Counter Ambush Concepts: Preparing Your Response Session 7: Front Loading Your Practice

So remember I said that this is the process, right? The principle is front load your practice, front load practice. How do we do that? Well, we go back to our our model of time allocation first and foremost, right? Whatever our most valuable training resource is, for most of us, it's time, then we're gonna look at budget.

But we divide that up into these sessions. Now, this could be hours in the day. This could be days in a month. This could be weekends in a quarter. I don't know what this is, but we've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 of these sessions, right?

What we tell people to do is take the skill development cycle, distribute it across your training sessions based on the idea of front loading your practice. Because you're not really just gonna be working on one thing at a time. That's very, very rare, right? So you learn a thing, step one, then you practice that thing. You might need to practice it some more before you feel comfortable enough to even evaluate your application of skill, but you might also at the same time, practice that thing, and then you might learn a second thing at the same time.

Next session, you're gonna be practicing the second thing and you're gonna go ahead and evaluate your ability to apply the skills you've been working on since you learned them. Evaluate this practice you've been doing. And maybe you find yourself good to go, so you're gonna long cycle it. You're gonna come back up here and you're gonna learn a third thing. Maybe you're ready to evaluate the second thing, but you're gonna find out you didn't practice enough.

You aren't happy with your ability to apply the skill. So you're gonna short cycle it, you're gonna get back and practice some more. So it's next time you practice the second thing, you practice the third thing, you're gonna evaluate both things. Good to go, learn a fourth thing. Practice the fourth thing.

And, you know what? It's been a while since I practiced that first thing I learned, let me throw that in there to, get some practice with that. Over here, I'm gonna practice the fourth thing and I'm gonna practice the second and third things as well because it's been a while since I practiced them. So this is what we mean by front loading practice. If you look at it, we learned something, we practiced it, we practiced it.

We evaluated it, then we let it go for a while, then we practiced it again off in the future. Well, while we let that thing go, we spent a lot of time practicing and working on this other thing. And then, somewhere in the middle there, we also had a third thing that we started working on and that we then touched on again a little bit later. But every time we learn something new, we'd spend a lot of time practicing it. Every time we learn this new thing, we spent a lot of time working on it.

Front load that practice. Don't be the person that says, "Well, I'm gonna go to this guy's class in September, "this other guy's class in October, "another class in November, "another class in December, "and then in January or March or whenever, "I'm gonna practice." You will not have retained enough to really get valuable practice. The skill development cycle needs to be a close process for any given set of skills. Don't just learn, learn, learn, learn, learn, learn, learn, and then say, "March is my practice month." That's not the way to do it. That's not a good way to retain skill.

The way you retain skills is practice over time. The warrior expert theory, through frequent and realistic training, you can capitalize on the power of recognition. That frequency needs to be higher, the closer you are to when you learned something. The closer you are to when you learned something, the more valuable that practice time is. Because if you go away from when you learned it, you might end up practicing the wrong thing.

You might think, oh, my foot was here, I think, but actually your foot was over here, and now you're practicing this thing in the wrong way and you're not getting it done as well as you could. You'll get good at something, right? You'll get good at something, but not necessarily the right thing. So front load your practice. The skill development cycle is the heart of your training model.

Front loading your practice is the most important concept when you're learning new things and trying to get good at them. And ultimately, making sure you're practicing the right things, working towards that worst case scenario of lack of control, maximum danger, plausibility principle, and trying not just to be effective, but really trying to be efficient. That's how you best prepare for the ambush moment.