鉄砲道 — teppoudo

The topic of grip pressure has been discussed ad infinitum.

I’ve seen everything from the “death grip” proposed by some people to discussions around a softer grip.

It is important to note that the amount of absolute grip pressure has very little to do with neutrality. Neutrality can be impacted by the proportion of  pressure exerted based on the capability of the person, e.g., you will have much more control if you are exerting 50% of the pressure you are capable of exerting, compared to if you’re exerting 90% pressure.

The typical analogy used for the softer style takes the form of “hold the pistol, as tightly as you would hold a hammer”. The objective being the removal of tension from the body while shooting. Just as you can’t swing a hammer effectively while tense, shooting at speed requires you not to be tense.

My personal shooting style evolved from a very firm grip to a softer grip, however as my shooting sessions got longer I noticed a tendency for a clench reflex to develop and a loss of fine trigger control skill.

While listening to an episode of Practical Shooting Radio hosted by Matt Burkett, I heard Matt discussing his workout routine where he makes sure he does not use his trigger finger as part of his grip while lifting weights. In fact he goes as far as to flex the finger in a trigger motion independent of the rest of his hand as he does his workout.

This intrigued me a lot since it seemed to indicate that the discussion of grip pressure had at it’s core a motive for trigger finger isolation. The grip pressure by itself didn’t mean much as long as there wasn’t tension in the rest of the body and the trigger control was not compromised.

As an experiment, for 2 weeks I did 30 pull ups (spread out over the day) without using my trigger finger as part of the grip. Additionally I tried to move the trigger finger in a relaxed fashion independent of the rest of the grip while performing the pull up.

After 2 weeks I had the opportunity to have an extended range session. The good news is as follows:

• Even during an extended range session my clench reflex did not come back and I maintained good trigger control right to the end
• My weak hand trigger control got significantly better
• I no longer had to track grip pressure in my conscious mind while shooting. Since it did not affect my trigger control, or make my body tense in any way, I didn’t need to worry about it

This is kind of interesting for me and I’d like to analyze it further since it seems to be a cross over between the hard and soft styles of shooting.