Drills to Eliminate Trigger Flinching and Jerking 

More than any other factor, accuracy is affected by trigger technique. Consider that your aim may be off by a couple of inches due to imperfections of sight alignment or shake, but a botched, jerky trigger pull can cause a miss by a foot. Fortunately, trigger drills to fix trigger jerking—due to flinching or other factors—are simple, easy, and cheap. They don’t require much live fire. 

As always, step one is safety. Unload the gun. If your pistol doesn’t have a disconnector, remove the magazine.  Place your ammunition elsewhere. Pick a target with a safe backstop and double-check everything. Now, you are ready for the drills. 

Drill #1 

Take a penny, place it on top of the autoloader slide or the revolver frame, if the gun form permits that. Pull the trigger, making sure the penny stays in place. Next, replace the penny with a cartridge, such as 9mm. If things go well with that, use a .22 case. Your gun should stay level enough and move so little as to allow the case to stay in place through a simulated shot. 

If you have trouble achieving that, your problem may well be an overly long or heavy trigger pull causing grip shift to gain additional leverage. Hand strength exercises or switching guns would cure that. If there’s no problem with keeping the case in place, switch to Drill #2. 

Drill #2 

Get a laser barrel insert used for bore sighting, or a magnetic laser, or just attach a laser pointer to the gun. Point at a target and look at it over the sights, keeping the laser trained on the bullseye. Then, pull the trigger slowly and smoothly. The laser dot shouldn’t drift far from the bullseye. Excessive dot movement prior to the shot breaking could meet a heavy or long trigger, while movement after the shot—especially low and left for a right-handed shooter— indicates flinch. Flinch may be subdued by repetition of dry firing. 

Flinch is usually caused by noise, less often by bright flash. Recoil is usually a factor in lightweight revolvers, made worse by the long and heavy trigger pull. Doubling hearing protection such as plugs under high-rating muffs and shooting outdoors helps with mastering the firearm initially. When firing at moving targets, the temptation to quick press the trigger when the target crosses the sights can lead to the same result.  

Drill #3 

Set up a moving target, such as a piece of paper on a string. Air circulation will usually move it enough to make it present the bullseye only some of the time. Dry firing is free, with no ammunition is expended. That makes the stakes low enough to reduce the psychological preoccupation with results and focus on the process instead. Later, this may be repeated with a BB gun or a .22 before moving onto a full-caliber firearm. At an outdoor range, the same may be done with a Texas Star. 

In all of these drills, it’s worth videotaping the process from the side with a phone, ideally set to high frame rate/slow motion mode. Often, the mechanics of the flinch become obvious in the video review, helping to determine the causes. Get to the range and practice! 

Written by: Oleg Volk, Firearms Photographer