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If it’s not relevant, why are you doing it?

If it’s not relevant, why are you doing it?

I’ve written before of the need to match the training you get and the equipment you use to the life you actually lead, not the life you fantasize about leading.

What does this mean? It means that if you’re training with a full-sized tricked-out autoloader on the weekends, but the majority of your waking hours are spent with a 5-shot revolver in a pocket holster, your training isn’t going to be congruent with your expected use. Training done under such false pretenses is of significantly lesser value than if you’re honest with yourself up front.

It’s a better use of your limited time, money and energy to train with the tools that you are most likely to be using, rather than picking training gear because it looks cool or because it’s what your instructor/guru uses or because it gives you an edge in the all-too-common class shoot-off.

Similarly, if your training event focuses on things like running through a shoot house taking out ‘tangos’ in various ‘hostage rescue’ scenarios, you’re not training realistically either. You wasted training resources that could better have been used to simulate the kinds of attacks that are likely to happen to you at work, at the gas station, or in your home.

Even if you’ve covered all those plausible scenarios, it’s still not a good use of your resources to train in ways that aren’t similar to your life. If you take a class in advanced hostage rescue team tactics, that class will use up resources that could have been used doing things like taking a course in how to deal with massive trauma (a skill far more likely to be needed even than drawing your gun) or in de-escalation techniques or even in defensive driving. Those are skills which are far more likely to be needed for events which are far more likely to happen to you (by at least an order of magnitude) than being faced with a jihadi-infested three-story building.

“All trigger time is good” is a fallacy. Poorly planned or selected trigger time keeps you from focusing on more plausible, and thus more important, skills.

Sherman House, a dental surgeon with whom I have a passing acquaintance, has made a similar pilgrimage from tactical silliness to reality. He recently penned an essay for the I.C.E. Training Journal where he discusses his evolution and what his training looks like today versus what it used to look like.

Great reading and very much recommended.

-=[ Grant ]=-

  • Posted by Grant Cunningham
  • On May 13, 2013

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