"So I practiced that, drawing to it, drawing to it, for hours that night, just thinking, 'This is the stupidest thing I've ever done; there's no way this isn't going to screw me up even worse.' Well, I actually managed to pull it off the next day and shoot the match with that grip. The amazing thing was just how well the sights tracked that day. I'd never seen the sights track so consistently, especially in a match. They weren't just flailing around out there; they were tracking up, then right back to the same spot. I'd never seen that in practice before; I'd never seen that sort of sight tracking, period. It felt so easy; the sights were lined up long before the gun got to each target.

As this close-up of Brian Enos' grip shows, in the straight-thumbs technique the support-hand thumb points straight ahead; the master-hand thumb is laid on top of the heel of the support hand and also points forward. The gun is a Strayer Voigt/Infinity .40. Photo by Nidaa A.

"After that I started analyzing why this grip was working so well, and I realized it was because with that amount of even pressure on the gun, and the thumbs not pressing into the side of the gun with lateral pressure, your grip became almost like this mechanical device, a machine rest, that didn't allow the gun to swivel left or right, just up and down. I got away from the idea of trying to use my grip to control recoil. I realized the amount of muzzle flip isn't that important. What's important is the consistency of how the gun moves, not how much it moves."

HOW HARD TO GRIP THE GUN
Brian Enos: "I've found over the years that the stronger I grip the gun as long as I'm still able to manipulate the trigger precisely, the better I shoot. In my book I talk about 'relaxing' when I shoot, and that's caused a lot of confusion. I wasn't saying you shouldn't grip the gun firmly; I was talking about my overall attitude while shooting. What you want is a really firm, fluid hold on the gun. When most people grip a gun 'strongly,' what they're really saying is that they're using their arms and shoulders to bear down on the gun, so it just beats them around every time they fire it.

"My arms aren't a part of my grip. I learned to feel the grip as only in my hands. That realization was a real breakthrough for me, that the grip is its own thing, not part of your arm position. Set up your grip without being in position, then push your arms out in front of your face without doing anything else to it; that's going to be a pretty good shooting position for you."

Dave Sevigny: "Grip the gun as hard as it takes to track up and down with the least amount of muzzle rise. If your grip is too relaxed, the pistol will recoil too much, track erratically, or it may shut down (failure to feed/eject, etc.). Gripping too hard, by contrast, may negatively affect sight alignment, induce trigger freeze (failure to let the trigger return forward far enough between shots to reset) for multiple-shot engagements and create fatigue in your hands and forearms. The pistol type and caliber will dictate how much actual grip pressure is needed."