I have been having trouble with my dominant hand for a while and finally went to the dir. without going into the long boring details, I will have to go in for surgery sometime in the spring. So, the last 2 days I have been sitting around dry firing or at least trying to with my left hand. I am lucky as my carry gun allows me to rack the slide with the rear sight, but aiming and sighting I suck
Anyone doing this, if not you really should I always thought I could pull it off, even would fire off a few mags once in a while left-handed, but when you really take your strong hand out of the picture it is not so easy, at least not for me. Got me thinking a lot about what if…
I practice some, not near enough, I’m sure and the ammo supply issues are not going to help that a bit. Dry firing is great but nothing embeds muscle memory like live fire.
I do practice shooting with the stranger hand. Not as fluid as the strong hand, but I can hit the target fair. I definitely need to practice more often.
The 22 cal pistols have been seeing way more use since the shortage started. While not close to a copy of my edc does give me a chance to fire weak hand.
It’s a regular part of my practice and I’m pretty proficient now. I’ll never catch up to decades of practice with my strong hand, but I can do well with my support hand now.
Dry fire and practice your draw frequently to get rid of the “odd” feeling of using your support hand…repetition is key.
One huge piece of advice I can give to help you hit your target more accurately, more frequently is to shift your vision/sighting to align with your non dominant hand. In other words, really concentrate on using your right side vision for firing right handed and your left side vision for firing left handed…this helped me the most in the accuracy department.
I was really trying to sight with my right side vision (since I’m right eye dominant) while shooting left handed which caused major issues in sight alignment. Once I learned to focus my vision to align with my sights, my shooting improved drastically.
And yes, I shoot with both eyes open, but shifting and focusing vision still occurs. You may want to do what I had to do to train myself which is to actually close the eye that you don’t want to focus through while aiming. Shift back and forth repeatedly from left to right.
This actually worked for me as crazy as it sounds.
And a good .22 pistol is golden for learning to shoot with your non dominant hand. Lots and lots of live fire/mag changes, loading etc.
A few decades ago I fell on ice and severely shattered my right wrist. I was in an erector set contraption and the prognosis wasn’t good. I figured that I wasn’t going to stop shooting so I taught myself to shoot lefty. I’m left dominant eyed so that wouldn’t be a problem. I found for rifle anyway I was actually better lefty than righty. So the answer is yes, I do shoot lefty. Not so much practice anymore, but when a course of fire shows up that requires left firing I know that it’s going to be fine.
The right hand? Prognosis be damned. If I had followed the advice of my therapist I’d have been a cripple. Instead I pushed myself and followed the common sense advice of pushing myself and if I couldn’t do something one day, just put it away and come back to it in a few days until I was healed enough to do it. I figured the right hand was either going to be functional or I’d get it removed and something fitted to allow me to use selected appliances to get use of it. It turned out that my approach was the right one.
If the stage I’m shooting requires weak hand shooting I’ll shoot lefty. If not i don’t really practice it. My first shot is generally an alpha and the second generally is a Charlie. That’d good enough for me i can do it when i have to.
When , I used to practice lefty shooting , it is a good practice to start at 3to 7 yards of course having a shoft dirt pile for the bullet to womp. Dont do a drill that close on steel plate . I digress ,anyhow, placing the dominant hand across the chest and then focusing on front sight only at this range. Switching the normal weaver stance you may be using to the opposit side. As accuracy improves at this short distance then go to the right hand as the support hand gripping around the other . The real accuracy of the handgun comes from 2 things the trigger pull and the support hand . Also some have found that placing a holosight or some other reflex sight where both eyes can remain opened removes the need for left eye versus right eye dominance . Just my 2 cents . Hope your re-training has been panning out
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