The Mantis X10 Elite brings sophisticated technology into a well rounded shooting app that gives you real time feedback on your shots. It’s a fun and effective way to sharpen your skills!
What makes the Mantis unique is that it measures and analyzes your grip, trigger pull, and follow through using a an onboard gyroscope and accelerator. These all fit into a small device that fits on to any rail of your most common firearms. It pairs to a really well designed app that can be downloaded for fee on the App Store or Google Play. It will work with both live fire and dry fire training too, which helps cut down on overall training costs.
Once you pair the sensor to the app, you will notice that the app has a plethora of available training aides. You can follow along the guided courses or you can freely train in any of the modules you feel are relevant. What I really like about this right from the start is that it’s easy to become bored or repetitive in your firearms training. Just like changing your gym routine to improve your physical abilities, you have to introduce new training techniques into your shooting. The Mantis X app is like having a personal trainer on your phone.
I started with the Compressed Surprised Break Drill. In this drill the app gives you a shot timer, and you start with the pistol close to your chest pointed at the target. On the command “GO” you extend towards the target, aim, and fire. You can do this as many times as you please. I started out not paying much attention to the app and slowly pressing out, taking my time to find the target and focus on trigger reset and sight alignment. My target was at seven yards, and my group was consistently in the ten ring. I felt pretty confident in my shots until I checked the app, an 80.6!
I was quite disappointed, because if you looked at my target, all of my shots were touching inside the ten ring. I would have thought I would have been somewhere in the mid-nineties and be on my way out bragging about my score. But alas, the score doesn’t lie, and it’s easy to shoot tens at seven yards. So What I found really cool about the Mantis is you can analyze each shot. The onboard instruments in this little laser looking thing track an unbelievable amount of data. And once I started to look at my shots individually, I realized it was tracking the imperfections in my shot that I’ve been struggling with for years. I tend to slap the trigger dropping my shots, and affecting my follow up shot by not putting enough finger on the trigger. Sure enough the Mantis caught that and pointed it out to me.
I was also really impressed with the apps ability and accuracy to record what you do before, during and after each shot. Below is an image of one of my shots during a string of shots. The blue line indicates the movement before the shot. You can see the blue line is where I come on to target, and the yellow is the movement during the trigger break and shot which is indicated by the “X.” the red line shows the movement of the gun after the round was discharged. it even shows you the cant of the pistol. I was pretty surprised to see that I tend to cant the gun to the left. I’ve never been told that before, but it could indicate that my support hand (I’m a righty) is manipulating my shot. You can also see a pretty decent trigger slap here in the yellow. Something I’ve struggled with for years, and it usually takes me a few mags to warm-up through.
Another really important function of the Mantis is to keep this fun, but competitive. They have several different benchmarks to test your abilities, and you can create groups and friends. You can score each other off different drills, abilities, and benchmarks. I think that the shooting industry can use more of a space like this. Where you can compare and rank yourself publicly and privately without going to a match and at you’re own pace.
The Mantis retails for $249, and it’s more expensive then some other shooting apps. However the Mantis gives you a lot more feed back that just a target and laser could ever do. The fact that It can be used during live and dry fire allows you to train at home, cutting down on training costs. You can use the app to run through drills and add structure to your range sessions. Put all of those things into a social media group that allows you to compare scores within a group, and I think this little training tool is a home run. I finished off testing this with the 20 second benchmark test and I scored a 81.2. I think that’s a really easy number to beat, so try it and comment your scores below!