by Rob Epifania
Rob Epifania (00:00):
What's up guys? My name is Rob Epifania. I'm a USPSA grandmaster, and I'm the owner of Systematic Performance Concepts. In this video today, we're going to talk about the five most effective things that I've found help people when it comes to their grip. Let's get to it. Right now, I've worked with a lot of students over the past 10 years teaching, whether it be online, one-on-one lessons in-person one-on-one lessons classes or within my accelerator course that has over a hundred members at this point right now, we find common things that seem to help people and seem to click with them. It presents a light bulb moment and it allows them to get improved performance immediately. So let's start talking about the five things, the five most effective pieces of advice that I've given people that seems to get those moments. Number one, the gun position in the hand.
Rob Epifania (01:18):
So a lot of times people just kind of grip the handgun how they feel comfortable, and that works out okay, but it doesn't give them the ideal performance that they might want. So when people correct the gun position in the hand, it seems to give them a much more secure grip with their firing hand. It also seems to allow the trigger press to be much more supported, meaning the gun is not going to move around as much on you. What do I mean by gun position in the hand when we talk about the position, if we look at our hand and we look at our forearm and we want to trace the bone in the forearm up into the palm. So again, just so you guys see that this is the bone, the bone that I'm feeling along my forearm, and we go up into the palm.
Rob Epifania (02:12):
Where this point is, is about where you want the gun to sit. So the backstrap of the gun here, I would like to sit in that bone as best as I can. That means when I'm pressing in with my grip and I'm pulling the grip in like this when I'm pressing in, you'll notice there's a bit of meat around the back strapp of the gun, and that's going to feel very secure. The way that you know you're in the right position is by doing that pull back with your fingers into the palm and you're going to feel that the gun's secure if the gun is off, when you pull back, you're going to feel like you don't have a lot of support here. You're going to feel like you have the bottom of the gun is hanging off and there's not a lot of support.
Rob Epifania (02:59):
Now, watch what happens when I press the trigger in a more aggressive manner, as in when we're practically shooting, when I press the trigger like this, you're going to see the gun move and the gun moves up and to the right for a right-handed shooter. So if you guys are doing a dry fire at home and you happen to see this up and right motion, consider that the gun is not supported in the back of the hand. So how do we fix that? We would adjust into this position and now that same exact trigger press has no movement, and that makes a big difference in a lot of people. I can also press the trigger a lot harder. The reason why this happens is because you have a force coming back. So it doesn't matter whether your trigger is two pounds or 10 pounds, you have to push back with that amount of force to have the gun go off.
Rob Epifania (03:58):
When that force is not supported in the back, what's going to happen is the gun's going to shift in the hand in order to create that support that you need. So by having it already supported in the back with more than enough than what you need. Now when I press the trigger, it doesn't matter whether I press with two pounds or three pounds like this gson 2311 trigger is, or I press with 10 pounds, the gun is fully supported in the back so that pressure translates right into the back of the hand. That's number one, and that makes a huge difference once people do it correctly. Now let's talk about number two. Number two is related to the amount of support hand pressure that we apply. Most people don't apply enough support hand pressure, but they apply a lot of firing hand pressure. The reason why is because the firing hand is directly connected to the gun.
Rob Epifania (04:57):
So when we don't feel like we're holding the gun tight enough, this hand wants to tense and it wants to push on the gun hard. That's why you typically have your right-handed shooter, low left hits or left-handed shooter low right hits. That's the most common issue that we see when it comes to performance, shooting or accuracy, and that is purely because this hand wants to do too much work compared to the support hand. Something simple you guys can do with your support hand, you're going to grip as tight as possible. The tighter you grip, the more well behaved the gun will typically be. So by crushing this hand and you can't really crush hard enough to have the gun shake. I'm gripping pretty hard right now and the gun isn't moving at all with the support hand, so you can't really grip tight enough. There's another video that I've done in the past on my YouTube channel where I gripped the gun only with the support hand and I moved the firing hat out of the way and I was literally firing like this.
Rob Epifania (06:01):
And you see the gun doesn't move that much. When you have a solid support hand grip, it is going to make tremendous difference in the way the gun behaves. Number three, going along the lines of the pressures needed for the support hand. Let's talk about the firing hand a little bit. The thing that I've noticed when it comes to firing hand pressures applied on the gun is not to grip as hard as you can, not to grip relaxed. It's somewhere in between and it is a little different for everybody. The keys are that the user, the shooter feels mentally comfortable that the gun is not going to move around on them in recoil. Okay, so let's talk about what needs to happen in order to have good recoil control with your gun, with the firing hand in particular, what needs to happen here? So if you guys notice the gun's just resting in my hand, I'm not applying any pressure yet, but you see how the gun moves. Watch the grip, the grip wiggles between the fingers. I have to grip as tight as necessary to not have that happen. Okay?
Rob Epifania (07:09):
If you guys have ever gotten a very soft handshake from people, that is how that feels. It is barely anything. The problem is when people grip that loose and then they experience recoil, they want to tense up, and that going from light to heavy is what causes that movement in the gun. Okay? So that's one thing we need. We need the gun to not wiggle in the hand, but now if you watch my wrist here, the wrist is moving, so I need to engage the wrists with the forearms enough so that doesn't happen, and we'll talk about this in number four, but all we're going to do is apply a little pressure towards the bottom of the grip and that's going to engage the for muscle here. And you see now it doesn't move anymore, right? Having the gun in the right position in the hand, like we discussed, is going to be very helpful as well because now the gun is fully supported.
Rob Epifania (08:06):
That's as much as we need to, it's barely anything. But the problem is when someone's shooting, they don't think it's enough and they go from 10% or 20% just arbitrary numbers from that wet noodle handshake to a gorilla grip, and that causes a lot of problems when it comes to your shooting. So adjusting, understanding that and figuring out what your comfort level is, how loose can I hold it and not feel that I have to increase or decrease pressure on the gun? That's something you have to experiment for yourself by playing around with it in dry fire and live fire. So along the same lines that we just talked about when it came to how much grip pressure with the firing hand, number four is going to be a specific focus on where the pressure goes. All I like to do when it comes to gripping a gun is I like to apply pressure towards the bottom, the ring and the pinky finger in particular when it's in position in the right place in the hand, okay?
Rob Epifania (09:04):
If you guys notice if any of you guys have ever gotten trigger freeze and trigger freeze is I'm going to shoot fast and my hand tightens up so much that I can't move my trigger finger, the index finger is not meant to move independently of the whole hand. We're not really meant to do that. So that's a trained thing and it also means we have to learn how to do that properly when it comes to shooting. Going a little further into that, the thing I've noticed is the middle finger happens to influence that the most. If you watch this little experiment, you guys could try this at home. If I'm moving my pinky finger now, watch the index finger here. If I'm moving my pinky finger, the index finger doesn't move that much. If I'm moving my ring finger, it's a little harder, but I can move it pretty stationary pretty well without moving the index finger.
Rob Epifania (09:55):
But watch, when I move the middle finger, it is exceptionally hard to keep that still. So the middle finger is the one that has the most influence over what happens with your trigger finger. So if we can keep this relatively loose, but everything else is tight as we want it now is going to allow us to shoot better with less trigger freeze and less tension related issues. So I can literally grab, take my middle finger, leave it off the gun grip as hard as I can with my ring and pinky finger, and I can move my index finger pretty fast compared to what I want to happen.
Rob Epifania (10:31):
So that's another tip that helps out a lot. It also helps in engaging the forearm muscles to stiffen the wrist up when the wrist is stiff, especially when it's stiff a little bit towards the bottom there. Muzzle flip wants to go up, and that applies a little bit of active resistance against muzzle flip, which means the gun is going to move up less and it'll typically return a lot better as a result of this. Now, the last piece of this puzzle that works really well is not, it's not a solution, but it is a bandaid. So what I mean by that, the most common thing that you might see with a right-handed shooter is low left hits or left hits. A left-handed shooter would be the opposite would be to the right or low and right, the most common correction I give in the moment. So the symptom is this firing hand wants to do too much work and it's pushing the gun. So it's doing something like this. Okay?
Rob Epifania (11:27):
That's the symptom, but it's not easy to solve that in the moment. So what I found works really, really well for people, and this is the most common correction I give to someone who's shooting low left in the moment, is to tighten the support hand because usually they loosen this up and this pushes right, tighten this, tighten the support hand and rotate the support elbow a little bit in, right? So now you're applying a little bit of pressure on the grip panel of the gun. What that does is that gives you more resistance to what the firing hand is trying to do. This is trying to do something, but what's happening is now your support hand is not really allowing it to happen as much or at all, I shouldn't say at all, but it gives you a lot more room for error. Typically speaking, anybody who's shooting low, right low, left or left, I give them this correction and immediately they get centered hits because you're giving yourself more room for error.
Rob Epifania (12:32):
Now you take that and now you combine it with appropriate dry fire and training to solve and relax this firing hand so that it stays the same no matter what. Now you have a waning combination for great accuracy, great speed, and good recoil control, guys. So those are the five most effective tips that I give to students when it comes to recoil control and shooting a handgun. If you guys liked it, feel free to check out my other free lesson series that I have. That'll be in the link below. Feel free to share this, like subscribe, comment with any questions. Guys, thanks so much for watching. Look forward to seeing you in the next one.
YouTube Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yic34bNtyBE
Credit: Rob Epifania