Fixes for Shooting Low and to the Weak Side

When you're out practicing your shooting skills, one of the things that's very common is people will see that they're shooting low and to their weak side. Now, since most of the population's right-handed, I get a lot of questions about, hey, I'm missing low and to the left. First question, are you right-handed? So what we're really talking about here is missing low and to the weak side. Now, there's two primary reasons this happens.

If you're shooting two handed especially, and especially if you're shooting in relatively squared off stance, either an isosceles stance or a natural neutral stance where you have a lowered center of gravity and the gun is driven out relatively equally with both arms, especially if you're a shooter like me, who started doing most of your training in a bladed position. Now you can go ahead and use the search engine @personaldefensenetwork.com and see what I think about the weaver position and the bladed positions and all that. But basically if you learn to shoot this way, then you learn to actually apply back pressure with your weak hand on the gun. So even if intellectually you know that you're supposed to be extending both arms once you're squared off, either in an isosceles or in a natural neutral stance like I teach, this arm may not be fully engaged. And that's the number one reason when you're doing rapid strings of fire, when I see people shooting a lot of left.

And remember I spend a lot more time watching people shoot than I do shooting myself. And that's really what my job has been for the last couple of decades, is helping people fix their problems. So I've seen a lot of people shooting on the range rapidly with this arm not fully engaged, in a squared off stance, driving out to the left or even low and left. What happens is you see it's pattern like that, lots of shots off to the left. And of course, I'm exaggerating this to make the point because I have spent a lot of years working on over exaggerating that extension of the arm and the engagement of the shoulder.

When I drive out and extend both arms fully I can shoot without having to worry about pulling the gun off to the left or low left. That's the number one problem I see with two handed shooting again, especially rapid. The number two problem that I see comes up especially with one handed shooting, but also sometimes with more precise shooting. We talk about over gripping the gun. So if I see someone, especially when we start shooting at those little circles, right?

If I see someone who's shooting and everything looks basically right, natural, neutral stance, they've driven both arms out, arms are both fully engaged and both extended, their heads behind the gun, one eye is closed, they're simply pressing the trigger, and they're getting the hits on the circle. But if those hits like, let's take a look at that three. If those hits start shanking left, or they start shanking low and left, they start ending up down there. The first thing I'm gonna look at, if their trigger press looks good, if their trigger press has already established as good, is I'm gonna tell them to take their weak hand off the gun. As soon as I look at their weak hand off the gun I want to look and see what's happening with their fingers.

If you have that capillary response, we have like stripe, white, and red, and pink, and you're pushing the blood out of the area where your nails are compressing against your skin, you're over gripping the gun. And over gripping the gun, as you press the trigger, puts that tension pushing in as your fingers have a sympathetic compression on the grip as you press the trigger. So over gripping the gun is the number one reason I see people throwing high level precision shots low and left, or anytime they're shooting one handed and they're out here over gripping the gun and they don't have the support of the weak hand where that gun is twisting while they're shooting it. Okay, canting the gun can make that even worse. You'll hear some people actually say one of the reasons they cant the gun when you're shooting on one hand is because you can grip stronger at extension with the gun canted than you can straight up and down.

Remember, we don't want to grab the gun as hard as we can. We don't want to over grip the gun. So what do I do? I tell people to loosen their fingertips. In fact, I'll go as far as to say, just point your fingertips off to the weak side and feel them inside the palm when you're first starting to break that habit of over gripping the gun.

Because now when you shoot, if you get out here in this position with your nails pushed into the palm of your hand and you shoot, and your gun centers up but you feel that pressure, you start to figure out, I am over gripping the gun. Eventually we get to the point where we can have a full grip on the gun, but just not be putting a lot of pressure. So I want to see that weak hand come off the gun, and I want to see a normal blood flow here. I don't want to see a compression on those nails where I obviously am gripping that gun with that death grip. So I'm gonna loosen up my fingers a little bit and then all day long, I can fire those shots and get the hits I need to get.

When you're shooting rapidly make sure your weak arm is fully engaged. When you're shooting slowly, make sure you're not over gripping the gun. And that should help you solve the problem of missing low and left.