Every shooter who dry fires has used a par timer: set a par of 1.5 seconds, get a start beep, try to finish the rep before the second beep. It’s simple, it works anywhere, and it’s been the standard tool for decades.
But a par timer has a blind spot — it has no idea what you did between the beeps.
What a par timer measures
Nothing, strictly speaking. It schedules. The timer tells you when to start and when time is up. Whether you beat par is a judgment call you make yourself, mid-rep, dozens of times per session. Was that press at 1.4 or 1.6? Did your draw actually get faster this month, or do you just feel faster?
Live fire solves this with a shot timer that picks up the report of each shot. Dry fire traditionally couldn’t — there’s no bang to detect.
What shot detection adds
Dry Fire Pro closes that gap with on-device machine learning that listens for the mechanical click of your trigger through the iPhone’s microphone. Every press gets a timestamp, which means every rep produces data:
- Real reaction times — beep to press, measured, not felt.
- Splits — the time between presses in multi-shot drills.
- Trends — your average reaction across weeks of sessions, on a chart.
- Honest misses — reps where you blew past par are recorded as misses, not forgotten.
The difference compounds. With a par timer you finish a session with a feeling. With measured reps you finish with numbers — and numbers are what tell you whether the new grip, the lower ready position, or the extra practice day is actually working.
Do you still need par times?
Yes — par times are a great training structure, and Dry Fire Pro supports them fully: set a par window per step, get the start and par cues, randomize the standby so you can’t game the beep. Detection doesn’t replace the par timer. It sits on top of it and writes down what happened.
The bottom line
If you’re choosing between a par timer app and a timer with real shot detection, the question is simple: do you want to schedule your reps, or measure them? Your first measured drill takes about 60 seconds — Dry Fire Pro is free on the App Store.