Dry-Fire Training: How to Know It's Actually Working
What dry fire is
Practicing sight alignment, trigger press, and follow-through with an unloaded firearm (or a dedicated training aid), so there's no recoil, no follow-up round, and no ammunition cost per rep.
Why it's popular
Without recoil to manage, dry fire isolates the two mechanics most likely to cause a bad shot: trigger anticipation and an unstable grip — the exact causes behind several of this site's pattern pages, like shooting low and left.
The gap: you can't see the result
A dry-fire rep can feel completely clean with zero feedback on whether it actually changed anything — there's no bullet hole to check, so it's easy to practice a flinch just as confidently as a good press.
Verify with a baseline
Log a live session before you start a dry-fire routine and note your accuracy and precision. Run your dry-fire practice for a couple of weeks, then log another session at the same distance with the same firearm and compare. That's the same before/after comparison the recap screen's personal-best tracking is built around — just pointed at a specific drill instead of general practice.
Measure it, don’t guess
Log a session and Range Tracer calculates accuracy, precision, and bias automatically.