FitShot Air Squats for Handgun Training

Let's take a look at our first fit shot level one exercise. It's going to be the air squat. I'm going to go ahead and use the training gun for this exercise. What we're going to be doing is checking our full range of motion from complete standing upright, all the way down to a squat, where we want to make sure that our knees break the level of our hip, if at all possible. So, we actually want to get our body down below our knee, and then come all the way back up to standing.

That's going to be a complete air squat. Now, the best way to do this is to stand with your feet just a little bit larger than shoulder width apart. Your knees are going to be kind of following a little bit of an outward direction over your toes. As you go down, you're going to try to keep your back straight, keep your head up on the target, and of course keep the firearm in the ready position. So, I'm going to go down into this position.

My weight is in my heels. I'm going to come up into a standing position, and then I'm going to drive out and take a shot. I'm going to come back in. I'm going to drop down. I'm going to come up, drive out, take a shot.

Now, one of the things that we're looking for here is that you're not moving with the firearm at extension. So, I don't want the firearm out here bouncing around and coming up and down in my field of vision. I want to make sure that the firearm is in here in a controlled position. This is where I want the firearm whenever I'm moving anyway. So I want to be here, go down, come up, and then drive out.

Come in, drive down, come up, drive out. So, whenever you're doing an air squat with your firearm you want to make sure that it's always pointed in a safe direction. Another one of the problems that you could run into would be to point the gun up as you go down. Driving down like this points the gun up over the berm. We don't want to do that.

We want to keep the gun oriented with the berm, or even slightly down in front of us here and back up and drive out. If we want to move up another level we can go to the laser device. And now I can actually check to make sure that my shots are going to end up in the target. I can drop down, come up, drive out and take a shot. Come in, drive down, come up, drive out and take a shot.

And that lets me know that I'm on target, and now it'll be safe to put my hearing protection in, and go to live fire. All right, and now once we've checked all that, we're ready to actually start our live fire exercise. So, I'll go ahead and get my fire up to the ready position. Make sure I have a magazine. Make sure I have a round in the chamber, and now I'm ready to begin.

I'll go down, do an air squat, come up, drive out. Down and up, and we would continue on. Now, when we first get started with any of our exercises, we're not going to try to put a big time pressure on there. We're just going to make sure that we can perform them safely, get the hits that we're going to need to get. Now because I'm using steel, I want to make sure that I'm a minimum safe distance away today.

Normally when we use paper, we might be even a little bit closer. Make sure that we're scaling all of our shooting skills so that it takes less than three seconds to get the shot. This way if I miss, that three second penalty actually does come into play, and helps us actually score the fit shot from a competition standpoint. So, let's talk about how we're gonna do that. What would we do from a competition standpoint?

Well, if I go ahead and set this up with a magazine that only has six rounds in it, let me go ahead and empty this out a little bit. And what we're going to do is we're going to try to time it so that all of our exercises end when we actually have slide lock. So in this case, I now have six rounds in the gun. So, what I'm gonna do is do a six rep exercise of the air squat. I'll know that my air squat exercises are done, because I'll hit slide lock.

I'll perform a reload, and then I would either have my competition end, in which case I would obviously stay dry, or at that particular point I would transition to another exercise. Let's take a look at how that's going to work. I'd have a training partner give me a go signal. And at this point we end that exercise. Now, there was one miss in there, so I would get a three-second penalty.

So, my score for those six air squats would be the amount of time it took me to perform the exercise, plus three seconds for the one missed shot. That's as simple as it gets. This is a very safe way to get started with your functional fitness integrated with practical shooting.