Shooting Illustrated by Kevin Creighton - Wednesday, July 11, 2018
Dry-fire practice at home is one of the fastest ways to improve marksmanship and gun handling. With a regular routine of dry-fire practice, you can quickly improve vital gun-handling skills like a smooth trigger press, a quick and efficient draw and fast, smooth reloads.
But here’s the dirty little secret about dry-fire practice: it’s boring. It’s like eating your vegetables as a kid: Yes, we know it’s good for us, and it’ll help us grow, but it’s just not as fun as other things like the noise and recoil you get when pulling the trigger on a live round.
That’s where dry-fire training aids come in, and several companies have teamed up the computing power and built-in of the modern smartphone with inexpensive lasers to create dry-fire practice systems that make practice at home a lot more fun.
There are essentially two different types of smartphone dry-fire apps available today: Ones that use the built-in smartphone of your camera to record the hits on the target, usually a scaled down version of a practical pistol or bullseye target, and then there are the ones that use another device to track hits and those those results are communicated to your phone for review. Apps that use your smartphone’s camera typically cost less up-front that those with a dedicated target stand, but then you also have to factor in the added cost of buying an adapter and stand for your smartphone in order to hold it in place as you do your training.
There are also two different ways to put laser “hits†onto the target, a small bullet-shaped laser that fits into the barrel of an unloaded pistol, and dedicated laser training pistols like those made by LaserLyte and Next Level Training. As always, for maximum safety when performing any dry-fire practice, make sure your pistol is unloaded and there is no live ammunition anywhere in the room where you are practicing. Here’s a look at some of the smartphone-based systems for dry-fire available today:
More:
https://www.shootingillustrated.com/articles/2018/7/11/6-fun-phone-apps-for-dry-fire-practice/