Be careful with auto-forwarding - there's some funky stuff that can happen: inertia can actually, much like it does with AR mags sometimes, cause that top round (or more!) to pop out, causing all sorts of havoc. I saw this happen to another shooter once and thought that it was just a freak occurrence, but you'll find some instructors and competition shooters to really have very strong opinions against auto-forwarding because of this very specific concern.jeep45238 wrote: 19JUL16
Spent every moment my hands were’t occupied practicing my reloads, as I frankly suck at them. With my old 1911 and M&P if I seated hard with a forward/up motion of my palm it would drop the slides with 199% reliability. I determined that I can do this with the Beretta with pure vertical seating motion of the palm. However, this is very dependent upon the weight of the magazine going in (read- how many rounds). With 1 snap cap I had 50% repeatability. With 5 in it, I had repeatability going up to 75%. I only did this once with a full mag of ammo since I want to minimize admin handling, but it did function far easier with the weight of ammo in the magazine.
At the end of the night with the dog next to me watching Parks and Rec I found it was much smoother to not even look at the pistol when reloading, and when I looked it was typically a slow, painfully botched reload. Hand positioning and the index finger seemed to play a big part of this for me.
The other thing to note with auto-forwarding is to ingrain whether if this will also work with your non-dominant hand: so that you don't get that "skipped record" kind of awkward pause when you're forced to switch-bat.
As for reloading - for me - there's a magic level of necessary visual input. I find that particularly when I'm on-the-move, I absolutely need to establish that visual index before I drop the magwell over the mag and toss that mag up in there. Towards this end, I've got two hits of white paintpen marking - one "dot" each - on the 3-o'clock and 6-o'clock portions on the inside of my magwell, and this works to really bring that magwell into sharp focus for me for that fraction of a second I peek-in (http://pistol-training.com/archives/7840" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;). While I don't know if such markings/aids are allowed per your competition rules or if it will help you at all, it's something that's definitely helped with my reload speed.
Over the course of the last 6 months or so, I tried to do about 60 reloads per day (slide locked back, pretend-to-be-shooting, pretend-to-respond-to-slide-lock, drop resident mag, grab/index/insert incoming, drop slide, back-on-target, assess/prep/shoot - a shot timer or even a shot-timer app can be used to time the runs, too, with the stimulus being the signal to drop your mag, and the slide drop should be loud enough, indoors, for the timer to pick up) so that I could get better at this task. I wanted to not only work on speed, but to also insure that my finger was clear of the trigger during the reload, but on it again as fast as subsequently possible (so I broke out a video camera to do this). Some times, I would break the reload into two separate components, focusing work on that "snatch and index" portion, exclusive of the insertion.