You should practice this drill using both one and two hands. When you can pull the trigger smoothly and consistently, it’s time to move on.

When you’re shooting at a range, you’ll see people go through all sorts of contortions with their heads while they’re shooting trying to get their eye lined up with the sights on their firearms.

In a violent force encounter, your focus will normally be drawn to what your brain interprets as the most serious threat. In addition, as your pulse rate shoots up, your vision will go from being able to see everything in front of you to tunnel vision—similar to what it would look like if you had an empty paper towel cylinder up to your eye.

We want to take advantage of this tendency instead of fight it, so we want to train our mind to bring our firearm up so that our sights will be in our line of sight rather than forcing our head and eyes to line up with our sights.

Put another way, let’s say that you’re holding your firearm at your side and you spot a target. At this point, your head can freeze. You don’t need to move your head at all from the instant of threat recognition until you have completed your trigger press and follow through. Simply bring up your firearm and adjust the firearm as necessary so that your sights are in line between your eyes and your intended target. You’re already familiar with this concept from using a punching motion to find your natural grip.

What you need to do to develop this is to stand with your firearm at your side or sit with your firearm on your lap or on a table and repeatedly pick out a target and bring your firearm up so that the sights line up between your eye and your target.

There are 4 variations to this drill:

Primary hand, single handed
Primary hand, with support
Support hand, single handed
Support hand, with support

Repeat this drill at least 20 times with your primary hand both single handed and with support before moving on. Initially, either focus completely on your primary hand or spend twice as much time on your primary hand as your support hand. In an ideal world, you would have enough time to become equally proficient with both hands. If that’s the case for you, then split your training time evenly.