US population

50.5% women
34% over 50
37.9% of men are obese
41.1% of women are obese
26% of adults have a disability

44.7% of all make LESS than $30k annually

You may think you’re the dude on the right. -Genetically gifted, young, fit, rich and connected.

Most of us have more in common with the dude on the left (Ephialtes).

If you ARE the dude on the right, you should understand that the majority of people aren’t you and recognize the gear you use is ridiculous for others that are not Spartan kings like yourselves.

If you are closer to the dude on the left you should give up the cringeworthy and phony warrior-king persona and live the life you are capable of. Adopt gear that best suits your reality/mission/capabilities.

Don’t train because you want to feel like a Spartan. Train because you take responsibility for the safety of your loved ones and yourself. That is SO much more badass.

Don’t carry a shield you can’t lift, or a gun you can’t afford to shoot often, or one you can’t carry always, or one you can’t run single handed while injured.

Also- I’m really against the romanticized Spartan/mOLAn lAaBE/sheepdog/gun stickers on my everything nonsense that is so widespread in the ‘defense community’.

Don’t be the phony on the left pretending to be a Spartan. Don’t be the jerk on the right telling others they can’t defend themselves unless they carry X.

Why do I carry a 22 snub revolver?

While the LCR22 has 160% capacity of a 38 snub, I feel the LCR22 is more than double the capability of the 38 or 357 snub as a fighting gun and defense tool.

While my best drill scores with the 22 are similar to the best scores from the 38, the lcr22 was a giant step up when comparing my worst runs across both guns.

This is highlighted even more when I compare my worst runs to my preferred semi auto. The recoilless DAO snub runs for me even when I’m screwing it all up.

And that’s really what we should look at.

How do we do on our worst day?

What setup mitigates the most commonly encountered problems best?

What gear allows the biggest lapses in our ability?

Because we aren’t betting our lives on our performance on our best days.

What gun do I want when I’m halfway beaten to death, concussed, broken and blinded?

…I may be in that condition at my first opportunity to access my gun.

I’m accused of being a freak of nature or ‘naturally gifted’ by people who try to paint the things I teach as something impossible for the average person. I’m quite the opposite and I am acutely aware of my ability to fuck-up very simple things. My carry gear and practices reflect this.

Choose a gun so small and light I have no excuse not to carry it.

Choose a carry method so concealed that to expose the gun would require removing my pants so I need not worry as much about a shirt riding up, a hug from a child, or bump grabs from a predator.

Choose a caliber so manageable that I can fire with a single injured hand with an incomplete grip in a dazed semi-conscious state.

Choose a gun so simple in operation as to not need to divide my training time among less likely scenarios like malfunction clearance drills.

If it is good in that losing fight, odds are good it will be just fine in better circumstances.

Diagnostics day. Isolate the suck and eliminate it.

All iterations should be recorded for 10 rep average.

Tactile (No eyes. No sights. No target)

This is best done with a phone app shot timer that can pick up a dry fire click. I use Make Ready.

• Reaction time
  • From full presentation.
  • From strong hand only presentation
    • On beep, trigger press
      • Average: 0.3sec
      • Elite: 0.2sec

*I was running this at 0.2-0.25sec a few years ago. This morning, 4AM with a half cup of coffee onboard, the best I could manage was 0.31sec. That is important when considering total presentation time. I was managing C-zone hits at 7yd from concealment in 0.81sec this week. Assuming my reaction time was the same as this morning, 37% of my draw time is spent realizing that it is time to start moving.

• Draw
  •  Thumb pectoral
    • Without concealment garment
    • From concealment
  • Single Hand Presentation
    • Without concealment garment
    • From concealment
  • Full Presentation
    • Without concealment garment
    • From concealment

*there is no measurable difference for me between any of these with concealment. This means that managing the concealment garment is no longer a time-adding factor. There is only 0.1sec time savings to draw to a thumb pectoral index over single or full presentations. My average time is 0.7sec for single hand and full presentation. This means that on a 1sec draw to COM-A (center of mass, a zone), 30% of the time is spent strictly on seeing/deciding when to press the trigger. If you watch my slow motion footage here it is painfully visible.

Visual (No click. No draw. No cheating)

This is best done with a phone app shot timer using short par times. You must know the length of the beep. Mine is 0.3sec on the Make Ready app. This part is all visual. We are setting par times and reducing them until the beep happens before we can reliably complete the drill.

Sighting Time

• Gross Sighting
  • From compressed ready facing target
  • From full presentation, eyes on sights 90 degrees from target
    • On beep, achieve sight picture necessary to achieve C zone @5yd
      • Reduce par time until you fail.
• Precision Sighting
  • From compressed ready facing target
  • From full presentation, eyes on sights 90 degrees from target
    • On beep, achieve sight picture necessary to achieve hit on 4” square @5yd
      • Reduce par time until you fail.

*There is a large (and growing) gap in my gross and precision sighting. This is no surprise to me as my prescription eyewear is getting thicker. It takes me an additional half second or so to achieve a sight picture with the iron sights on my LCR. This time is reduced significantly when using any red dot sight and even more when using a green laser. For gear selection alone, this drill is worthwhile to establish realistic time expectations.

Summary

Of the 1 second it takes to draw to a COM-A hit:

• 37% is used to start moving
• 30% is used to start shooting
• that leaves 33% of total time for ALL of the doing

Seeing that breakdown has shifted my focus to processing information faster. For improvement on the initial shot, my efforts are better spent on computer speed games than on live fire reps. These exercises may reveal something very different for you.

Test it. Quantify the suck. Eliminate it. 

More to come.

Controlling recoil is no different than controlling a sparring partner. If the opponent is weaker than you, no special technique is necessary. Strength and driving power will defeat that opponent with application of any technique.

Things change when the strikes delivered by your opponent are enough to cause you physical injury or immediate loss of consciousness. These strikes exist in boxing opponents and in shooting platforms.

When blocking a cross thrown from a boxer, if the punch strikes harder than can be controlled by simple grip (checking the punch) then a fighter must brace for the impact and receive the force over as broad a surface as possible. Part of this requires distributing force over the largest surface area on the body as possible (example: taking a punch meant for the jaw on a curled blocking arm instead). Another part is distributing that force as rapidly as it is applied. For the boxer and for the shooter managing stout recoil, this means bracing for impact in a way that immediately and efficiently channels and distributes forces in the largest muscle bearing joints, across as many of those joints as possible, simultaneously.

Unremarkably, the muscles, tensioning pattern, and strength involved in a shooter using a clinch technique to manage recoil are the same as a fighter clinching and blocking a roundhouse kick to the head. The body squares to the epicenter of the strike, stiffens at the most delicate joints (wrists and elbows) without locking. The muscles of the torso, torque and torsion; maximizing clamp load in the body. Back and core muscles meet each other in mutual tension against each other. This pairs with a small but extremely muscularly reinforced drive of the shoulder and pectoral muscles into each other, creating an upper body that is muscularly locked and collapsed in neutral joint space.

We must create structure that is stiff and unyielding to minor shocks, but results in a structure that is excellent at accepting and diffusing high impulse impacts- like that of a Thai boxer’s roundhouse, or the recoil of a heavy 12ga load. A fighter receiving a kick while clinching in this manner may look nearly stationary during the event and may not show much give or acceptance of energies in that blow, until you look at the event on a high speed camera.

Viewing the event in slow motion reveals the magic of the clench technique. As the blow impacts the curled arm, the tissue of the arm, rigid from being flexed, starts to absorb energy, robbing the strike of velocity and snap before the striking surface of the kick (opponents shin) meets bones on the blocking surface. As the shin drives deeper into the blocking surfaces, the radius, ulna and humerus collapse into each other, arms collapse into chest, structures bolstered by pre-tensioned muscle tissues connected to those structures. Massive muscles of the shoulder receive energy and channel it into the large supporting structures of the chest and back, finally distributing it down the torso. What you see at speed is a massive energy transfer at the blocking surface, diminished into the slightest of rearward travel at the base, resulting in a small shuffle rearward.

It is important to understand that this type of energy transference is happening across these structures simultaneously, rather than sequentially. Clenched muscle tension is vital to making this work, as only a tensed structure transfers energy fast enough to recruit surrounding structures in absorbing extremely short duration, high intensity, shock energy like that of a whipped roundhouse kick… or a trigger press delivering 00buck.

This isn’t all of the recoil management process, but without this, the rest is of little worth.

I’ll save discussing the use of sequential sacrificial structures in recoil mitigation for another post where I will draw comparison between highway barricades or runaway truck ramps and the standard method of recoil mitigation in shotgun technique.

I’m often asked ‘how much training is enough?’

Popular answers vary little. Most include some variation on the ideas that no amount is enough to stop, or any amount that you can afford is the minimum. Great. Thanks for that. Throw my life at every single thing I do. Got it.

Thing is, as a great urban sage once uttered, ‘ain’t nobody got time for that’.

Those are great paths to aimless mediocrity.

What else is wrong with those commonly spouted responses?

I’m not a fan of such nebulous answers. When I ask a question I want something more definite. I want something that is quantitatively measured. While the answer to this question is certainly not a single number of hours or classes that every person should strive for, I believe there is a way to quantify the amount of training necessary to put you in the ‘better than most who try’ category, which is where we ought to be (at minimum) in any task we want to be good at.

The terms generic training, fundamentals training, or basic training all express a similar idea at their root. They teach the mass of skills that are applicable in MOST situations, making the focus mastery of the concepts and repetition of a base set of drills to the point of diminishing returns.

The upper end of this point can always be measured as an average of experts ability on any of the standardized drills used to teach and quantify performance on a set of standards.

The lower end of the diminishing returns threshold is the point at which any individual first experiences the drop off in training returns. All of us owe it to ourselves to train to THIS point in anything we endeavor to do well in life. Anything before this point is generally ‘below average’ amongst peers who are endeavoring to master the same skill set. In other words, anything before this point is dabbling- not training.

So there it is- simply defined. How much should you train? Always train beyond the point of quantifiable diminishing returns. Next, train to the accepted experts level of diminishing returns using their standards and measurement criteria.

How do you know the experts level of diminishing returns? Simple. Find the lowest acceptable performance in any metric for professional performance. It may be a failure rate. It might be a speed and accuracy standard that is agreed upon by multiple experts (like the sub 1 second draw at a 7yd COM A). It will ALWAYS be measured quantitatively- pass/fail or a numerically expressed score.

Approaching performance at that level should always focus on the area with the lowest hanging fruit. Attack the parts of your desired skill that have the easiest gains. Attack the parts that give you the largest gains. If you can clean a B8 drill every time, but can’t ever stick a 1 second draw at any distance, you are doing it WRONG. Analyze your performance framed by your goals, focus on one area, and drill it until it is a strength. Reassess. Repeat.

The focus, for the vast majority of tasks, should always remain in fundamentals training. Specialized training has a time and a place that it should be considered and approached. That time is AFTER achieving an experts level of diminishing returns on fundamentals, and/or AFTER reaching a point where mastery of a specialized skill set becomes more important than the fundamentals.

If you are a breacher and carry a shotgun as a breaching tool, it may be more important to master the specialty training of shotgun breaching before or alongside the journey to mastering general shotgun proficiency. If you are not in this role, dedicating precious mental facilities to accomplishing a task that will likely never be needed from you is at best a waste of time and at worst a deadly distraction that puts you further from skills mastery that could have saved your life.

In short, drive to achieve standards of fundamental skills set by the experts. Let ‘good enough’ be determined by performance on quantitatively measured tests and drills.

Think about it. You know plenty of idiots that graduated the same school you did. They did the same training. What is important is your scores in comparison to the best. Not the amount of time spent at study or the place that you learned.

Train yourself to the point of diminishing returns. Teach yourself how to learn. Then, identify your weak points (still talking fundamentals here). Seek training from an expert who does well in addressing THOSE weak points.

If you can’t approach ANY task and train yourself to the point of general novice understanding, with the use of Google, THAT is your weak point. No amount of classes will help you, because you don’t know how to learn. Most people can train themselves far beyond novice levels of performance in any task without any formal training. The internet has really changed the game in self teaching. Use it. Get as much as you can on your own first. By doing so, you’ll get much more out of the professional training that you seek, and you will likely find better instructors for that teaching.

Get as much as you can by yourself. Know what you want before you seek instruction. Get the best instruction for the skill you are focused on. Quantify your goals and gains. Live in the land of diminishing returns.