Mastery Or Versatility?

Think of all the physical skills you have learned over the span of your life to this point (hammering nails, throwing a baseball/football, doing tricks on a skateboard, shooting a bow, etc.) If you were to try to perform those skills after not doing them for a while, you’d find you have deteriorated in your ability to perform as you did when you actively focused on it (people call it being rusty). Even walking away from certain physical skills for a week will cause your brain to start overwriting these physical skills with others that you are CURRENTLY using. Your shooting skills work very much the same, and I dare say they are more vulnerable to being overwritten due to how precise your movements must be and how isolated the skills are from your normal day to day activities. On top of that, each platform (rifle, pistol, shotgun, revolver, muzzle loader) is going to require specific and unique physical coordination. Most people will struggle to maintain proficiency with multiple shooting platforms, let alone master a single one.

MASTERY ISN’T PERMANENT
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It sounds good to say that you are going to master something, but the amount of time needed just for mastery of one weapon requires almost complete immersion in that system. You will need to become dedicated to training your body to the point of religious pursuit. You will have to eat, sleep, and breathe that weapon system. Most people have a life that they want to live and that is all well and good. However, I would warn you that you cannot just say “I am only going to shoot my Glock 19 because that is what I want to master” and have mastery dropped at your door.
Mastery is a journey of trial and error, pain and sacrifice. You will have to sacrifice time with your family in order to develop mastery. You will have to sacrifice meals, friends, hobbies, money, comfort, and even sleep to develop skills with that weapon. This is how your brain is convinced to prioritize learning a skill. Stress and nauseating repetition must go together in order to get your brain to focus and promote the learning process. Mastery is a byproduct of obsession, in my opinion. And though you may spend years mastering your Glock 19, if you spend a month shooting a rifle/shotgun, your brain will start overwriting some of those physical skills you developed with that Glock 19. Sorry, but that is how your brain works. You will notice a degradation of skill and ability just from walking away from your routine practice for a short time. For this reason, some would ask what the point is in aiming at mastery, and not just getting good enough.

GOOD ENOUGH?
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HAHA, I have heard this so many times and said this myself. The amount of effort it takes to focus on a specific skill to the point of being “good enough” is roughly the same as the journey of mastery. Perhaps you chase a goal like being able to conduct some test within some time range. Say you get to that arbitrary time with your prized pistol and then call it good and move onto training with your prized rifle. A week later, if you run that same test again, you will likely not maintain that time standard you worked so hard to achieve, unless you constantly practiced between working with your rifle. You have to constantly revisit that set of skills to stave off the overwriting function.

WORK WITH YOUR BRAIN

If you track your training development, you will notice that maintaining skills requires specificity for a short amount of time on each skill. You won’t effectively do this by training in rifle, shotgun, and pistol skills all in one day. Nor will you succeed when training distance shooting, draws, malfunctions, and reloads for any of the weapons all in one day. 8 hour training courses produce good results at the end of class, but they are about as volatile as a fat kid on the first week of Keto. You won’t retain any of that performance. Most will be purged within 24 hours and your learning ability may even be scarred by the experience. Yes, your brain could literally forget how to do basic stuff like get a proper grip or even how to safely clear the pistol. Your best option is to literally write down everything you were taught like how to get a proper grip, complete with pictures. Next, list the courses of fire you did, what it is supposed to help with/test, how you performed, and why you performed that way (if you performed less than optimally the instructor may give you pointers for your notes). This will allow you to go home and start training in specificity with your notes as guidance. This is how you get your moneys worth from a course.
Training in specificity means training in little isolated skills. For example, a day of working the draw/presentation, a day of training trigger pull, a day of reloads, a day of malfunctions, and so on. Each day you will run tests on the skills you learned the previous day (without any warmup) before and after training the next skill.

INTERLEAVED TRAINING

During training, you will want to conduct periodic and randomized tests on yourself under time. This is called interleaved training and you should do this these tests on skills you tested only a day or so ago. This is one of the many ways the brain knows to hold onto physical skills. For example:
-Day 1:
Skill(s)- Pistol draw technique, presentation from high ready
No Test
-Day 2:
Skill(s)- Pistol Emergency Reload, Speed reload/Top off
Test- (Prior to training and after) Pistol draw (1.75 seconds from concealment/1 second from open)
-Day 3:
Skill(s)- Pistol Malfunctions
Test- (Prior to training and after) Pistol draw (1.75 seconds from concealment/1 second from open), Emergency reload (2.5 seconds from concealment/1.5 seconds from open)

As you can see, there is a time standard that you must perform under. You can perform the test 5 times each if you want to get more reps, but the original time needs to be recorded as the actual time (regardless of whatever mess up it was). Make sure you write down the date, drill, your time vs the required time, and where you think you can improve.

STILL NOT ENOUGH

Spending a week on your pistol like this is not going to be enough. It will build a solid base, but it will be temporary. Don’t get it twisted in your head or ego that good performance today equals you being “good enough”. Training with firearms is a never-ending process if you want to stay at any level of skill, much less make gains. Sorry, but shooting is a finely tuned orchestra of fine motor skills that are not replicated anywhere else in our daily lives. The amount of body control needed to quickly place your rounds exactly where you want them to go is greater than any other sport out there, so yeah, shooting at a low level is still going to be asking a lot of the brain, so train properly. Try to minimize the number of guns you are spending time with in order to better train with one and limit overwriting the skills in your own brain. It is a real thing, so be smarter than that. And no, training with a Glock 19 doesn’t set you up for learning the Glock 26. That is not how the brain learns or thinks, so don’t buy into that bro-science.