As I’ve worked to try to improve my skills – with mild success – I’ve come up with a few things that have really improved my dry-fire practice with Glocks. They may or may not help you, but they have been winners for me.

The biggest thing, of course, is consistency and timing yourself. You need to dry-fire daily to really develop the skills you’ll need to get better.

Rubber-band in the Glock ejection port trick: this is fantastic for giving you a trigger that doesn’t go dead when you pull it. No reset, but it’s basically free, and it doesn’t scoot out often during magazine changes.

SIRT magazines: I used to dry-fire with empty mags. This works, but it does not give you a gun or mags that are weighted correctly, and thus screws you up during real life reloads and draws. The SIRT pistol mags correct this, and are even weight adjustable if you want to simulate only 10 rounds in the magazine. It also makes the mags a little easier to reload with due to the shape of the top of them. They’re only ~$20 and highly recommended. I was not willing to use dummy rounds due to concerns about a live round somehow working its way in.

SIRT pistol: I take the battery out and use my SIRT pistol sans lasers, which are useless to me at this point in my development as a shooter. I don’t love the trigger (too heavy and noisy), but it has a reset, which lets you practice certain things you might not otherwise be able to do without one. Metal slide model is probably best to simulate the weight of a real polymer pistol. I also like the safety factor.

I will say that I don’t think you are ever going to be as fast with a SIRT pistol as a real pistol with a tuned trigger. The SIRT trigger is simply too heavy and slow. OTOH, if you’re used to a SIRT pistol, muscling through a DA trigger pull without messing up your sights is going to be a lot easier.

Smartphone Dryfire Par Timer: I know some people hate these apps vs using a proper shot timer, but they’ve been great for me. I have kids at home and practice at night, so a quieter buzzer is in order. The one I use in particular is the Dry Fire Par Timer for Android. It has a super useful drill set mode:

You can see here that I’ve got a number of different drill sets and standards to practice against. I try to do at least two per day. I particularly like the IDPA 5×5 Classifier as a warm-up to the Ben Stoeger drills, and the Modern Samurai Project belt standards provide a lot of challenge – especially with irons.

AMG Lab Shot Timer: I don’t use the AMG Lab Shot Timer very much in dry-fire, but is magical for occasionally confirming speed to first shot via detection of the hammer or striker click. The problem with par timers is that it’s sometimes a little hard to tell just how much under the par time you’re doing something. (Unfortunately, it does not pick up the SIRT clicks, even at max sensitivity.)

1/3 scale USPSA targets: Remember my shocking and unexpected victory in a class king of the hill contest at 25yds? My dry-fire distance is almost always a simulated 10-15yds – never closer. It turns out that practicing getting your index into a tiny-looking A-zone pays off huge dividends when it’s game time for steel at long distances. One of these days, I’ll hunt up some 1/4 and 1/6 targets to practice longer shots, but I rarely see those in club matches. Ben’s $10 kit is all you really need to start.

Books: Ben Stoeger and Steve Anderson both make excellent books on dry-fire that you should buy and use. I’ve programmed in a lot of Ben’s drills in. If you don’t feel like buying books, this older forum post on Ben’s 15 minute a day program will provide you a good reference point; I went from novice to laid back to expert in the span of about six months. (A word of warning about the par times in Stoeger’s book – they are brutal, and designed for M/GM levels of performance. That can be discouraging to some people. I am nowhere close to hitting them. )