How to Use Par Time in Dry Fire

A par time turns 'that felt fast' into a pass or a fail. Choosing it badly turns it into a trigger-slapping machine.

What a par time is

A par timer makes two sounds. The first is the start signal. The second comes after a fixed interval — the par — and marks the deadline. Your job is to finish the movement before the second beep.

That is the entire mechanism, and it is powerful for one reason: it removes your opinion from the result. Either the shot broke before the beep or it did not.

Choosing the first par time

The number people reach for is the one they wish they could do. That is the wrong number.

Pick a par you can hit about eight times out of ten. Not two out of ten, and not ten out of ten.

• Too generous and nothing changes — you have set a deadline you were going to beat anyway.
• Too tight and you start doing whatever it takes to beat the sound. That is where the trigger slap comes from, and it is a genuinely hard habit to remove once it is in.

If you have no idea where to start, take the suggested par on any drill page and adjust from there after one set.

The clean-repetition rule

A repetition counts only if both are true:

1. The shot broke before the par beep.
2. The sights were still on the aiming point when it broke.

The second condition is the one that gets quietly dropped, usually right after the par gets shortened. A time that came with the front sight halfway off the target is not a faster repetition — it is a different, worse movement that happens to take less time.

Score honestly. If you cannot say where the sights were at the break, it did not count.

When to shorten it

Ten clean repetitions in a row, then take 0.1 s off.

Not five. Not "it felt good today". Ten consecutive, both conditions met. Then drop the par by one tenth and expect to fail for a while — that is what progress looks like at the edge.

If you cannot get back to eight out of ten within two or three sessions, you moved too early. Put the tenth of a second back. There is no cost to that, and there is a real cost to spending a month practicing a movement that is falling apart.

What par time will not do

A par time measures the whole movement, start signal to shot. It cannot tell you where the time went. If your draw is slow, the par tells you it is slow but not whether the problem is the grip in the holster, the path to extension, or hesitation at the sights.

For that, split the movement and time the halves separately: beep to full firing grip, then grip to shot. Work whichever half is worse, then recombine. This is the single most useful thing you can do once a drill plateaus.

Split times: the next layer

Once you are shooting more than one shot, the par time stops being the interesting number and the split — the gap between consecutive shots — takes over. Splits expose grip and recoil control in a way that a single timed shot never will.

A par timer cannot give you splits; it does not know when you fired. That needs a timer that listens for the shot itself, which is where a phone with a microphone becomes genuinely useful.

A simple weekly method

1. Choose one drill and one par time for the week.
2. Run five sets of five, scoring clean repetitions only.
3. Write the number of clean repetitions down. That is your metric for the week.
4. Shorten the par only when the ten-in-a-row rule is met.
5. Re-benchmark once a month under identical conditions.

The 7-day dry fire plan is this method laid out day by day, ending with a benchmark session you can repeat.