good ol days of training over?

[SteyrAUG]

Serious answer - in virtually every class I get something. As other people have mentioned, I'll watch for the delivery of a drill or a tip or explaination.

Tom Givens is one of the best firearms trainers around. He and his wife Lynn have gone to Quantico multiple times to help train the FTU at the FBI academy. He makes an excellent point on why he goes and takes classes as a student every year. He's looking for new ways to teach a specific idea.

Gabe White was a house guest last year while teaching a class here in Texas. He gave me an idea on how to track my front sight during recoil that was simple and helped reduce my split time. Note - I do NOT worship at the altar of fast split times. But if I have to transition from a chest shot to the head, that tip is important. (Note: Some people are unimpressed when you shoot them in the chest. But connecting to the skull brings results, even if it's just temporary.)

Can you imagine how many people have worked with my poor dumb self to do that over my life? But Gabe gave me a lightbulb moment sitting on my couch drinking Bourbon.

Ernest Langdon helped me with recoil control. Spencer Keeper taught me a nugget about grip. Paul Sharp got me thinking about my pinkie strength. John Murphy showed me a tell on an opponent's draw stroke. Craig Douglas showed me a neat tip on double-edged blades. Chuck Haggard taught me a cool trick about pepper spray and baseball caps. Chris Fry about blade carry, Steve Tarani about improvised weapons, Cecil Burch about regaining your feet in a fight.

Wayne Dobbs, Darryl Bolke, Guy Schnitzler, Claude Werner, Hany Mahmoud, Gary Greco, Mark Fricke, Greg Ellifritz, John Farnam......I can go on and on about nuggets from dozens of teachers. All of those people are tremendous trainers that I have sought out multiple times. And I know I am leaving people out - sigh.

I have a habit of taking a beginner handgun class every year. I ain't showing off, and I keep my mouth shut and don't play Mr Know It All. I do it so I can run my carry gun with my weak hand.

I've been the weirdo in class running a S&W 686 L-Frame revolver and speedloaders. Why? Because if you put 17,000 rounds through a double-action revolver in a year of classes, guess what that does to your trigger control on a striker-fired pistol? The answer is you'll never pin a trigger again, and you'll be very fast and accurate. You'll also need to send the thing back to S&W for some warranty work - that was worth it.

There is always something to learn. You have to be a disciplined enough student to watch and learn.

Coming from Florida, you know that summer is usually break time. Very few trainers come to Texas in the summer, it's honestly dangerous to students. So from mid-June to early September, I'm not doing classes. I'm practicing the drills I learned in the first of the year. So it's basically three months of training - two month summer break - then four more months.

I hope that helped a little bit.

More power to you.

I guess if a person has time, money and opportunity. I get everything you are saying but to use an analogy there was a time in my martial arts journey where I was taking on 7 to 10 styles / systems at the same time and working with as many as 5 different instructors. But despite holding high rank in some and middle rank in others, I realized that no matter how good my teachers were I simply had too much on my plate and I was only advancing in my core systems and baby stepping everything else. On top of that I had a tendency to do "this in that class and that in this class" and it was sometimes a chore simply to keep it all organized in my head to say nothing of "available to me without thought."

So I had to back off, refocus on main systems and then add additional information in smaller bites and over longer periods of time so that I could more successfully incorporate it.

I have found the same to be true of firearms. Now tactics, strategies and things like that - even ideas that are new to me or simply presented in a different light I can usually incorporate right away.

But if you give me new methods such as a physical approach to a target, an alternate way to manipulate firearms or something else completely new and different then I need the training course to get a "nuts and bolts" understanding and then I need several months of being able to incorporate it into what I already do so that it become part of the greater whole. And I've had some very qualified guys who have tried to give me lots of new material and I had to do the same thing, I had to cherry pick the things that seemed most important or most easily incorporated into what I already had and then seriously had to revisit the rest of it several months later.

I like being exposed to new methods and concepts. I may never adopt a Costa hold on my rifle but seeing it done spins the wheels and I understand what they are doing and why and it makes me consider the ways I do things and if there are elements I wish to incorporate that I wasn't fully addressing and didn't even realize I wasn't fully addressing them.

I also know my limits, I'm dedicate but I'm not a sponge. I know guys who are a sponge, they can see it once and they have it. You can feed them material all day long and by the end of the day they can do it and sometimes even end up with a more efficient version of what they were just shown. Having seen more than a couple of those guys, I know that's not me.

But again, if I had greater time, money and opportunity I probably wouldn't be opposed to some deep immersion training even if I can't retain all of it.

[T2C]

I like the way Tom Givens thinks. Like other instructors, I will take a handgun, carbine or shotgun course once in a while to see if there is something I should be teaching or if there is a better way to teach the material. It's good to view things from the perspective of the student once in a while.

[taliv]

Serious answer - in virtually every class I get something. As other people have mentioned, I'll watch for the delivery of a drill or a tip or explaination.

Tom Givens is one of the best firearms trainers around. He and his wife Lynn have gone to Quantico multiple times to help train the FTU at the FBI academy. He makes an excellent point on why he goes and takes classes as a student every year. He's looking for new ways to teach a specific idea.

Gabe White was a house guest last year while teaching a class here in Texas. He gave me an idea on how to track my front sight during recoil that was simple and helped reduce my split time. Note - I do NOT worship at the altar of fast split times. But if I have to transition from a chest shot to the head, that tip is important. (Note: Some people are unimpressed when you shoot them in the chest. But connecting to the skull brings results, even if it's just temporary.)

Can you imagine how many people have worked with my poor dumb self to do that over my life? But Gabe gave me a lightbulb moment sitting on my couch drinking Bourbon.

Ernest Langdon helped me with recoil control. Spencer Keeper taught me a nugget about grip. Paul Sharp got me thinking about my pinkie strength. John Murphy showed me a tell on an opponent's draw stroke. Craig Douglas showed me a neat tip on double-edged blades. Chuck Haggard taught me a cool trick about pepper spray and baseball caps. Chris Fry about blade carry, Steve Tarani about improvised weapons, Cecil Burch about regaining your feet in a fight.

Wayne Dobbs, Darryl Bolke, Guy Schnitzler, Claude Werner, Hany Mahmoud, Gary Greco, Mark Fricke, Greg Ellifritz, John Farnam......I can go on and on about nuggets from dozens of teachers. All of those people are tremendous trainers that I have sought out multiple times. And I know I am leaving people out - sigh.

I have a habit of taking a beginner handgun class every year. I ain't showing off, and I keep my mouth shut and don't play Mr Know It All. I do it so I can run my carry gun with my weak hand.

I've been the weirdo in class running a S&W 686 L-Frame revolver and speedloaders. Why? Because if you put 17,000 rounds through a double-action revolver in a year of classes, guess what that does to your trigger control on a striker-fired pistol? The answer is you'll never pin a trigger again, and you'll be very fast and accurate. You'll also need to send the thing back to S&W for some warranty work - that was worth it.

There is always something to learn. You have to be a disciplined enough student to watch and learn.

Coming from Florida, you know that summer is usually break time. Very few trainers come to Texas in the summer, it's honestly dangerous to students. So from mid-June to early September, I'm not doing classes. I'm practicing the drills I learned in the first of the year. So it's basically three months of training - two month summer break - then four more months.

I hope that helped a little bit.

this illustrates why i often learn as much in class from other students as i do from the instructor