George: I have the arigun setup in the garage and I sometimes think the fun of actually being able to shoot keeps me from doing more of the dryfire and holding drills I should be doing. Just save a handful of spent cartridges, feed one in from the magazine with the left index finger as a guide and click it three or four times before you extract and turn it. Yes, this is kinda tedious but the REAL point is to handle the rifle and get into position and try the trigger almost every day (with a day off, at least, every week.) Five or ten minutes is fine, as long as it's regular and frequent. You might even try that trigger dry firing with the striker down. Mine works fine for that. The second stage feel isn't quite the same as it "breaks" but you sure see the difficulty, I mean "challenge" of following through when there's no striker fall to distract you.
The plastic .22 snap caps I tried didn't last very long.
The airgun is really a long term deal. On one level, it does tend to make you think that you're only learning to shoot the airgun. Then, a couple of years down the road, you realize it's really helped. I would love to hear from some of the more experienced folks about practice drills with airgun.
As you know, I'm not exactly threatning the match winners but I think it's my mind holding me back now. I truly feel that airgun has taught me fundamental skills I couldn't (wouldn't) have learned any other way and that when I figure out how to unleash them, watch out! Most of the same things can be learned dryfiring but most of us just aren't disciplined enough to dryfire six days a week for years. The appeal of the airgun is that it gives us feedback from a target DAILY. Until we find a way to make handling the rifle part of our daily lives, we're going to be on the old plateau. It may be a pretty high plateau for the talented few but shooting a match a week is going to stop making us better at some point (about two years into the sport I'd say.)
And then there's mental training...
