Why track dry fire at all?

Live fire is expensive and time-boxed by range trips. Dry fire is the opposite: cheap, frequent, and easy to do badly. The problem is that without a record, every session starts from zero. You repeat the same draw a hundred times and have no idea whether this week is faster than last week, or whether the reload you have been grinding is actually improving.

Tracking turns dry fire from "I did some reps" into "my draw went from 1.4s to 1.1s over six weeks." That feedback loop is the entire point — and it is the difference between practice and just handling the gun.

Step 1 — Decide what to measure

Not every drill wants the same metric. Forcing everything into one format is why most logs get abandoned. Pick a metric per drill:

Reps only — for volume work where the count is the point (weak-hand reps, draws to a wall).
Time per rep — for anything on the clock (draws, reloads, a Bill Drill in dry fire).
Par time — when you train against a beep and just need to confirm you made the time.
Hit factor — when you score points and time together and want the HF calculated for you.

Match the metric to what the drill is training. A draw is a time. A volume reload block is a rep count. Mixing them in your head is fine; mixing them in your log is not.

Step 2 — Build a small drill library

The fastest way to kill a dry fire habit is to spend the first five minutes re-creating the same drill you ran yesterday. Build your handful of go-to drills once — draw from holster, reload standards, transitions, weak-hand work — and reuse them. The session should start in a single tap, not in setup.

Keep the library small. Four to eight drills you actually run beats forty you never open.

Step 3 — Log every rep in the moment

Memory is a terrible logbook. If you wait until the end of the session to write things down, you will round, guess, and eventually stop. Log the time or rep as it happens. The bar is simple: logging a rep has to be faster than the rep itself. If the tool turns logging into a form, you will quit; if it is a calculator — tap, save, next — you will keep going.

This is exactly the workflow SplitZero is built around: a fullscreen, one-hand session where saving a run takes under five seconds, so the log never interrupts the training.

Step 4 — Review weekly, not daily

Daily numbers are noisy. One bad morning means nothing; a flat month means something. Review on a weekly cadence: how many sessions did you log, which drills are trending faster, where did you stall? Looking at active weeks and session counts keeps you honest without turning a missed day into a guilt trip.

This is also why streak counters are a trap. A streak punishes rest and rewards junk reps just to keep the chain alive. Rhythm beats streaks — the goal is to come back, not to never miss.

Step 5 — Adjust based on trends

The payoff of tracking is direction. Once you can see which drills are improving and which are stuck, bias your next sessions toward the weak spots. The log stops being a diary and becomes a plan: the slow transition gets more reps next week, the dialed-in draw gets maintenance volume.

A minimal weekly system

Pick 3–5 drills from your library.
Run each, logging time-per-rep or rep count in the moment.
At the end of the week, glance at trends — not daily totals.
Move next week's volume toward whatever stalled.

That is the whole loop. It works on paper, in a notes app, or in a purpose-built tracker — the only thing that matters is that logging is fast enough that you keep doing it.