hey guys this is Chris and today we're going to talk about pistol reloading in general there's only two reasons why we're going to be shooting our pistol instead of our primary weapon system either our primary is down or out of BBS or we're in a situation where a smaller weapon system will be more advantageous so either way if we've got our pistol out it can be assumed that we're in an emergency situation we need to be effective at transitioning from our primary to our secondary which is covered in a video linked here and we need to be efficient at reloading our pistol so let's go over the steps that we find effective our first step is to look at our deer placement we need easy access to our secondary reload that's available to us in the widest range of positions that we'll find ourselves on in the airsoft battlefield for us that generally means on our belt on the opposite side of our holster this will allow your offside hand to easily grab the fresh mag and complete your reload as you can see my reload is located on my left hip in a taco pouch this pouch allows me to easily grab my mag and is secure enough that I'm not worried about losing it if your setup differs from this make sure that you practice the extra steps necessary in your situation another approach is effectively position let's move on to the actual steps of the reload we're going to begin this process by bringing our pistol up on target our first step is to recognize that our pistol is out of ammo the slide should be locked to the rear first we're going to canter the pistol to the right and bring our elbow into our stomach our pistol is now directly in front of our face which is called our workspace this position is also extremely stable and gives you a consistent point of reference from which to reload from this position we can observe the entire pistol and see exactly the levers buttons or whatever your weapon has in terms of a magazine release I'm going to press the button with the thumb of my weapons hand and at the same time I'm going to sweep my offside hand down with the magazine this sweep allows me to aid the magazine out of the pistol and maintain a strong index grip on the empty mag this grip will reduce fumbling and the risk that you will drop the magazine this is where our pistol reload differs from our rifle reload we covered rifle speed reloads in the video linked here unlike rifle mags we don't want to drop our pistol mags these mags are expensive and prone to breaking so now we need to get rid of our empty mag and we have two general methods for this the first and preferred is to deposit it in a dump pouch and the second is to reuse the pouch that the fresh mag came from so let's look at the dump pouch method taking the mag out of the pistol we go directly to our dump pouch our next step is to retrieve a fresh ammo source we want to ensure that we have a solid indexed grip on our fresh mag which allows us to confidently guide the magazine into the pistol let's look at the second method which is to put the spent mag back into the pouch that the fresh mag came from the first few steps are exactly the same we're bring the pistol into our workspace and release the spent mag now instead of going through the dump pouch we take the mag and tuck it between our pinky and ring finger over shooting hand from there we index the fresh mag with our off hand then take the spent mag and place it back in the patch our final step of our reload is to release the slide catch button or power stroke it's up to the user and bring our pistol back up on target so that's our general methods for reloading our sidearms remember to adjust the steps as necessary for your weapon system and setup if you liked the video make sure to subscribe thanks for watching guys