I've gone beyond hitting a wall lately, I've been going backwards. Quickly. So, rather than let that happen for no good reason, I decided to try something new. I've started a series of lessons with Chris Tilley. As predicted in my first lesson he changed my grip, grip pressure, stance, posture, shoulder position, head position and arm extension. Basically everything except the pistol and which eye is dominant. I shot the last match trying to do it exactly like he wanted, and failed at the match
hard. With everything different, nothing worked.
I kept dryfiring using the new everything for a week, then had to go on a business trip where I would not have access to anything to dryfire with. Not wanting to stop for a week, I came up with this:
It's the little block of cedar that we keep in the luggage to keep it smelling nice. Turns out that with the edges rounded a bit and one pass with some gaffers tape it's pretty much a dead ringer for a glock grip (gen 5 maybe, no finger grooves!). I measured up to where the top of the slide would be, cut it at the correct angle and got fancy with a set of OEM sights that were sitting in my junk parts box.
I spent time each day and night establishing the correct grip/posture/etc, over and over and over again. Today I got to the range and damn if it didn't help. The new methods seemd a little less awkward and when I found myself missing a lot and looked I had slipped back to my old stance/grip/posture almost every time. Stop, go back to what Chris told me, and start again and things got better.
Absolutely none of it is natural, and it's incredibly slow. Unusably slow at this point, and it only works with both hands on the gun. But, it does seem to work. No where to go but up.
My goal is to take a lesson every 3rd week and practice 2-3 live fire sessions in-between with lots of dry work at home. After 10 lessons, that should be 30 weeks of work on this. By then, if I'm not able to get into "sharp shooter" in the IDPA qualification, then I think I'm going to have to accept the fact that I've maxed out in this particular skill and just move on to something else.