Defensive Shooting Fundamentals Session 4: Understanding High Compressed Ready Position

There are many times during a defensive shooting course when you're going to train from the ready position. Now, let's say that you're interested in home defense firearm skill development. For home defense, you're probably not going to prioritize training from the holster at all. You're gonna be retrieving your gun from a staging position, perhaps a quick access safe. You're going to be getting that gun into your ready position.

This will be the position where you're barricaded. You have your family behind you. If you have to move with the firearm you're going to be in your ready position. If you're on the phone with the police, whatever other things you may be doing, maybe you're holding a flashlight or maybe you're just going to be in that good traditional two handed grip, high compressed ready position. Now, you may have seen other ready positions.

In other words, a ready position is defined as the position the gun is in when you're not shooting and the gun is in your hands. So you may have seen ready positions which you have the gun extended down low. You may have seen extended ready positions where the gun is actually seemingly in a shooting position, but you're not shooting, you're doing something else. Maybe moving around. You may have seen any kind of a high muzzle ready position.

Some people will even put the gun in places that really are either incredibly specialized and unique exceptions to the rule or just positions that you generally don't want your gun in. You don't want your gun generally down here behind your back hidden. But I've seen this referred to as a covert ready, sometimes. Putting the gun up here by your face, in any position, up by your temple, I don't recommend of as any general practice. There's always going to be some exception you can find to rationalize these types of extreme positions, but primarily you're gonna see a low ready; you're gonna see an extended ready; you're gonna see a compressed ready.

The high compressed ready is the only position that I teach as a default. There may be other exceptions, but this high compressed ready position is the one that you're going to want to use most often. It's the one that allows you to do all of your manipulations that you may need to do with the gun, load it clear a malfunction, things like that. It keeps the gun in a position where you're very strong, all right? It's a very safe position.

It's a position where if the gun goes off it's going to go off in a direction where you are obviously looking, where you're aware of what's happening. If someone tries to grab the gun, it's a position where it's going to be easy for you to regain control of it or maintain control of it. It's a position which is congruent with your presentation from the holster to the shooting position. So it's redundant. In other words, it's consistent with your presentation where you're coming from the holster and you're driving straight out.

If I'm here in the ready position, it's basically the same movements as I drive out into my shooting position which makes my training model more efficient because I'm doing the same thing more often. So there's a whole bunch of reasons why we like the high compress ready position. Let's talk about what you actually are going to be doing when the gun is in the high compressed ready position. First, the gun is up in front of your chest, all right? Generally speaking, the position of the gun is in front of your chest.

Specifically, we want it to be above the height at which the gun comes out of the holster. So the gun comes up out of the holster, that represents the minimum height of the gun. We wouldn't wanna come up out of the holster and then drop the gun back down. So gun up, in front of the chest, above the height at which it comes out of the holster, and below your line of sight. Now below your line of sight, obviously most people are not going to think this is a potential option, but I really mean out of your line of sight.

For practical purposes, the gun is below anything we would consider the center of our field of vision. It's not out here to where I can see the gun, it's not here where I can see the gun, it's in front of my chest, not a factor in my visual field at all. I could look at it if I needed to or I may be aware of it somewhat in my peripheral vision, but I'm really looking out here. I'm not relying on visual reference from my firearm, I'm aligning it kinesthetically. I know where it is because of proprioception.

I know where my body parts are. I know where the gun is. I'm integrated with the gun consistently with a good grip. The gun's in the high compressed ready. The gun is also going to be not angled above my line of sight, all right?

The idea is the gun starts pointed down. Wherever you're carrying the gun, here, here, maybe it's in or outside of a box, the gun comes up into your ready position, and when we drive out to shoot we're gonna want the gun aligned with our line of sight. So having the gun go from the holster and be rotated into an upward pointing position, only to then come back down into a shooting position doesn't make a lot of sense to me, it's inefficient. It's an extraneous amount of movement. So we talk about economy of motion.

The gun comes up and comes to the ready position and then is aligned either parallel with our line of sight or below. I might even roll the gun all the way downwards pointed just in front of my toes. If I'm really worried about flagging other people, if I'm worried about pointing my muzzle at people in the environment, I can come all the way down to here. One of the things you'll notice about this position is that it's also very non-threatening. If I were in a public environment and I rolled down into this position, which is known as which is Portuguese for South pointing downward on a map, If I rolled down into this position, it's very, non-threatening.

Here, someone can articulate being clear fear that you're going to shoot them. Certainly here that's the case. But in this position I'm not really in a threatening position. Imagine you were a third party coming along a situation and you saw someone here in this position telling someone to stop or to get down or to move away, versus someone in this position doing it and try to decide which is more threatening. The person who's driving out, holding their finger on the trigger, pointing and yelling, or the person who is here, maybe even with this hand gesturing telling the person to do something?

Well, if you're a police officer or a security guard responding to that scene, seeing this position or even this position is much less likely to cause you to take immediate action than this position. So whenever we're that person in a public space, we're not in uniform, we've pulled our gun out for some reason, maybe we had to shoot somebody, maybe we think we may have to shoot somebody to defend ourselves or others, high compressed ready position with that muzzle here or here is going to be much less threatening than any extended ready position. So again, gun is going to be in front of our chest, above the height at which it comes out of the holster, below our line of sight, with the muzzle not aligned above our line of sight. If I'm looking up checking rooftops or maybe the top of this berm or the top of this much taller berm over here, my line of sight is up, so the gun can be angled a little bit more up. Now we're going to drive out to shoot, I'd be in this position.

That's fine. Next thing we wanna talk about is having the gun as much as possible perpendicular to the line of our torso. So I don't wanna have the gun crossing my body like this. Obviously, if I were going to shoot to this side, that's very efficient, but if I saw someone over here, I now have to rotate the gun all the way around and that could create some lateral motion that I don't want. When I drive this gun out to a shooting position, I really want as much as possible to drive it straight out to have my arms and body behind the gun to help set my shoulders and lock the gun in to the correct alignment.

If I'm coming across this way, I run the risk of reaching full extension and be swinging the gun into my line of sight and that will allow that lateral motion to sometimes carry the gun past where I wanna go and I'll have to correct. So I don't want to be off to the side. I want to be as much as I can perpendicular to the line of my body. So here are the points: gun up above the holster height, the removal from the holster, the height at which the gun is, below my line of sight, in front of my chest, oriented not above my line of sight, and is close to perpendicular as possible with my body relative to the threat, relative to the area that I'm assessing. And the last point is a helpful one.

Keep your elbows at your side. If you think about having your elbows here, now I've got a partial extension. Everything else could technically be true, although the gun is certainly more in my line of sight, this keeping the elbows at the side will ensure that you are gonna have as much control over the gun as possible, that you're as strong as possible for all of your manipulations, and that you have as much kinesthetic motion as possible to get the gun into your line of sight. So instead of being here and driving just barely out and coming up, now I'm properly bringing the gun up and finishing out in a very strong way with a lot of momentum and energy to set those shoulders athletically. So this gives me a lot of control, a lot of protection for the gun if somebody tries to grab it, a lot of strength.

I'm also able to very consistently drive the gun out regardless of whether I'm coming out straight ahead of me or if I'm turning all the way around behind me and driving that gun to my shooting position. And there's several advantages to the high compressed ready position. One of the things that you gotta remember is that this is a very strong position, right? So if I'm extended in any way I have less strength with the gun. Here, I am very strong for all the manipulations that I wanna do with the gun.

If someone tries to grab the gun, if someone were to try to get around me or somebody came in very close when I was turned away, turned in another direction, they grabbed the gun, it's very strong and easy for me to retain control of the gun. This position is very consistent with the alignment that we're probably going to be have as we're assessing our environment. So I could even shoot from this position or if the gun were to go off for some reason, if I were to get panicked and my trigger finger was in the wrong place and I were to slip down to the trigger, the gun is at least oriented in the general direction preferably of my threat, but possibly just in a direction that I am aware of as well. So in a training environment, again, it's a very safe position. I don't have to worry about the gun flagging around into different directions.

There's other advantages here as well because this is very consistent position for all of our gun manipulations and gun handling.