Firearms skills is the only physical skill that I know of that is sold as something that can be taught in an 8-hour class. By the end of the day, depending on your learning ability, you will be shooting relatively well or even better than you thought you could. However, after 24 hours, a majority of that end-of-day performance will have vanished. Why? Because that is just how the human brain operates when it is exposed to a new physical skill. Sorry, but you will not just be able to shake off the rust in 10 years just because you took a particular class with someone who made you feel good about yourself for $300. My aim in this article is to expose you to the complexity of learning how to shoot. Even getting to the point of being ‘good enough’ will be trivial and difficult. PHYSICAL SKILLS ARE LIKE MUSCLES Every physical skill we learn is like a muscle. Every time you use that skill, those neural connections get used and exercised, to a degree. How much that skill develops depends on time and intensity, just like a muscle. If you want to grow your muscles, you have to physically demand more from them on a frequent basis. Going to the gym for the first time for several hours may have your muscles looking a bit pumped at the end (just like how you may shoot well after an 8-hour course), but this is temporary and your muscles will go back to their flabby appearance within 24 hours. Permanent growth takes time, and it is not done in a day (or in an 8-hour course). On top of that, reading a book or watching a video about exercising is not going to make your muscles grow, and neither is it going to help you develop a skill like shooting. You can take some ideas from what you see and read, but then it is on you to physically DO those things. Sorry, but shortcuts in skills development don’t exist. It isn’t like you can just download information and physical skills like in the Matrix or take a pill like in Limitless (Ha, if only). Shooting, like bodybuilding, is not intuitive/natural or used in most daily life, so we must practice it on a frequent basis in order to develop it. And having an expensive gun will not make you a better shooter any more than expensive clothes will make your muscles grow. Drugs (Testosterone, steroids) may help physique in the short term (long term use destroys your Endocrine system), but there are very few equivalents for physical skill development. PROCEDURAL LEARNING One of the methods used to establish a long-term physical skill is procedural learning (cognitive, associative, autonomous). This has been hailed as one of the more effective methods, and is almost perfect for developing the basic shooting skills. Shooting is an umbrella term that incorporates many different skills such as the draw (open or concealed), reload (speed/emergency and top off), malfunction clearing (type 1, 2, and 3), firing process (grip, stance, sight picture, trigger), and all the safety rules. All these skills require practice, practice, practice, and are best learned through the procedural learning phases, which are impossible to be taught in a day. In fact, there is no definitive time that can be given since skill development in each phase is based on whether you have gotten to a level of unconscious competence. This means you get to the point where you don’t have to think about what to do anymore and it just becomes automatic. This can realistically take months or even years to complete a cycle, depending on your commitment. The first step is the cognitive phase. This phase requires following the process to the letter and thinking about each part of the process. Whether you are tweaking a known skill, or learning something new, procedural learning is going to be essential as it lays out the process you must follow to achieve a desired result. Start out with slow, exact, intentional movements. It will be almost robotic at first, but will smooth out over time. At first, you may need to write down the process and read as you go. Drawing from a holster is a good example of this. When you are in a class, most shooting classes will break down the draw into 4 or 5 steps. The aim is to give you a procedure to follow and make it easier to remember the steps. Speed can be increased as the process becomes easier to follow, but you shouldn’t toss the procedure and just “see how you do” after you do a couple of reps. Consciously run through the steps every time, but just try to run through them faster and faster. The cognitive phase is not a check in the box, but rather as a way of gauging your skill development. You will know that you are ready to move on when you have reached a level of skill where you don’t need to think about the process in order to do it right. It doesn’t necessarily mean you are the fastest gun in the West, but you are at the point where the process feels natural and flows smoothly. The second phase is the associative phase. This is where you start attaching initiation and response/reaction stimuli. In a nutshell, this phase is where you start learning WHEN to initiate the learned skill. This is where people learn to draw when they see a gun on a target or when they hear a shot timer beep. Since self-defense situations are mostly based on what you see, force-on-force training is the closest you will get to realistic associative stimuli for lawful drawing of a firearm. Reloading fast is a shooting skill that makes its money in the associative phase. You start out learning the steps of the reload through the cognitive phase, but detecting when the gun is empty makes a big difference. This is because you are ideally supposed to REACT to the feeling of the last round fired or seeing the slide/bolt locked to the rear. The final phase is the autonomous/procedural phase. This is where you will be training to apply this skill while distracted/multi-tasking, such as draw/reload on the move. Another way to think about this is training to become unconsciously competent. This is really where practical application starts. This doesn’t mean you are John Wick, but it means you are at that point where you can test and refine certain skills. This is where shoot/no shoot scenarios, timed circuits, and mental math come in. You can identify your initiators and complete the process almost subconsciously and despite distraction. You are able to apply the skill correctly and unconsciously while calculating and adjusting for the dynamics of the situation and/or environment. CHANGING A LEARNED SKILL The three phases I just shared with you are not a one-and-done thing. Think of these three phases as a continuous cycle or loop. Every time you want to add a change to one of your skills, you will have to repeat the cycle, and it will take much longer to complete. It is extremely hard to rewire your brain and change how you conduct a specific skill. The cognitive and associative phases will need to be trained with intense detail and repetition in order to get it to stick. It isn’t impossible, but it requires deliberate repetition, time, and patience (not quite a 21st century American quality). This is why it is easier to train a new shooter how to shoot a certain way than it is to train an experienced shooter. We all pick up habits over the years, good or bad and sometimes we want to change them. Think about eating habits or habitual swearing. You’d have to consciously focus on every word you say before you say it. No doubt, this would make you feel at first like you are going TOO slow to function and communicate. But with time and repetition, controlling your language in communication will start to ‘flow’ as if normal. Let's go back to the muscle analogy for a minute. If you conduct pullups with poor form or without full range of motion for months or even years, your body will adapt to that and it will become normal. You may become very good at those types of squirming, jumping, kicking, incomplete pullups. Perhaps you can do 30 of them after doing them for months. Lets say you see a tip one day in a video, on how to do proper pullup and you want to follow the tip. In order to change your form for a proper pullup, it will require relearning proper and deliberate form to make it a habit to do pullups the right way. It will require a spotter to point out when you are using good form and it will cause you to feel like you have lost gains. This is because your body will have to build different muscles and get used to the procedure. Now as you start with this new form, you can't even do 5 correct pullups and it burns you out after a few sets. But over time it becomes increasingly easier and you eventually don't even have to think about HOW to do a proper pullup because it is a habit to do it right. This is what it is like to change a learned physical skill. Not impossible, but it will be like going back to kindergarten and getting training wheels again. But if you put your head down and trust the process, it will be over before you know it. TYPING AS AN EXAMPLE I am writing this article using the typing skills that I learned in a Middle school class. That class went on for an hour a day for months. We started off with screen-led drills for hitting every key and then went on to typing three letter words as fast as possible. As you got faster at this, you progressed to 4, 5, 10 letter words. Next it was sentences like “I found a hat” and other simple/dry sentences. Then came punctuation and capitalization, etc. Then we would have to type a prewritten paragraph for time and that is how we were tested daily. Our grade was based on our words per minute and accuracy (lack of mistakes). In addition to this class, I had to type up essays on my home computer for other classes, which helped me a bit. I continued to get practice through the rest of my schooling whenever we were required to type up an essay. This was before the days of everyone having a phone, so it was still somewhat of a luxury at that time. After graduating High School and going into the military, I rarely used my typing skills. After getting out, I got into blogs and writing about guns. That is when I noticed that the skill was a bit atrophied and needed to be practiced in order to get me back to typing with less mistakes or needing to look at the keyboard. I didn’t lose the skill entirely, but it was really difficult for me to “shake off the dust” and type fast or for longer periods, as I was able to do before I joined the military. The skill faded and had to be reacquired. I still am not all that fast at typing, even with all the typing I do for these articles. I would have to literally relearn how to type all over again and get years of experience in a different foundation in order to improve how I type. IT GETS MUCH DEEPER
If this article is already heavy for you, I assure you that I have only shared with you the wavetops of this massive ocean. Physical skill development gets into the weeds and it is easy to get lost down certain rabbit holes, believe me. There are techniques, methods, exercises, and even dietary choices that can/will affect how fast/well you develop skills. When it comes to shooting, I will leave the complex neurological functions to authors like Dustin Salomon, Mike Ochsner, and Drew Estell (Baer Solutions) to explain. I just wanted to give you just enough information in layman’s terms to give you a respect for how complex it is to perform at a high level in shooting. If you get anything from this article, I hope it is that just getting to the point of being ‘good enough’ is time consuming, difficult, and short term.
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