Physical skills cannot be learned well by reading a book or watching a video; they need to be physically practiced. We firearms instructors would like you to do three practice sessions of 200 rounds each week working on various marksmanship, movement, and tactical drills. However, that’s not a realistic expectation. Most people, myself included, live
Is it the certificate on the wall, the training to get the certificate, the mindset, or our actual knowledge of tactics that work for self-defense? Knowing tactics doesn’t make an instructor, of course, and it’s a shame that most of the training organizations that provide credentials for instructors don’t stress actual teaching of the material.
I get a lot of email, Facebook messages and forum comments from people asking when there’s going to be a Combat Focus® Shooting course in their area. I usually tell them to check the calendar at the www.icetraining.us website to see where we’re going to be. You’d be surprised how many people go to the
We live in a violent society. When I first became a police officer, I carried a six-shot revolver. Portable radios were bigger and heavier than bricks. There were no cages in the patrol cars, and the patrol cars had a red light and a blue light on top. At least I had TWO lights on
None of us can predict what, where, when or how a critical incident will occur. The only elements we can control are mindset, training and gear. Everything else is unfortunately up to our potential attackers and luck. Because of this, true personal protection training should include a variety of different skill sets based on the
What is the real reason we should train to use only one hand to manipulate and shoot the firearm? Lots of people might say, “Because it is common to get shot in one of your extremities and lose the use of one hand.” While I agree, and the statistics confirm this to an extent, over
Once we finish a personal defense training class, a question that should remain in our minds is, “Where do I go from here?” We trainers almost universally say that you have to practice after a class to ingrain the skills you learned in order to achieve the unconscious competence necessary to prevail in a critical
Training conferences represent an outstanding opportunity to learn and network at an affordable price. Every year, I participate in several conferences in various places around the United States. In 2010, I will attend at least seven. Some, like the New York Law Enforcement Expo, are more focused on vendors and the exhibit hall while others,
It is important to integrate a lowered center of gravity into your training regimen as it is one of the most common reactions to being scared and/or startled. The reason for this survival reaction is that it prepares us to move. In fact, if we try to integrate lateral movement into our presentation quickly when
In part 1 of this article, I tried to draw correlations between two areas (combative and competitive) in each of the five critical skill sets. My purpose was to outline how techniques used in either area relate, and more importantly how to train them. In this part, I will get into the weeds and discuss
