PDN 2012 National Training Tour Update: Week 3

Okay, week three of the Personal Defense Network Training Tour 2012 is wrapped up. And, as you can see, I'm coming to you from the home office. The tour has come up the East Coast, made a turn towards the Midwest and I'm now at home in Ohio. I'm gonna be here teaching next week, so I'll actually be talking about some updates that are coming up for the future right here from Ohio also, but this week we have some other things to talk about. First and foremost, as week two ended up, I went out to St.

Louis for the NRA annual meeting and convention. It was a great time. I was there with a lot of the staff members from Personal Defense Network, people that make everything happen at the website, and help structure our deals with our supporters and sponsors for the website of course and our tour. I was able to meet with some of our supporters at the tour also. I spent some time with Aaron and Larry Moore of LaserLyte.

Spent a lot of time with Mark Craighead at the CrossBreed booth and with his whole team there. Had a lot of good times. What's important to understand is that the people that are involved in the tour, not just myself and the other instructors, but even our supporters and the people at the offices that run personaldefensenetwork.com all believe in the mission. What we're trying to do, is spread the word about training, get more people talking about training, build training communities at new ranges. As you saw last week in our update we were talking to Troy Mines at Thunder Mountain Training Center.

Talking about the new range that he's establishing and the momentum that he hopes to start with his participation in the tour as a host in terms of developing a training community there. So we encourage you guys to get in touch with us if you're interested in hosting an event in the 2013 training tour, make sure you get in touch with us soon. Meanwhile, this week Alissandro Padovani was running a course as part of the tour over in Italy. We're gonna see some video footage from that. Alessandro is a great instructor, and he has been spreading the word, not only here in the United States but also over in Europe, about combat-focused shooting and now the Personal Defense Network also.

We also had Dr. Robert Smith, one of our early contributors to the Personal Defense Network. Robert Smith and I have known each other for a number of years. He's a medical doctor with an active practice, he spends a lot of time actually working with law enforcement in Louisiana also. And he's a member of two different special response teams as their tactical medic.

And he's also quite an established shooter himself as well. He takes tactical medicine and the way we think about the human body as part of our fighting system to a whole new level. And he got to run a course that was hosted by 10X out in California, and we're gonna hear from not only him, but also a couple of the students that took that course as well. So, while I'm here in Ohio, we've got other instructors out on the tour. I'll be teaching again next week, and this weekend I'm heading up to New England for the NE Shooters Tactical Training Conference.

I'm sure to have some footage for that in our week four update. What's up guys, Mike Dasargo with 10X Defense here with Dr. Smith of Direct Action Medical Network for the Personal Defense Network Tour. What do you feel is important for shooters to know about tactical medicine, strategic medicine and operational medicine? How does that differentiate?

Yeah, I think the most important thing for shooters to understand is that the equipment that you use are just the tools. The weapons system is who you are and what you do and how you move and what you eat, what you read, those kinds of things. You're the weapons system. Dan has brought forward the idea of the human weapon system and everything else is just tools. And I think that's one of the things that we try to stress and that PDN has helped us put out and put forward that it's the human weapon system.

That makes sense. Now, I hear a lot of times that tools are an extension of a human body. And a lot of times when I see shooters we become slaves to that tool, to the firearm where we're trying to maneuver around them. What you've done is enhanced the human body to actually be able to properly use a rifle based on human mobility. Well, sure.

And I want to be real clear. I haven't done anything here. All I've done is I've prepped it so it's a little bit more palatable for people to consume and for them to have, maybe a paradigm shift of, hey you know what, this is just a tool. When it runs out of ammo it becomes a club or a stick or something like that. And that the way that you fight is, the first thing to do is decide what you are fighting for.

And the second thing you do is train yourself to accomplish that. And once a person does that, everything else just becomes a tool to advance that commitment. Mike Dasargo here, 10X Defense armed professionals division coach. And I just participated in Dr. Robert Smith's Operational Medicine class from Direct Action Medical Network.

To try to sum it up as simply as I can with my experience with Dr. Smith I'd sum it up with one word. And that is profound. We've started with operational medicine. He was able to define everything from strategic medicine as it differentiates with tactical medicine as well.

But one of the key elements is here is a guy who has a doctorate degree, is a physician. So it comes from a collegiate culture of evidence-based science, but he's able to keep his mind open enough to take experiences and teach through his stories and his anecdotal evidence of what has worked in the field and the lessons learned in the field and being able to adapt and connect the dots from things that you don't think have anything in relationship at all. When we're talking, we think medicine and we're thinking about firearms and we're warming up with stances. We're warming up with lunges and yoga stretches and exercise. We hit the range.

And now all of a sudden we have more mobility. Our performance is enhanced. And the greatest thing I liked about it is at the very end, we started with the body and we were working and he's able to really unlock our perception of how we train and how we learn. This will change your outlook on how you perform as a medic or any medical professional in a dynamic world.