Hoffner Training

[bubba04]

I did search on here for Brian Hoffner but didnt find much.

Has anyone taking any of his training courses or know of anyone that has been through them? If so what did yall think?

He does a lot of training close to home so that makes it a plus.

http://www.hoffners.com/info.htm

thanks.

[gringop]

His credentials page has a pic of him holding a gun with a knife in his support hand.
http://www.hoffners.com/about.htm

That combined with the description of his "Sights on Slack out" fighting system would keep me from ever taking him seriously.

But who knows? Take a class and let us know how it is.

Gringop

[Magsz]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_0Ry...embedded#at=24

Gar...

The guy might have a wonderful training curriculum but WHY do people have to sink to these lows just to make a buck?

Stuff like this shows a marked lack of judgement...

[ucrt]

.

FWIW

My nephew is in MARSOC and is overseas. 6 or 7 weeks ago, he asked for me to send him some "Frog Lube". The only place that would answer their phone and had Frog Lube in stock was Hoffners.

I told the girl that answered the phone it was for my nephew in the USMC. She said, "No problem. We'll ship it for free." She offered to drop ship it to him but I told her my nephew also requested coloring books, toys, clothes for the extremely poor local kids around where he is stationed. So, I asked her to just ship it to my home and we would just add it with the other stuff we were shipping to him.

She told me she had some kids clothes that she would send to me, too, so I could ship to him. Well, Hoffner's sent 3 huge boxes for free of kid's clothes to my house with the Frog Lube. I'll bet the shipping was $50+.
We repacked everything and shipped it to my nephew. We haven't heard back from him yet.

So, I don't know about their training but I can attest that Hoffner's heart seems to be in the right place. God Bless 'em!

Personally, I would call and talk to them and do some more investigating. They might have a list of references you could check out??

But maybe it's just me...

.

[ranburr]

Brian is a good guy. I don't agree with everything he teaches, but all in all he is considered to be a good instructor. He does put on an excellent shotgun course that ranks up with the best out there. His background is primarily as a long time HPD instructor. He holds most of his courses out at The Impact Zone. On the plus side, he is local and convenient. On the downside, he charges as much as the top guys in the industry. I would say give one of his classes a try and see how you think he compares with other instructors. If you are new to training I will tell you that he has a rabid local following of students who start with him and wind up sticking with him. I consider him better than many instructors (by far the best local source), but not as good as the top tier national instructors. You may want to check out the Impact Zone's website (they regularly bring in top talent to teach courses).

[Shadow1198]

I took one of his pistol courses last year. There were a number of techniques taught which I disagree with, have tried, and which I personally do not choose to use. They are stuck on doing the slide pinch sling shot method for racking the slide and clearing malfunctions, which IMO is not robust and really just makes things harder than they have to be. Regardless, I gave it an honest try to do my due diligence and not be "that guy" in class. Despite all of this, honestly, I had a good time in the class. Brian as well as some of his AI's were decent instructors and made the class fun. The one thing that I think they did an excellent job with is the first several hours of the class were in the classroom and entirely focused on mindset and trying to break people out of their shell to think more defensive/offensive. The thing that stood out most in my mind was I saw a steady and decent amount of progression from all of the shooters (many were fairly inexperienced) from beginning to end. I also didn't see a single major safety violation.

Would I recommend the class? For newer shooters, yes, though it wouldn't be my first choice. I fully trust Hoffner's to train a new shooter to be safe and relatively effective with mostly modern techniques. They may not learn the most effective techniques, but it will at least get a newer shooter ~80-90% of the way there. As always, no one instructor has all the answers, so I always recommend cross training with as many different ones as you can. That being said, if someone has already been to a class from Vickers, Hackathorn, USTC, Paul Howe, or any others of that caliber, then you're probably not going to take away much from a Hoffner's course. If you're relatively new and don't have much in the way of formal training, Hoffner's is a great way to get started, I would just try not to get caught up in the "cult of techniques" that they tend to push.

Here's a few vids I took from the event. Man I sucked it up in this class, dehydrated, didn't eat enough food, changed parts on my gun without practicing with them....blah, blah, blah. Bottom line, eat and drink enough for any class if you want to get the most out of it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgBQ1IhxJBg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIwedNlI7CY