Dry Practice Gear: Ready Up Gear Dummy Ammo
Some readers may know that in 2019 and 2020, I committed to dry practicing 10 minutes a day. I missed a few days each year, but for the most part I dry practiced every day for two years. This year I decided to do it again. I’m almost halfway through the year, and I’ll update you at the end of the year. For now, I’m going to tell you about one of the tools I use to aid my daily dry practice routine: Ready Up Gear Dummy Rounds.
Disclaimer: Jacob over at ConcealedCarry.com sent me these dummy rounds and asked me to review them. I agreed, but other than these dummies I receive no incentive whatsoever. I don’t have a financial relationship with ConcealedCarry.com, I don’t get any kickbacks or anything like that. The thoughts here are mine and mine alone. This article contains Amazon affiliate links. Using these links gives us a small commission but costs you nothing. Please consider using our Amazon link to support this blog.
Why Bother With Dry Practice?
If I were known for one thing, I could do a lot worse than to be known as “the dry practice guy.” Dry practice brings a host of benefits to your shooting life! First, it allows you to practice on all those days when you can’t get to the range. Outside of an elite few professionals, one of use can shoot live every day. Time is a precious commodity and ammunition, fuel, and targets all cost good money. Dry practice fills in when you can’t get to the range.
But it’s not just a second-best option. Dry practice allows you to work on things like sight picture and trigger control without distractions. Things like recoil anticipation become immediately apparent - and readily correctable - without blast and recoil being distractions. We also tend to break habits like looking for our bullet holes when shooting dry. Dry practice - as opposed to dry fire - allows you to practice every single skill you need to run a firearm effectively, with the exception of recoil management. You can practice draws/presentation, work on transitioning to a red dot, work malfunctions, reloads, SHO and WHO, rifle-to-pistol transitions, and just about everything else.
Because you can do dry practice every day, you can build true mastery. Mastery, also known as overlearning or automaticity, is having learned a skill so well that it will happen automatically under stress. This protects the skill from degradation under stress, and allows your brain to focus on other important elements of the fight you are in. Achieving mastery also means that you will retain about 80% of your level of skill for the rest of your life, even if you stop practicing.
Maybe more importantly, dry practicing regularly (practicing your firearm manipulations “a little, a lot” as I’ve heard Chuck Haggard say) gives you recency of experience. The more recently you have performed a task, the more readily available it is in your brain. If you last shot two months ago when you were at the range, your firearms skills aren’t very recent. If you did a quick, 10-minute core skills dry practice session two days ago, your skills are very recent. Which guy would you want to be when it comes time to save your own life with a gun?
Dry Practicing Safely
Those are some of the reasons that dry practice is important. Unfortunately, dry practice can be a fairly risk endeavor. We typically do dry practice in places where we can’t live fire. This means that if a round goes off, there will be some consequences. These may be legal consequences; in Arizona “Shannon’s Law” makes firing a negligent discharge in a city or town a felony offense. These consequences may be financial; something as simple as firing a round into your car could cost thousands of dollars to repair. Or they could be much worse, like killing a family member or beloved family pet. A serious safety regimen is required to mitigate the dangers inherent in dry practice, and Ready Up Gear Dummy Rounds are one piece of that safety protocol.
One category of dry practice safety measure is making sure you don’t fire a round in the first place. These measures include having a dedicated location where you dry practice and never bringing ammo there, always having a clearly defined beginning and end to dry practice sessions, and putting away or covering your target when no dry practicing. Another one of these is using readily identifiable dummy ammunition.
Dummy ammo protects you in a few ways. First, two objects cannot occupy the same space. Secondly, good dummy ammo is readily visible as dummy ammo. This is the case with Ready Up Gear Dummy Ammunition; it has a brightly colored “bullet” and primer. One quick glance and you know that you’re loaded with dummy rounds. There are also some other reasons other than safety that dummy ammunition is important for a high-fidelity program of dry practice.
Are Dummy Rounds Necessary?
There are several reasons you need dummy rounds. First, as I mentioned above, if I know there is a dummy round in the chamber, I also know there is no possible way that a live round is in the chamber. it’s hard to really work reloads and malfunctions without them. Secondly, dummy rounds allow you to work skills that would be nearly impossible (or much lower fidelity) without them. Malfunctions are a good example. You can’t practice the simplest “tap, rack, reassess” malfunction without them. You can tap the mag and rack, but the slide is going to stay locked to the rear. Dummy rounds allow you to practice the full gamut of firearms skills.
The two guns that have put most of the wear on the Ready Up Gear Dummy Ammo: my duty Glock 45 and my everyday carry NHC 1911
The last reason is that they probably protect the gun a little. I am working on my third year of daily dry practice. That will end up being about 150 hours (almost four work weeks!) of dry practice on my everyday carry pistol. That is tens of thousands of hammer falls, slide drops, racks, and more. Would that break my pistol without dummy rounds? Probably not…but that’s a lot of potential wear and tear on the gun. And not just the firing pin; a full magazine in place, and a round going into the chamber slows the slide as it falls, too.
Ready Up Gear Dummy Rounds
Now, we are finally at the topic of this article: Ready Up Gear Dummy Ammo. These dummy rounds accomplish all of the objectives above. The give us a safe, readily identifiable dummy round, helping to ensure safety in dry practice. They provide higher-fidelity training than no dummy ammunition, and they protect the gun. But most dummy ammunition does these things. Let’s talk about how these rounds are different.
First, they are incredibly durable. I began using these dummy rounds on February 20, 2026. I am writing this on June 20, 2026 - exactly four months later - and these dummies are still in excellent condition! The cases have developed a patina, but they still function perfectly. During each ten-minute, daily dry practice session a couple of rounds receive a couple dozen firing-pin/striker strikes, and are chambered at full force at 1-10 times. Though exhibiting some wear, the rims of the cartridges are still in excellent shape, and the “primers” are minimally dented.
Using dummy rounds while dropping the slide during reloads, dropping magazines to the ground, performing “tap, rack” malfunctions, etc. creates serious wear and tear. Another problem I’m experienced with aluminum dummy rounds is metal shavings being left in the gun. This has been far less a problem with the brass-cased Ready Up Gear Dummy Ammo. There has been a conspicuous lack of metal shavings when cleaning the guns after using Ready Up Gear Dummy Ammo.
Minor Complaints
I do have a couple of minor complaints with these rounds. Keep in mind the rounds function fine, support high-fidelity dry practice, and are durable; these are indeed minor complaints.
The first is that the weight is quite a bit less than live rounds. I weighed 10 aluminum snap caps, 10 of these rounds, and 10 rounds of 115-grain FMJ ammo. The aluminum rounds were the lightest at 40 grams. The Ready Up Gear Dummy Ammo came in slightly heavier at 51 grams. The live rounds were over twice as heavy at 116 grams. This isn’t a deal-breaker, but I would certainly prefer dummy ammunition that is closer in weight to live ammo. This alleviates wear and tear on the gun when cycling the slide, and makes magazines feel true weight.
The second complaint is that that the 9mm rounds are just slightly shorter than true 9mm cartridges. This caused an interesting malfunction in my 1911. When press-checking (which functionally serves to recock the hammer/striker in whatever gun I’m dry practicing with) if I pulled the slide back just a bit too far, a second round would feed. This forced me to practice my double-feed malfunctions occasionally, whether I wanted to or not. it caused no other issue so it’s not a big deal, just something to be aware of.
Ready Up Gear Dummy Ammo
Despite my two minor complaints, these dummy rounds are extremely high-quality. I have put them through an extremely high volume of dry practice over the last four months. These dummies have held up and still have lots of life left in them. They function well, are well designed, protect my guns, and permit high-fidelity dry practice. I will admit, I did not use these on the live range for fear of losing them. It doesn’t matter what color your dummy rounds are, they always seem to find the one patch of grass on the range to hide under. I have no doubt they would work in that role.
Ready Up Gear Dummy Ammo is available in common calibers including 9mm, .38 Special, .380 Auto, .40 S&W, .45 ACP, and 5.56 NATO. Additionally, a instructor pack is available containing five each of the most common calibers (.380, 9mm, .40, and .45). These are a bit more expensive than the all-aluminum snap caps I used for years, but I do think they are a superior product. Consider them an investment; each dry practice session you do takes the place of a range session that would cost quite a bit more time and money. Over a year’s time, these cost fractions of a cent relative to the training value you get from them.
Bottom Line: As someone who does a high volume of dry practice, I recommend Ready Up Gear Dummy Ammo without hesitation!