The first fundamental is stance, it must start from the bottom and it’s your feet. The isosceles stance forms triangles with your legs and arms when you face your target head on and toes pointing forward, knees slightly bent to give you balance and quick movement if necessary, arms locked out and punching towards the target.

Weaver stance would be used when you want to blade yourself and make use of cover, if you are right handed you would have your left foot forward and right foot slightly to the rear, your right arm would be pushing out towards the target and left arm bent and pulling the grip towards the body.

Gripping the firearm is most important, for the Handgun; make sure you have both hands on the grip of the Firearm and thumbs facing towards the target. Cover the grip with no gaps and keep your fingers around each other and not on the trigger guard. The Long guns are slightly different where you need to grip the long guns in a four point weld. You start off with the strong hand grip, and then the support hand on the forend of the stock, the butt of the stock must be firmly secured in your shoulder and then lastly the cheek on the stock so you can align your eyes through the sights.

Sight alignment is important as you need to align the rear sight with the front sight to make them level with each other. They must have equal height and equal light between the two sights.

Sight Picture is what you see when you are about to fire the firearm, the rear sight and target must be blurred and you must be completely focused on your front sight, most shooters make the mistake of focusing on their targets rather than the front sight. If you want to win the fight, you must see the front sight.

Make use of both your eyes as they are needed to find ‘depth perception’, this is how far away your target is from you. Try to drive a car for a second or two with one of your eyes closed; it’s very difficult to judge how far away the car in front of you is. Peripheral vision is our natural ability to survive an attack from the sides, so if you have one eye closed you are disabling yourself. If you need to close one eye while practicing your fundamentals to master them and achieve satisfactory results, then do so, however you will never be in a gun fight with one eye closed.

Trigger control is the most difficult fundamental to master, the trigger finger must not come through the trigger to much; just the tip of the index finger placed on the trigger and squeezed back towards you in a rearward line. Do not jerk the trigger or snatch as this will affect the front sight of the firearm. While squeezing the trigger the firearm must take you by surprise while you are holding your sight picture, for every shot you must have a sight picture.

Do not anticipate the shot going off as it will cause you to flinch and pull the firearm off the target, simple you no longer have a sight picture. Dry firing exercises are valuable to master the trigger control; you can do this at home with an empty firearm and no live ammunition in the firearm. Insert a “dummy round” or snap cap in the firearm to protect the firing pin, find a target in a secure room and practice your sight alignment, sight picture and then squeeze the trigger nice and slow.

Breathing is a normal fundamental, when you are applying all these fundamentals, you need to breath as you need air, most shooters hold their breath while shooting, this will affect your grip and start to tremor. Breathe in and out normally and when you get to the middle of your exhale then you should be ready to fire. However in life threaten situations, breathing becomes a natural process and cannot be controlled while in a heated gun fight.

The seventh fundamental and last fundamental is Follow through. You must apply follow through when the firearm fires, you must keep doing what you have been doing for a few seconds after the firearm has fired and gone through its recoil, unloading and loading process if it is a self loading firearm like a semi-auto pistol.

Some of the information on this page was sourced from Wikipedia