Ejh28
10-08-14, 17:09
Who Hosted: MDFI
Where: Post 46, Pinkney, MI
When: Oct.5 2014
Instructor: Keith Denman Co-owner of MDFI
Website: http://trainmdfi.com/
Cost: $150 & $20 range fee
Time: 10am-5pm
Weather: 50* & Overcast
Participants: 8 Students
Keith started the morning with the standard MDFI welcome; Medical brief, Course outline, reinforcing that the class is an “Ego Free Zone”, and letting everyone know that they can stop at any point if they are uncomfortable with the course of fire.
Then there was another MDFI staple; “The Humbler”. Depending on the class level it changes up a little bit, but for this class it was going out to 25yrds and doing strong hand only for 10 shots on an 8x10 steel plate. There was no time limit, but for the first drill on a chilly morning it earned its name (Yes, the cold is my excuse!).
Next up was getting everyone into the groove and warmed up, so we did a variety of standard drills from the holster, with multiple strings of fire to the body or head as called out by Keith. Once we were comfortable he pulled out a roll of painters tape and promptly covered up our sights. Fun stuff. We then started at the 3yrd line and practiced drawing and getting 3 hits to the body without using our sights, and stepping it back further and further until we stopped getting good hits. For different students it was different distances and you basically stopped when you were no longer confident in making the shot. Keith often talks about little Susie, and how every shot you don’t make hits her in the background. Those of us that pulled shots early went and jammed mags while the other guys finished up and taped targets.
We then moved into some close quarters work. Keith demonstrated shooting positions for being in close contact with a bad guy, and the correct way to score hits while keeping the gun up and running and away from the BG. We did it slowly at first until everyone was comfortable with the drill, then ran it at full speed for a couple runs. We then started up at the target and practiced moving backwards to get space to punch out the pistol towards the target, while getting hits throughout the backwards movement. Keith coined the term “fuildity” to describe the goal of the drill. We started at the target and drawing to position 2 and making hits, to stepping back to fire from position 3 then stepped back again to punch out and fully extend to position 4. We ran this drill moving backwards and forwards. While still covering contact shots Keith showed us several techniques to keep the gun in battery while engaged in a very close quarters fight and still get off shots, which I had never done before, and was quite surprised at how well they worked.
We hit lunch and came back to the range to runs some dry drills. We did some practice falls to demonstrate how to hit the ground correctly and be ready to fight and change directions to address the attacker(s). Then we buddied up and tried to get at our partner on the ground. We all got to scurry about on the ground and them we swapped and tried to get at the guy on the ground. After that we moved into fighting with a pistol from the ground, and practiced drawing so we didn’t flag ourselves and could quickly get rounds on target. When we got that down Keith moved us through the steps of getting up from the ground both while shooting, and simply getting to our feet while doing our scan and assesses at each level.
Then we moved on to everyone’s favorite part; Weak hand shooting! We ran a couple dry runs to practice drawing from our holsters with our weak hand, trying out a several of the methods Keith demonstrated. This took up a good portion of time since it was pretty rough for everyone, and we needed to do a lot of reps to get familiar with the different styles. Once we were running those drills mildly proficiently, we moved to single handed reloading, both strong and weak hands. Several reps later Keith started incorporating failures into the drills so we would have to clear them using methods that must have looked funny as hell to anyone watching, because they sure felt uncomfortable while I was doing them! It was a lot of information to process and it took several repetitions to get some semblance of a smooth single hand malfunction clearing drill down, it was a GREAT eye opener and learning experience.
To end the class Keith ran us through the world famous “Steve Fisher’s F you” failure drill, which is always fun, and even more great times when you’re doing it one handed. (sarcasm)
All in, this class is named correctly. It highlights everything that we all hate to practice, because we suck at it. Which is actually a really good reason to practice all of these things, and why I’m writing this AAR (So I can remember this stuff). I would recommend this class to everyone, but you NEED to take this class if you have a CPL. Learning how to problem solve your firearm in several potential real life scenarios is great training, so that if the occasion should ever happen, you don’t go into vapor lock and freeze up. Once you’ve been through this class you can say “Oh I know how to fix this now”. It was a great class with some great fellow students. I look forward to the next time I get to train with MDFI.
Where: Post 46, Pinkney, MI
When: Oct.5 2014
Instructor: Keith Denman Co-owner of MDFI
Website: http://trainmdfi.com/
Cost: $150 & $20 range fee
Time: 10am-5pm
Weather: 50* & Overcast
Participants: 8 Students
Keith started the morning with the standard MDFI welcome; Medical brief, Course outline, reinforcing that the class is an “Ego Free Zone”, and letting everyone know that they can stop at any point if they are uncomfortable with the course of fire.
Then there was another MDFI staple; “The Humbler”. Depending on the class level it changes up a little bit, but for this class it was going out to 25yrds and doing strong hand only for 10 shots on an 8x10 steel plate. There was no time limit, but for the first drill on a chilly morning it earned its name (Yes, the cold is my excuse!).
Next up was getting everyone into the groove and warmed up, so we did a variety of standard drills from the holster, with multiple strings of fire to the body or head as called out by Keith. Once we were comfortable he pulled out a roll of painters tape and promptly covered up our sights. Fun stuff. We then started at the 3yrd line and practiced drawing and getting 3 hits to the body without using our sights, and stepping it back further and further until we stopped getting good hits. For different students it was different distances and you basically stopped when you were no longer confident in making the shot. Keith often talks about little Susie, and how every shot you don’t make hits her in the background. Those of us that pulled shots early went and jammed mags while the other guys finished up and taped targets.
We then moved into some close quarters work. Keith demonstrated shooting positions for being in close contact with a bad guy, and the correct way to score hits while keeping the gun up and running and away from the BG. We did it slowly at first until everyone was comfortable with the drill, then ran it at full speed for a couple runs. We then started up at the target and practiced moving backwards to get space to punch out the pistol towards the target, while getting hits throughout the backwards movement. Keith coined the term “fuildity” to describe the goal of the drill. We started at the target and drawing to position 2 and making hits, to stepping back to fire from position 3 then stepped back again to punch out and fully extend to position 4. We ran this drill moving backwards and forwards. While still covering contact shots Keith showed us several techniques to keep the gun in battery while engaged in a very close quarters fight and still get off shots, which I had never done before, and was quite surprised at how well they worked.
We hit lunch and came back to the range to runs some dry drills. We did some practice falls to demonstrate how to hit the ground correctly and be ready to fight and change directions to address the attacker(s). Then we buddied up and tried to get at our partner on the ground. We all got to scurry about on the ground and them we swapped and tried to get at the guy on the ground. After that we moved into fighting with a pistol from the ground, and practiced drawing so we didn’t flag ourselves and could quickly get rounds on target. When we got that down Keith moved us through the steps of getting up from the ground both while shooting, and simply getting to our feet while doing our scan and assesses at each level.
Then we moved on to everyone’s favorite part; Weak hand shooting! We ran a couple dry runs to practice drawing from our holsters with our weak hand, trying out a several of the methods Keith demonstrated. This took up a good portion of time since it was pretty rough for everyone, and we needed to do a lot of reps to get familiar with the different styles. Once we were running those drills mildly proficiently, we moved to single handed reloading, both strong and weak hands. Several reps later Keith started incorporating failures into the drills so we would have to clear them using methods that must have looked funny as hell to anyone watching, because they sure felt uncomfortable while I was doing them! It was a lot of information to process and it took several repetitions to get some semblance of a smooth single hand malfunction clearing drill down, it was a GREAT eye opener and learning experience.
To end the class Keith ran us through the world famous “Steve Fisher’s F you” failure drill, which is always fun, and even more great times when you’re doing it one handed. (sarcasm)
All in, this class is named correctly. It highlights everything that we all hate to practice, because we suck at it. Which is actually a really good reason to practice all of these things, and why I’m writing this AAR (So I can remember this stuff). I would recommend this class to everyone, but you NEED to take this class if you have a CPL. Learning how to problem solve your firearm in several potential real life scenarios is great training, so that if the occasion should ever happen, you don’t go into vapor lock and freeze up. Once you’ve been through this class you can say “Oh I know how to fix this now”. It was a great class with some great fellow students. I look forward to the next time I get to train with MDFI.