Press is clean most days.
But I don't *feel* ready, and I can't figure out if that's normal beginner anxiety or if I'm actually missing something.
The OP's framework says "after 30 days you've got a repeatable draw, a clean trigger press, and rhythm." I have those. delacroix's pars are pretty close—I'm running 1.7 on grip, 4.1 on the presentation + sight + press reps, 4.2 on the rhythm strings. solo.range's notebook approach caught something useful: I'm slower on days I dry-fire tired, but the binding goes away once I reset.
So what's the actual gate? Is it "hit these numbers consistently for a week"? Is it "don't feel afraid"? Is it "take a fundamentals course first"? Because right now it feels like I could move to live fire and genuinely not know whether I'm stepping into competence or just overconfidence.
I want to do this in the right order. I'm not in a rush. But I also don't want to dry-fire myself into analysis paralysis.