Training in Context: Visualization

Here's another important video from the Personal Defense Network. When it comes to training in a normal shooting range area where you have a plain backstop and usually limited to some plain type of targets, visualization can be incredibly important. The truth is you can use visualization whether you're on a shooting range or not. Just sitting in a car and pulling up to a stop sign and visualizing what you might do if there were to be an attack or an assault to someone in your area, or if someone were to try to steal your car or hurt you in that spot, visualizing your response can go a long way towards helping you recognize the appropriate response at the moment the thing actually happened to you. Of course, make sure that your visualizations are plausible and make sense in the setting.

Make sure your visualizations of what you would do in response to that threat are also realistic. If you don't have a gun in the car, and you visualize yourself shooting someone who's trying to hurt you, the visualization not only doesn't make much sense, but also doesn't help you. So if I picture myself in, say, I was still in a law enforcement capacity and I wanted to so some training for shooting against someone who is maybe in an active shooter environment, or if I'm thinking about myself being in a public space and thinking of someone who comes around the corner at me with a submachine gun or something outrageous like that, where he was trying to victimize somebody in that school, hospital, shopping mall, whatever the public space may be, if all I do is shoot at this piece of paper, that's one level of training, and it's skills and isolation training, is what we call that, marksmanship shooting for putting holes in paper or cardboard or some other plain type of target. But to actually visualize a threat and to recognize it coming at me, and then go through an appropriate response, visualizing that threat stopping, assessing my environment, and knowing that it's okay to go back to that neutral position, whether I was then going to make a phone call or go to my loved ones or go to other people in the area and make sure they're okay, whatever I was going to do after having dealt with that threat in the public environment, that's the whole concept of what I want to visualize when I'm doing my tactical training. And of course, fundamental defensive pistol shooting is an important skill to develop.

Drawing from the holster, using your lateral movement, working well with what your body is going to do naturally during a startle response when you're scared and ambushed. All of that's very important, but once you've gotten all those fundamentals down, integrating visualization into your defensive training, whether with a firearm or without, is incredible important for your realistic preparation and your ability to recognize that which you have made yourself aware of. One thing that can help your visualization when you're actually on a square range is to use a reactive target. Something like this steel dropper target is a great way to increase the actual visual stimulation that's going on. Course, we can't simulate with this target someone attacking you, but you can get a very close approximation of someone going down in response to your defensive use of a firearm.

If you always shoot a pattern, if you shoot one shot, two shots, six shots every time you present on a perceived threat, you're going to end up shooting that pattern under stress. You're gonna revert back to what your training is. Instead, if you vary your training, combined with visualization or an actual stimulus that allows you to see a target going down, your training's gonna be more realistic and more applicable to the context of a defensive shooting situation. The way this target's set up, I don't know if it'll take one shot, two shots, or three shots, but I know that if it hasn't gone down, I need to keep shooting. For example, just because I heard the ding of steel, I came back into my ready position and stopped, that would be a bad visualization of a threat, bad realistic training.

We wanna train until the threat goes down. In this way, what we end up doing is understanding that it's going to be a stimulus from the threat that makes us stop shooting, or a stimulus from the target, in this case, on the training range. Visualization is vital to your realistic training. Check out more videos just like this one at the Personal Defense Network.