Dot Torture Lite

Dot Torture is the most honest pistol diagnostic ever written. The original fifty-round version from David Blinder exposes every crack in your fundamentals — there’s nowhere for a bad trigger press or a sloppy draw to hide. This lite version squeezes the four things that matter most — trigger control, draw, pacing, and transitions — into twenty rounds so you can run it as a warmup or a quick benchmark without burning half a box.

Print or draw a sheet of A4 paper with four 2-inch (5 cm) circles. Tape it at 3 yards (3 m). Dot 1, five rounds from ready — slow fire, pure trigger control. Dot 2, five rounds from the holster — one full draw and one shot, five times. Dot 3, five rounds from ready — two shots, pause, two shots, one shot, all on the same dot (pacing). Dot 4, five rounds from ready — one shot on Dot 3, transition to Dot 4, one shot, repeat twice, then a single finisher on Dot 4 (transitions). Any shot outside the circle is a miss. Score is hits out of twenty.

Log every session. Twenty clean at 3 yards means you move back to 5 yards. Twenty clean at 5 yards means you shrink the circles to 1.25 inches (3 cm). This is a diagnostic first and a drill second — the trend line across sessions tells you more than any single run.