I log my round count (and practice sessions) pretty regularly. Last year, I did almost zero dry fire and shot about 32,000 rounds of ammo. I definitely improved as a shooter, going from C-class to A-class in L10 that year. But I’ve been thinking lately that focusing on round count can become a red herring for a lot of people; myself included. It’s easy to get hung up on the number of bullets I’m shooting, because it’s a cool number. Saying “yeah, I shot 50,000 rounds of ammo last year” is a lot sexier sounding than saying “I did 40,000 dry fire trigger pulls and shot 10,000 rounds”. But when I take a hard look at the numbers from last year, a lot of the improvement I had was in areas like draw time and reloads. Essentially, I was using live fire practice where other guys would use dry fire practice.
Substituting live fire for dry fire is fine as long as 1) you can afford it, because it’s not cheap and 2) you understand that it also comes with some negatives. For example, while live fire is a lot more interesting than dry fire, it’s also easier to let your technique slip during live fire because of what you’re doing. One of the things I realized about live fire is the vast majority of my live fire time was spent doing single lane drills, which are great to work on draw speed and reloads. You know where else I could work on draw speed and reloads? In dry fire. Which would be cheaper and allow me to focus more on technique, because there wouldn’t be some clown with an AR and a Surefire brake right next to me.
Like any other sport, it’s definitely possible to overtrain. I had to ask myself some tough questions about my round count. If you’re serious about getting better, but you’re spending a lot of bullets just turning money into smoke and noise on single lane drills, it might be time to ego-check yourself and see if you’re getting caught up in your round count. For me, I know it’s time to start dry firing a little bit more, and shooting live rounds a little bit less.
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