How To Hold A Paintball Gun

Hi guys, my name's Tommy Pemberton. I'm here with UK Paintball in south London. We're out in the woods today, and I want to talk to you about paintball.

I want to talk to you guys about how to hold a paintball gun. Obviously, when you turn up at a paintball field, you're going to get after it. You're going to get your safety kit, you're going to get issued a gun, and you're going to walk out there onto the field and get ready to play.

Most people just step out onto the field and don't have a clue what's going on, so this is hopefully going to give you guys an insight about how to hold the gun, and hopefully to get the most out of the paintball gun throughout the day. So, I've got my Dye NT here. The idea about a gun setup is talking about the length of the air system to the grip.

The reason for that is, obviously you want to have a comfortable hold on your gun; you don't want to have it too long or too tight, so when you're actually playing the game, you can't feel comfortable with it. So if you have a choice of setting up your own gun, the ideal way to have it set up is so when you're holding your gun like this, the back of the bottle is pretty much levelled with your elbow. What that means is that when you have your gun into your shoulder and you're holding your gun, hopefully you've got a nice, comfortable 90-degree angle in your elbow.

So that means it's a nice, strong angle in your elbow, you're not spread out. And it means that if you need to react to anything that's happening on the field, it's a much more comfortable position to move from. So with this, the whole idea with holding the gun is basically to have this pressure point from the back of the tank into your shoulder, and to have the bottom half of your hand - whether it's a single trigger or a double trigger gun, it doesn't matter - the bottom half of your hand needs to be the main grip onto the actual grip of the gun.

So the two pressure points are going to be here, and then the back of my shoulder, here. And these two bits are going to be pulling together; I'm going to be pulling into my shoulder. So the whole stability of the gun is already set up here, and I've only got one hand doing it.

And the main reason for that is, obviously with this other hand, I want to be doing something else. And with that, I'm not going to be doing anything with it right now, but what I want to be doing with it is basically to load up this gun. So if I'm shooting my gun and I start running low on ammo, I'm going to reach around, grab my battle pack, probably with some more paint in there, and then basically just load up as I go.

So I'm going to pour more paint into the top of the loader as I'm shooting. And it means that I can have this stable position here just with one hand; I can still shoot at people without actually needing to use my other hand. When I'm playing normally, I'm going to have obviously my other hand on the front of the gun.

So instead of this being a pressure point and using this to pull into my shoulder, I'm going to use this hand as a direction. What it means is I can use it to pivot and actually pull the gun into wherever I want to actually shoot. So say if I'm looking this side and a guy stops moving on that way, I can use this hand and I can pull the gun in straight away and get a quick turn, and try and actually to get that paint on target as quick as possible.

So with this, it gives me a nice setup, and if I bend down like that I've got a nice, square setup within my arms. So again, this is a nice, strong setup. It doesn't matter where I move my gun, I've got this strong pivot going on and everything is so stable.

So there's no real movement in my upper body; everything is just really stable. And from that stability, it gives me the accuracy. Because obviously, if I move my bow tip an inch here, 100 meters down the woods where I'm shooting, it's going to be affected by five meters or so.

So everything needs to