There are lots of ways to become a better marksman, but one of the best is by increasing your grip strength.
Doing grip exercises and learning how to steady the old you have on your weapon will go a long way towards boosting your accuracy and bettering your shot consistency.
Reasons to Improve Grip Strength
1. It Increases Stability
First off, increasing your grip strength will result in you increasing your overall stability as well.
All firearms need a stable platform to operate effectively and remain accurate. This can be the spot where a rifle barrel is lying or the palms of your hands if you are using a pistol.
Either way, better grip strength means that you’ll hold the weapon more securely in place and in the correct orientation.
This, obviously, allows you to put your shots on target more accurately overall. Better stability also means that you won’t have to compensate for your arms swinging back and forth, which can be extremely hard to counter.
Note that this is also grip “endurance” rather than strict squeezing strength. Keeping a solid grip is just as important as achieving it for a split second.
2. Your Shot Will Be Consistent
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Furthermore, those who have enough grip strength or who train for extra grip strength will have a more consistent shot.
Like we said above, if you have enough grip strength, you can hold the weapon in place for longer stretches of time, which might be necessary if you are lining up a difficult shot or waiting for a target to enter your sight picture.
Even better, having enough strength to control your weapon adequately will help you put shots clumped together in a tight shot pattern.
Consistency will rise, as will your overall accuracy.
3. You Can Take Faster Follow-Up Shots
Another big way that improving your grip strength can make you a better shooter is by allowing you to take faster follow-up shots.
Whenever you fire your weapon, there will be some amount of recoil that you have to control to bring your barrel back onto your target and take another accurate shot.
If you don’t have a lot of grip strength, the weapon will kick in your hands or arms and kick further away from your original target.
Better grip strength means you can control the kick of your weapon and prevent it from bumping up or to the side nearly as much.
Therefore, you can retrain your sights on target and take a follow-up shot that much more quickly without compromising accuracy.
4. You Can Hold a Gun Correctly
Most shooting stance guides will teach you that the correct orientation to hold a regular pistol is with your thumbs forward or facing toward the barrel.
However, this grip is difficult to master if you don’t have enough grip strength, meaning you might do it improperly. And you might not be able to learn more advanced grip techniques.
Being able to grip your gun correctly this way can make the difference between being accurate for a target shooting contest or a certification test and failing.
As with all things, holding your firearm correctly matters a lot when it comes to performance and safety.
5. You’ll Break Your Grip Less
Additionally, it’s common for beginner shooters or those without a lot of strength to “break” their grip after every shot or every couple of shots.
This means you might need to re-adjust your grip all the time to hold your weapon better.
However, this takes lots of time in between each shot and requires you to reset your sights on target.
If you want to take faster and more accurate follow-up shots, you need to have better grip strength so you don’t break your grip all the time.
Keeping your original grip on the weapon means you can fire multiple accurate shots in rapid succession.
What do you do to improve your grip strength? Please share with us your tips in the comments section!
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