Firearms Accuracy and Basic Pistol Course Wellinghton, FL

Firearms are tools that give people the power to destroy at a distance. Firearms are inherently dangerous. Negligence and accidents can lead to permanent injuries, jail time, and possibly even death.
Treat every firearm Training as if it is loaded at all times, and don't point them at anything that you don't intend on destroyin g. Don't point them at a wall that may have something on the other side that you don't mind destroying. When you handle a firearm, YOU are responsible for everything that happens as a result, so get proper live training from a qualified instructor.
This book does not substitute for live training with a qualified instructor. It is meant to enhance and lock in the skills that you learn from live training. The author, publisher, editor, and talent for this book take no responsibility for what you do with firearms or what happens to you as a result of being around firearms.
If you don't think a particular activity is safe, or that you can safely do it, then don't do it.
Stay safe. Obey the law. Don't do careless things.

These tactics, techniques, and procedures are the very same ones that elite special operations units from around the globe, many with unlimited ammo budgets, use to train beginning and advanced tactics as well as maintain their edge.
Who else uses these tactics? Olympic athletes of all disciplines and competitive shooters, including the champion of Top Shot Season 3, Dustin Ellermannn, who you see on the cover and who graciously agreed to demonstrate the skills throughout.

Put that way, it sounds kind of silly, doesn't it? It may be silly, but it IS understandable. Let's say that you go out and buy a used Glock for $400 and you buy 1200 rounds of ammo to run through it for another $400. Spread that out over a year and it works out to 100 rounds a month...or just over $3o.

Not too bad, but most people who shoot will quickly tell you that this is not the only cost. To begin with, it's very difficult for most people who love shooting to ONLY shoot 100 rounds per month. You've also got to add in range fees, targets, cleaning supplies, gas, and time. Time to drive to the range, time to shoot, time to drive home, and time to clean your firearm.

And I don't know about you, but every time I pull the trigger, there's a little cash register bell ringing in my head reminding me how much my outing is costing...and there are times when it rings a lot because I really enjoy shooting. And, as I'm shooting and trying to keep my costs under control, I'm also trying to work on accuracy, my presentation, two handed, right hand, and left hand shooting, reloads, malfunctions, presentation from concealment, follow through, transitions between targets, stance, quickly acquiring my site picture, quickly reacquiring my site picture, short range shooting, long range shooting, one handed reloads, imagining scenarios, duck walking, cornering, low light, and more.

It's not easy to balance training 10-20 skills with the reality of time and money constraints, but that's exactly what we're going to talk about in this book. You see, I've mined through thousands of pages of research, go through multiple advanced firearms classes every year, and have interviewed some of the best firearms instructors in the country (many would say the world) to unearth proven techniques for improving firearms skills as quickly as possible while spending as little money as possible. As I did more and more research and spoke with more and more "operators" and trainers, they finally got through to me that some of the most effective firearms training techniques available were inexpensive or even free.

The Basic Pistol Course training techniques that I'm going to share with you have been proven over several decades by elite units such as the US Army Special Forces, US Navy Seals, Soviet and Russian Spetsnaz, GSG 9, British SAS, Detachment Delta & other SOCOM units, and Olympic gold medalists. They're used by professional and amateur competition shooters around the globe and, in many cases, they're the difference between first place and 5th or 6th place. Keep in mind that they don't use these techniques because of limited budgets—they use them because they're the absolute best training tools that they have available to them. Self Defense, Politics, and Training

One of the specific applications of this training is going to be training to use a firearm for personal protection. That involves shooting while moving, around barriers, switching hands, and possibly drawing from concealment...actions that are frowned at on most ranges. I'll show you how you can still effectively train for these scenarios without having to go to great expense.

In addition, as various city, state, and federal agencies continue on their anti-gun paths, it's likely that it will become more and more expensive and difficult to train to defend yourself and your family with a firearm. I'll show you how you can continue training, no matter how oppressive things get.

In fact, it's important to realize that your firearm is not your real weapon. Your weapon is your mind. Your firearm simply allows you to use your weapon (your mind) to focus your strike with more force and at a longer distance than you can strike with your hands or feet. Your mind is truly the foundation for being able to quickly and accurately put rounds on target. Shooting with weak mental skills is like building a house of straw. Shooting with strong mental skills is like building a stone fortress on top of a mountain.

With that in mind, we're going to start with the mental aspects of shooting first. A common saying among firearms trainers is that it takes 3000-5000 rounds to develop a new habit. Fortunately, this popular, often repeated number is specific enough that it's easy to find out where it came from. It comes from a textbook titled "Motor Learning and Performance" by Richard A. Schmidt that was published in 2004.

In it, what Schmidt actually says is that it takes 300-500 repetitions to develop a new motor skill and 3000-5000 repetitions to break a highly ingrained motor skill and replace it with a correct one. The good news is that if you have no ingrained skills or skills that have been practiced inconsistently, it will be easier to replace them with the skills you want to use when your life depends on it or even when you're just under extreme pressure to perform in a competitive situation.

Just to be clear, most people shoot inconsistently, so you'll PROBABLY be much closer to the 300-500 range than the 3000-5000 range—even if you've been shooting regularly for years. The other side of this high repetition argument comes from Ed Head at Gunsite. There is common belief that shooting is a perishable skill that you need to continually train or risk losing it. Ed is a world class instructor and has a different take on shooting being a perishable skill. He maintains that you can turn a perishable skill like shooting into a locked-in reflex after approximately 3000-5000 rounds of training.

If you carry that logic out, you'd want to run through 5000 rounds with your primary hand, secondary hand, and with both hands with perfect form as quickly as possible. You'd also want to do it with your sidearm, long gun, and shotgun for an ammo count somewhere north of 35,000 rounds. It SOUNDS intimidating, but it doesn't have to be.

So, what's the trick to breaking old habits and locking in new ones so that they will be your default response when your life depends on it without breaking the bank?

• Option 1: Join a SWAT unit or a Special Operations unit that gets paid to have LOTS of trigger time and free ammo.
• Option 2: Become a professional shooter and get free ammo from your sponsor.
• Option 3: "Cheat" by doing the majority of your training using low cost and free proven tactics that I'm going to share with you and using your live fire time to reinforce and lock in your skills. This shortcut method is not only the fastest possible way for you to become an expert shot with a firearm, it will also save you thousands of dollars and years of time in the process.

That being said, you'd better be VERY confident that your technique is the one that you want to learn, because after going through this series, that technique will be imprinted deeply in your subconscious mind and it will become your new "default" when you need to operate under stress.

There are 5 factors that will determine just how quickly your skill improves and how locked in the skills become:

1. The quality of the technique you practice. The old saying, "Garbage In Garbage Out" applies. If you practice bad technique enough times, you'll revert to it when you're under stress. If, on the other hand, you focus on practicing good technique, your default response under stress will be much better.
2. The consistency of the technique. I'm going to refer to this example frequently, so you might want to read it twice. I want you to envision two quarterbacks throwing 100 passes. The first quarterback focuses on speed and how fast he can get through his 100 throws. He ends up changing something with every throw...his stance, his balance, his grip, what he does with his off hand, the angle of his body to the target, his release, and his follow-through, etc. In looking at his wo passes, you see that he threw 100 different ways...but he did it really fast. Impressively fast.

The second quarterback takes his time and focuses on doing absolutely everything the same with every throw so that, at the end of wo passes, the video looks like the same footage spliced end-to-end wo times. (or 99 times for you fellow geeks reading this)

At the end of the loo throws, whose mind do you think has a more ingrained image of what a perfect throw feels like? Who do you think has developed more consistent muscle memory? Which one of them has a more solid base to unconsciously revert to under stress when there's barely enough time to react?

This second quarterback is the model that we want to copy by deciding on proper technique and using it every single time you practice. When the first quarterback's mind gets under stress and trys to throw a pass, it's going to be confused and it won't know which muscle sequence to fire.
3. Number of repetitions
4. Frequency of training: If you have the option of doing 5000 repetitions over one month or one year, you'll lock in the technique better if you do the repetitions in as little time as possible without sacrificing quality. While it's important to get the repetitions done quickly, the goal isn't to blast through them...the goal is to imprint perfect technique into your subconscious mind. That being said, remember to stop your practice sessions as soon as you're no longer able to execute the skills you're practicing with perfect form.
5. Speed of active shooter training : One of the experts that I consulted for this, Tim Larkin, had a career in Naval Intelligence and went through BUD/S (SEAL) training. Near the end of the training, he had a catastrophic eardrum rupture that prevented him from wearing the Trident. He told me about how SEALs were taught high speed firearms skills.
Surprisingly, they weren't given live ammo for the first two weeks. All they did was draw an empty firearm from their holster, aim it at their target, and squeeze until they heard the gun go "click." Then, they'd rack the slide, re-holster, and repeat. And repeat. And repeat. As Tim said, he'd been shooting all of his life, and felt like he was being treated like a child rather than the expert that he already was.

To make it worse, they made him go S L 0 W. And they made him do it perfectly every time. By the time they actually gave him ammo, he'd dry fired thousands of times...and he'd ingrained perfect technique deeply into his mind. His mind knew the exact sequence of micro movements necessary to perform a perfect shot and his mind was able to fire the sequence at any speed...slow OR fast.

This is the interesting part about how the training played out. The mind remembers the specific sequence of muscles to fire without remembering the speed. Saying it in a slightly different way, that means that once a technique is locked in by training at slow speed, it can be used at high speed under stress.

Back to the football example, if he would have trained fast, he would have had dozens, perhaps hundreds of sequences that his brain could have played back, leading to inconsistent results. But since he went slowly and focused on consistency, the sequence that he played back was the same every time. Quality, Consistency, Volume, Frequency & Speed. Remember them. They're going to be the keys to the kingdom of firearms accuracy.

A quick word on safety. No article, book, or course on firearms training would be complete without the attorney mandated warning not to do stupid things that hurt people. Specifically,

1. ALWAYS keep your firearm pointed in a safe direction
2. 2. ALWAYS keep your finger off the trigger until you're ready to shoot.
3. ALWAYS keep your firearm unloaded until ready to use. Keep in mind that these apply whether you're using a firearm that shoots bullets, BBs, lasers, or anything else.
4. 
   
   
   

Two of the biggest factors that they identified were grip strength and overall fitness. Above a certain point, grip strength does not continue to improve firearms accuracy, but if you have weak grip strength, strengthening it to where you have average to above average grip strength will have a dramatic positive effect on your accuracy.

Overall fitness is particularly important for people who carry their excess weight above the belt. The reason is simple physics. A proper shooting stance is an aggressive stance with the upper body slanted towards the direction of fire. Any extra belly weight ends up being out in front of the hips, pulling against the spine, either causing lower back fatigue or lower back pain when the muscles can no longer compensate for the weight.

This is one reason why it's normal to see overweight shooters standing straight up at the range and then leaning backwards as they slowly lose the battle against recoil on multiple shot drills.

This doesn't mean that you can't improve your firearms speed and accuracy if you have a weak grip and are overweight. I've been outshot by guys who are literally twice as heavy as I am in competition because they have made tremendous efforts to compensate for their weight. But for most people who are serious about improving their shooting; fitness and grip strength are force multipliers that can't be ignored. It's similar to hikers who will trim the laces on their shoes, cut all of the labels off of their gear, and cut their toothbrushes in half to cut weight but carry an extra 10-15 pounds around the waist. All of those little steps WILL help some, but making the fundamental step of losing the extra weight can cause a quantum leap in performance.