Practice makes perfect, right? Well, maybe…but practice is absolutely key to staying sharp as a shooter. We are glad you’ve found Mantis and our suite of products! Let’s talk about the MantisX and Laser Academy products and help you decide which product is the best fit for your training needs.
Instead of focusing on where shots land on a target, MantisX requires no target. You choose what to aim at when using it. The unit is constantly capturing movement data and recognizes when the trigger is pressed, and knows where the muzzle of the firearm was immediately prior to the trigger press vs where it was at the trigger press and what happened after the trigger press (recoil). The app reads the data from the unit in real time via bluetooth and provides the shooter feedback based on the movement that happened during the shot. MantisX shows you the exact movement of the shot and provides advice on correcting the movement.
Laser Academy is designed to show the user where the shots actually went in dry fire practice. Can you dry fire without a target giving feedback where your shots went? Yes, but it takes skill to understand what movement you see in your sights, especially iron sights, when the trigger press occurs. This technique is called “calling your shots” and if you are a beginner, it’s already a challenge to be aware of the fundamentals to proper shooting! It involves adding on another layer of watching shot movement. Laser Academy can remove that layer allowing the user to focus on the fundamentals and getting the point of aim to be the point of impact and having a visual of what the target would look like if they were at the range.
Laser Academy does not provide any coaching or correction like the MantisX product does, but it does provide a great option for new shooters called “The Journey”. It walks you through Laser Academy, but more importantly fundamentals and gives specific drills to work on specific skills culminating with a course and a test. The videos are available at any time to re-watch to allow learning at your own pace.
MantisX provides social interaction through groups. A group can be created or exist for any number of reasons. There are large groups that exist for firearm manufacturers, for organizations and for ranges. You can create your own group just for your family or friends. There’s no requirements to meet to create and engage in a group and groups can be public or private, so you can control who is in your group. Creating your own group allows for a weekly group goal, and can foster some of that friendly competition to see who can meet or exceed the group goal. It also allows you to view another group member’s history and sessions and even encourage them with a message on the session.
Laser Academy provides drills in which users can compete against each other in person using the Duel drills. There is a single shot drill, a 5 shot duel, a high score duel, and the favorite of many is Duel with the Hunt target, which adds complexity by having the competitors find the specific item and shoot it accurately on the Hunt target. You can also have a bit of fun using the Bullseye drills and take turns shooting the 5 or 10 shot drills and highest score wins.
MantisX has courses built in just for this purpose! We recommend starting with the MantisX Introduction Course if you are new to the product, then there are 13 (more coming) courses that you can work through that each grouping of courses gets progressively harder. Start with the Marksmanship courses and work through the Basic, then Advanced and finally Elite. There are Combat courses and a new set of courses for Concealed Carry. At the completion of each of the courses past the Introduction course, you can put your address in and Mantis will send you a free patch. You can work towards collecting all of the patches!
You can also mix up your dry fire by running the Daily Challenge drill. This is a quick drill that changes daily and requires you to practice doing some unconventional things that may apply to real life. You are then rated against everyone else who has run the Daily Challenge drill for that day to see where you stack up. If you like the Daily Challenge, you can save your favorite ones to be able to run them on any day!
In Laser Academy “The Journey” is a guided path to have you work on fundamentals through running specific drills to help improve your fundamentals by experimenting and practicing different aspects of each fundamental. Laser Academy also has a Pistol Marksmanship Course that you can earn a patch upon completion, and more courses are to come!
Consider challenging yourself by increasing your distance from the targets or using the smaller 5x7 targets. Distance scales linearly, so a smaller target is very similar to shooting at a further distance. For example, use the Bullseye target in open training, you can track your scores and work to improve them at distance or by using the smaller target.
There are multiple drills that can be configured to a ready position of “holster” and provide an audible beep, a visual screen flash or both as a go signal, depending how the user would like to practice by muting the device and relying on the flash only, or having the sound up, but the screen hidden from view. A competitor may only want the beep, whereas the conceal carrier may only want a visual indicator. There is a built in Shot Timer and Par Timer drills to where you can work on your draw to first trigger press within your goal time (par time) or work multiple shot split times (live fire requires X3 or X10 Elite, dry fire requires resetting trigger or double action).
Laser Academy has a Holster Draw drill where you can start from the holster, the drill will give an audible and/or visual start signal and record the time from the start signal to the laser hit on the target. The drill allows you to configure how many repetitions or draws in the session as well as a reset time, which is how long you need to reset the gun and be back in the holster.. The Holster Draw - Par Timed drill allows you to configure a par time (the goal time) and a pass or fail will be associated with each draw whether it made the par time or not. Both of these drills require all shots to start from the holster.
To practice multiple shots or split times in Laser Academy, the Open Shooting drills would accommodate this if you have a resetting trigger like a double action trigger, DryFireMag with laser, a SIRT pistol or the like.
MantisX has drills that can add cognitive load (making you think before taking action) to practice. There are a set of Decision Drills that pose Shoot vs No Shoot scenarios either by color, by shape and color, by analyzing dice to a condition, or by addition of numbers to a condition. Sounds simple enough, right? Many users have commented on the challenge they bring and how we are wired to just shoot at a target without recognizing if it poses a threat or not to us. These Decision Drills help us to take time to see if the situation warrants taking a shot or not and practicing drills with more cognitive load can help translate to better decisions for concealed carriers.
Laser Academy allows for some drills to be run with multiple smart targets allowing you to work on target transitions and engagement. The targets must be placed so that the QR codes are all visible within the camera window in the app. Consider using a target with a larger area and a target with a smaller area and work the transition to shoot faster at the target with a larger scoring area, and be more precise with the target with the smaller scoring area. Push to move as quickly as you can and still hit the scoring areas.
Laser Academy also features a Hunt target and drill, which brings complexity to just shooting a target by shooting a called out target by the app. There is an easy, medium and hard mode which each level up gets a bit harder and more specifics on the target to shoot. You can start from any position, so consider running from the holster on this drill and how quickly you can draw and engage the right target!
The X3 and X10 Elite units are rated for live fire and all drills can be set to run in live fire. If you have the X10 Elite unit, there’s an additional drill included for live fire only called Recoilmeter. Instead of tracking the movement of the firearm on the target during the trigger press, the unit is tracking the motion of the firearm starting with the trigger press through getting the firearm back on target. The Recoilmeter drill can measure the muzzle rise (how much did the muzzle flip up), the recoil width (how wide was the recoil deviation side to side) and recoil angle (deviation from straight up and down).
Laser Academy is a dry fire product only, but if you practice with Laser Academy Smart targets, you can print out additional copies and take the same targets to the range and see how shots pattern on the targets at similar distances to your dry fire and then compare to your history in the app for the same targets you dry fire practiced on.
MantisX and Laser Academy are two wholly separate products, but you can use them together to enhance your dry fire practice. The best way to accomplish this, is to have two separate devices, one with the MantisX Pistol/Rifle app running and the other with Laser Academy running. Remember, the devices do not need to be high end, but we would recommend using the device with the best camera for Laser Academy. Both MantisX and Laser Academy will run on lower priced Android based devices, even a Kindle Fire. If your device does split screen, where it can run two applications at once, you could run both MantisX and Laser Academy on the same device.
Set up the target(s) you want in Laser Academy and choose Open Shooting with either Single or Multiple targets depending on how many targets you want to have. Then with the other device, open up and connect your MantisX unit. You will want to run the actual drills on MantisX to capture the movement data, so start the drill on Laser Academy to capture the laser shots, then start the drill on MantisX. Once complete with the drill, stop the drill on MantisX first, then stop the drill on Laser Academy. Consider taking a screen shot of your Laser Academy target and uploading it into MantisX on the notes for the session so that you have the visual target hits and the data all within MantisX.
Hopefully this helped inform you of what each product does and how it may help you in your practice. To put it simply, Laser Academy is like bringing home the range, while MantisX is like bringing home the coach. Ultimately you need to assess the functionality of both and decide what fits your training needs best. Mantis offers a 45 day return policy (save your packaging) if you are not happy with the product. Have additional questions? Reach out to our support team via Live Chat from www.mantisx.com or email support@mantisx.com or call (630) 551-8171. We would be happy to answer your questions!