By Duane Thomas
In 9mm which, in common with most handgun shooters, is what I mostly shoot these days, there are three common bullet weights: 115, 124 and 147 grains. There are also two commonly accepted sorts of recoil we can strive for through handloading, if we’re competing in any sort of sport where the quality of recoil, how fast and repeatably the gun comes right back to the same spot between shots, is important: slow and pushy or fast and snappy.
We get slow and pushy recoil by running heavy bullets with fast-burning powders. The classic approach in 9mm is 147-grain bullets with whatever fast powder floats your personal burn chart. “Slow and pushy” recoil is what people mean when they say a load seems “soft.”
The best explanation I’ve ever heard for this observed reality is that with heavy bullets and fast powders, the powder burns so fast that the recoil impulse kind of “pops” the slide, which then continues to the rear mostly through inertia, without much continued thrust afterward. Therefore, heavy bullets with fast powders give us much lower slide velocity, and the perception of slower, softer recoil.
By contrast, we get fast and snappy recoil by running light bullets with medium burn rate powders. With light bullets and slower powders, burning powder gases continue pushing on the bullet for much longer as it travels down the bore than occurs with heavy bullets and fast powders, therefore inertia is imparted to the slide for a longer time period, giving us much higher slide velocity and the perception of faster, snappier recoil.
There are very, very good shooters in the world who swear by slow and pushy, heavy bullet/fast powder loads. Hey, it works great for them. I tried that approach for years, before finally realizing it wasn’t for me. Slow, pushy recoil, to me, gives the slide stroke a very strange, glunk-glunk, back-and-forth quality, and a lot of what I call Subsidiary Muzzle Bounce (SMB), that “tuning fork effect” where the front of the gun bounces up and down for a while, like one of those little spring-loaded Chihuahua heads, after it comes down from recoil. My theory to explain this is that, the way recoil travels through my body, the slide is moving so slowly it’s still returning forward as the gun has already begun coming down from recoil, thus that forward energy gets added to the gun’s “down” movement.
I’ve come to realize, over time, I greatly prefer fast, snappy recoil. I want the slide moving so fast it’s completely cycled, back-and-forth and closed again, while the gun is still moving upward in recoil. Not only does this give me no SMB, and much more consistent, predictable sight tracking, it also gives me less muzzle lift in recoil. It’s like the recoil impulse is over so fast, comparatively speaking, it’s done before the front sight has had very much time to move at all.
It’s important to understand, there is no right or wrong here, no empirical “best” to which sort of recoil impulse you should prefer. It’s simply what you like, what works best for you.
