Let's get this straight right up front. You can't show up at the range to qualify or train expecting to perform well without having spent some time and effort on your own practicing. So too, you don't want to show up at the scene of a fight - fistfight or gunfight - expecting to win the encounter without practiced skill. Yet everyday in my career as a trainer I run into police officers and SWAT teams/operators that do that very thing. The results on the range or training scenario based on this mindset are bad; the street results are often catastrophic.
It Ain't Rocket Science
Late last year I had a conversation with a firearms instructor from another state about how a professional shooter of his acquaintance trained to be world champion. He told me that everyday this shooter arrived at the range with a five gallon bucket full of training ammo to put through his pistol. That's a lot of ammunition but this shooter dominated pistol and three-gun matches for years. It paid off; all that practice that is. Think about it: he was just engaging in competition. Think Tiger Woods only hits only one bucket of balls a day in practice?
Isolate the Skills
Here are some life-saving skills that would benefit from practice:
- Handcuffing
- The combat draw-stroke of your duty pistol
- The draw and loading of your tactical baton
- Accessing your Taser and/or chemical irritant spray
- Coordinating your duty pistol and flashlight in a solid stance
- "Running" your duty pistol
- Empty hand strikes and control holds
- Scanning your 360º environment
- Accessing the shotgun or carbine in your patrol vehicle
- Drawing your BUG (back-up gun)
- Getting your patrol duty knife out and open with your non-gun hand
- Handgun retention techniques
All of these physical motor skills and many more are important enough that you must be practiced in their performance.
Drilling
Drilling is the act of repeating the physical skills to gain competence. This is also called practice. Drilling follows a logical flow of movement, e.g. if the suspect (stimulus) does this you revert to Plan A. If Plan A fails, you go to Plan B, and so forth. In this way your practice programs the proper motor program as a response. You then lower your overall response time by identifying threat cues that initiate a pre-practiced response. Practice smoothes out your performance and allows you to flow that seemingly mythical state where you just respond as train with little to no conscious thought as to what you're doing.
Imagine a professional tennis player. With serves traveling over 100 mph if the player has to stop and think about his or her response, the ball is already past. Nuances are subconsciously processed by players that allow them to respond without thought with skills that they've long perfected.
Yet street cops move search buildings each day (and suspects for that matter) with skills and techniques that are severely lacking.
If we take that mythical close range, high intensity, low-light gunfight that statistics tell us is the average, are we practiced - have we drilled in the skills that will enable us to win (not just survive)?
Practice Time
There was a poster that I've seen in several police weight or workout rooms throughout the years. It's a photo of a very muscular subject in a prison uniform doing pulldowns on the lat machine. The captions says, Everyday that you don’t train, someone else does or similar.
Although free weights and machines have been removed from most federal and state prisons, it doesn't stop incarcerated inmates from working out hard via push-ups, pull-ups, crunches, dips and related body weight exercises.
Couple a well conditioned inmate or suspect on the street with violent intent and you're facing a formidable assailant. The armor that protects you is not limited to passive Aramid fiber body armor that you wear but is also composed of a steel will to win and a hardened body capable of inflicting intense violence.
You don't get there by annual or semi-annual visits to the range or by striking a kick bag once a year in in-service. It's constant mental and physical drilling in preparation for intense violence. What the when/then thought processes are to mental preparation, the skill practice (drilling) is to the physical.
Great rewards await you through the act of drilling. You harden your heart and body in the preparation for what one day may come. And the gold benefits accrued don't ever loose their value.
