Defensive Shooting Fundamentals Session 2: Extended Shooting Position

Our primary defensive shooting position is going to be an extended shooting position where we're using maximum amount of contact with the gun, maximum extension, maximum skeletal, and muscular support to not only align the gun, but to maintain that alignment throughout recoil management, throughout the cycling of the gun. Whenever we're talking about firing defensive strings of fire, we're thinking about shooting multiple rounds. We're not just talking about firing a single shot and expecting it to stop the bad guy. So a lot of the things that you might've learned, that you might see in terms of target shooting and maximizing our efficiency for single shots placed with extremely high precision, are gonna be different from what we're going to do in the context of a defensive shooting when we already know that our body is going to take a certain position or a certain posture, and most importantly, that we know we're gonna wanna fire multiple rounds. So recoil management becomes a really important part of setting ourselves up for success.

Now, first and foremost, we're already gonna assume that you have a good grip on the gun and that you know how to get the gun from the holster out to the extended shooting position, or from your ready position out to the extended shooting position. And we're just gonna isolate talking about that. So once I'm out at my fully extended position, and this is really what I want it to look like as I'm about to fire my first shot or while I'm going through cycling and firing a multiple shot string of fire. Let's take a look at the important points there. First of all, I'm in a lowered center of gravity position, this can be very important.

It's your first bullet point when it comes to understanding the extended shooting position for defensive shooting. We know that people, when they get into fights, are not gonna stand bolt upright. This isn't the position you get to when you're scared or when you're in a fight mode. When you're in a fight mode, when you're startled, we tend to lower our center of gravity as human beings. So we wanna learn to fight and shoot in this position whenever possible.

There's no reason to work against what we do. We call this being intuitive. It also helps us to be efficient. So while we can be very effective with a handgun standing up perfectly straight, we wanna try to maintain that lowered center of gravity when we're going to be training for defensive shootings. And the other thing we wanna make sure that we have is what I call a natural and neutral stance.

Lowering the center of gravity is part of that. And lowering the center of gravity means bending at the knees and closing at the hips. This is gonna put our shoulders in front of our hips somewhere, we'll just go and do it in a minute, you'll see it allow us to recruit our back muscles and our skeletal system to help manage recoil. The other thing that's happening in this natural and neutral stance is that my feet are not staggered more than a foot length. In other words, there's no gap between the toe and the heel, right?

I'm not staggered with either my strong foot or my weak foot forward. So I can keep my feet out here and I can be staggered, or I can keep my feet out here and have them more neutral and planted underneath of my hips and underneath of my shoulders. Now that's not to say you couldn't fight in this position or in this position, but why would we wanna train to always, for example, have one foot or the other forward, right? We spend most of our time moving that back and forth. As we walk, we change which position is front or behind.

And if I have to turn to my left, then my left foot's probably gonna be a little bit in front. If I have to turn to my right to defend myself, then my right foot's probably gonna be a little bit in front. So if I train in a natural neutral stance, I'm better off. The other thing is that the feet are about shoulder width apart. So I'm not standing with my feet right next to each other, obviously, and I don't need to exaggerate and get into a very wide kind of martial arts horse stance type thing.

So just lowering that center of gravity, bending at the knees, bending at the hips, getting your feet not staggered too much, and about shoulder width apart, that's the base of your stance. All right, let's take a look at understanding our defensive shooting position, or our extended shooting position. Right now we're gonna focus on threats that are beyond to arm's reach when we're gonna take the gun either from the holster or from our ready position and drive it out into a shooting position that's designed not only to help us align the gun very intuitively, very efficiently, but also to manage recoil as much as possible. Remember that when we're shooting in a defensive context overwhelmingly, we're gonna be planning on having to fire multiple rounds strings of fire. So we wanna make sure that just like our grip, and our stance, and everything else we're gonna be doing, we're designing our training platform, we're designing our training positions to support our application of skill not just the performance of skill in isolation.

Now, when we talk about the extended shooting position, we remember that stance really isn't incredibly important here. It's not vital that we have our body in any specific position to get the proper extended shooting position. So it doesn't matter if I'm sitting in a chair, if I'm falling through mid air, if I'm laying on the ground, or if I am standing and in my good natural, neutral, lower center of gravity stance. The extended shooting position is a separate thing. So let's talk about what the bullet points are.

And we'll assume that you know what your stance is gonna be, you know how to get the gun to the shooting position, that you have a good grip. And we're just gonna look at the position. I wanna make sure that both arms are extended fully. Now, for me, that means my arms are going to be straight. I'm gonna go ahead and have a straight line through the elbow and a straight line through the wrist onto the gun.

Now, for some people you may not be able to get your arms straight, but you have to remember that's still fully extended and that's why it's important that you think of it that way. If my arms only go to here, this is still full extension. Now, it's not as good anatomically or physiologically as going to full extension and having my arms straight in terms of managing recoil, but it's the best I can do. If one of your arms go straight and the other one doesn't, then that's fine, that's the best you can do Same thing if you reverse that. When both arms are fully extended and they're equal, you don't have any range of motion issues, you don't have any injuries, you don't have any problems with your human body, you're gonna see that the tops of the arms will be even.

So I don't wanna be here with my support arm really high. I don't want to be here with my strong arm really high. Both of those arms are gonna be equal to put the gun in and parallel with my line of sight. And in and parallel means not only in this plane, but also in this plane so that when I drive out, I'm not gonna be here, I'm not gonna be here. The gun is aligned with my head.

If I were to be canted leaning around cover, then the gun also will be canted. And in this case my arms are gonna be even in this plane with the gun. So I don't wanna be here like this leaning out around cover. It doesn't make any sense. Keep the gun consistently aligned with your head.

Your arms are gonna push out, your head is going to be inside of that triangle. So when I'm in this two-handed extended shooting position, you can see that my head is inside of the triangle. I'm not here up above the triangle. Now you may see people do this in a target shooting environment, you may also see this in a competition shooting environment where someone might have their weight forward at the hips a little bit, but they are very upright on their back, and this allows them to swing through multiple targets. Now that's not something that we're gonna practice and train to do.

We're not gonna anticipate the idea of a plate rack type presentation or an "El Presidente" static targets where we know exactly where they are and they're not gonna move kind of thing in a true dynamic critical incident, defensive situation. So we're not worried about this. We're also not presuming that we're gonna be able to track something out here in the periphery of our vision when we know that we have most of our visual information coming from the center of our field division, especially in a fight mode and we're very psychologically focused. That presumption is one of those types of things that in the training environment really causes us to skew our technique from what would be the best for the situation we are trying to apply our skills in, and skew it to the training environment where we're simply performing our skills. So this whole idea of being up above your arms and being able to see what's going on, well, I don't wanna be looking to the left while my gun is pointed out in front of me.

My gun's gonna be here, well, out of my field of vision when I'm assessing the environment. And if my gun is extended because I'm shooting somebody that I'm psychologically and physiologically focused on, then I'm not worried about not being able to see someone over here. So any part of my visual field that's blocked by driving my arms out and making sure that I'm in this best position for shooting, isn't my concern. You don't want an extended shooting position that's designed for scanning your environment, doesn't make any sense. Let's get into the best shooting position we can.

So we've got fully extended, we've got arms fully extended straight, if possible, my head down inside of the shooting position, and the next thing I wanna talk about is shoulders being in front of the torso. So not having our shoulders next to our torso, but in fact engaging our shoulders fully behind the gun. Now, here's where we have to think about the forces that we're trying to control, especially recoil management, not just the alignment of the gun initially, but also the management of recoil for these multiple shots, strings of fire. And I keep coming back to that because it's very important. Make sure that we're not just target shooting, shooting one round, waiting some period of time, shooting another round, and then looking at our group.

We have to think about a rapid string of fire, throughout which we can maintain our defensive accuracy. So engaging our shoulders is gonna be part of that. If you've ever done any kind of weightlifting where you've taken weight up over your head, you'll know that what your shoulder's active when that weight is over your head. When you drive up like this, you don't stop here with a bar or any kind of weight, you go up and you lock, especially if you're gonna suspend that weight. If you ever maybe try to hang some dry wall or something like that, or you're handing somebody something up onto a ladder, up onto a ledge, you're not gonna just stop here and hold that weight with nothing but your muscles.

We're gonna drive up and try to lock our arms and use our skeletal system to support that weight. Well, with a gun, the weight or the force that I'm trying to resist and control is coming back at me. So I don't want my shoulders next to my body, I want my shoulders forward and engaged. And what you'll see is that now I have my back muscles and my skeletal frame, especially when we combine this with our typical standing crouched position, our lowered center of gravity, I'm driving out and I'm engaging everything that's going to help me to control the gun and to put the gun in the right place. When you extend, everything tightens up here.

Again, look at it from the strong side, I drive out my extended shooting position. Obviously, another thing we have to think about with our shooting position, is when the finger touches the trigger. So when does the finger touch the trigger? It touches as we're extending. Don't be too dogmatic about this idea if you hear like when the finger touches the trigger.

Let's make sure that the gun is moving out to the shooting position before you start to touch the trigger, and that you've reached full extension before the gun goes off. Those are really the most important things. So it's not about having 50% of the trigger pressed on, 60% of the way out or any of these weird numbers you might've heard. I don't know what 50% feels like, you probably don't either. And 60% out, and 55% out, and 70% out, they're all kind of in the same area.

So think of it more as a big picture concept. When I'm in the ready position, or obviously when I'm in the holster, I'm not touching the trigger. And as I extend, somewhere in here, that's where that finger is gonna touch the trigger, and only after I'm in my full extended shooting position is the gun gonna go off. Now, obviously, if we're talking about compressed positions, where I'm shooting from attention, different scenario. While the gun is moving, that's when I want my finger to move to the trigger and initiate that first touch before I actually start pressing.

If I need sight alignment in sight picture, then I'm gonna wait until I'm out at full extension before I start that trigger press. So trigger control is something separate from our extended shooting position, but it's obviously very closely related in terms of the timing. So, again, bullet points, full extension whether that means straight or as far as you can go. And, again, remember sometimes when people are dressed in certain ways, you might see guys from military or law enforcement backgrounds who have used body armor, or maybe you see pictures on the internet of those armed professionals wearing heavy, thick body armor that prevents them from getting their arms straight because of the way it affects their shoulders. It may also prevent them from getting their shoulders engaged forward.

That doesn't mean that they're in a perfect shooting position, it means they're in the best shooting position they can get into. So you wanna be careful not trying to emulate that when you don't actually have those same problems, you don't have those same concerns. So I'm in this situation here because I'm wearing body armor, but the kinesthetics, what we're learning as a principal is that if I don't have that heavy body armor, or plate carrier on, then I'm gonna drive out to full extension. The other nice thing about that for you as a defensive shooter, regardless of which situation you're in, if you happen to go back and forth between concealed carry and being an armed professional with heavy body armor, is that it's always your brain telling your muscles to do the same thing Drive all the way out. And whether that stops here or it drives all the way out to here, doesn't really matter.

Your brain is telling your hands to do the same thing. You're obviously gonna have much better recoil management when you're fully extended here with your shoulders engaged. So full extension, arms straight, head inside the triangle, so the gun is in and parallel with your line of sight, and you wanna make sure that you're not firing the gun until you shoulders are engaged and active behind the gun to resist the recoil, manage it, and allow you to take that follow-up shot as quickly as possible.