2013 PDN Training Tour: Update #1

Bravo! Middle! Up! All right I am still down here in Florida. This was the big kickoff week for the Personal Defense Network Tour 2013.

It has been a great week. We've got a couple of classes that were officially part of the tour. Two Combat Focus Shooting classes and one Introduction to Combat Focus shooting class at the Gander Mountain Academy in Lake Mary. We also had a School Attacker Response course that we slipped in on an open day over Easter weekend. We had 15 people in the room for that.

That was an instructor development course. So we certified some new instructors to help make teachers and students safer inside of worst case scenarios during schools. And we're gonna take a look at it. An important thing that you need to know about how to deal with practicing and developing your skills over time. It's called Front Loading your practice.

And it's something that was brought up in a question during a debrief at one of our first classes. The tour is just getting started. I'm headed up to Georgia for the second week of the tour. We're gonna continue up the East coast. If you haven't already checked the schedule, see if there's an open slot that you can join us on the 2013 Personal Defense Network training tour.

If someone is really interested, because most of the stuff's what I call perishable skills. If you don't do something to keep them going, you're gonna lose it. And we're often told when we're learning something as intricate as what we're doing today you know, you wanna be applying or working on this again fairly soon. Yep. So my question is, in order to maintain skills, what do you do you have anything that you consider as a minimum for regular training?

So everybody everyone has a limited amount of time, limited amount of budget, limited amount of interest right? Maybe access to a range, talk about range access. So everybody's got limited training resources to spend on training. So direct answer to is there a minimum? No.

It would be it would be facetious for me to say, there is you have to do this. You know it's not, I can't dictate to you that you must train in a certain amount of time. There's plenty of people who've never trained at all. And if successfully defended themselves with guns. Right?

The idea that there's a minimum isn't real. But what we do have is a recommendation for how you spend your resources. All right so there's a strong recommendation for how you spend your resources. So imagine that you've got, you know these, whatever this is six or seven, training sessions. This is called Front Loading your practice.

All right. Front Loading your practice. What we know is that when you've learned something new, these perishable skills as Harry said. When you learn something new, you don't want to wait a long time before you practice them. Right?

You want to get some practice and refresher for your brain and for your body, close to when you actually learned it. So that's what we call, Front Loading your practice. You just learned a whole bunch of things. Don't wait six months to go out and practice. Don't go take another course every month for the next six months learning new new and new and new and new, and then decide in August you're gonna practice.

You're gonna have a practice month in August. It's not gonna work. You will have lost all of this and you will essentially be relearning it if you wait a long time. So, you go out to the range in session one. And you learn the first thing.

Right you learn this first thing whatever it was. When you go back out to the range next time, don't try to learn something else new. Just practice that. All right practice thing number one. You go out to the range the third session.

And this again it's gonna be once per week, once per month, once per quarter, whatever your expenditure of training time and sessions are. So now I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna learn a new thing but I'm still practicing that first thing. I've learned thing two, but I'm still practicing thing one. I go back out to the range, I'm gonna practice thing two. And maybe I'm ready to evaluate my ability to apply thing number one.

Something like a figure eight drill. We call it the Evaluation of Your Ability to apply those skills you've been practicing. So I evaluate thing number one. And I find myself good to go. I'm happy right?

Like some of you guys on the figure eight drill found some things you weren't happy with. So you came back out and you worked on them. But some things you were happy with so you didn't focus on them as much. You were okay in some areas. So let's say that you were okay in thing one, we go back out the next time and we're gonna learn thing three.

We're still practicing thing two. The next time we go out, we're just gonna practice three, practice two. And then the next time we're gonna evaluate thing number two. We've had several practice sessions with it. And we're gonna practice thing number three.

Cause we just learned it not too long ago. And you know what? As a refresher, it's been a while. Let's practice thing one again too. Just to make sure that we still got that locked down.

Right? So thing one, we learned, we practiced, we practiced right away. We evaluated. Then we skipped it for a while. And then we throw it out back in, a couple of sessions few sessions later.

So that model is called Front Loading your practice. And that's what we recommend as far as how to follow up now. What do you do with this stuff? Don't let it just sit there on the shelf for months and months and months. As you practice it, you know make up make up a thing.

If you practice it once every two weeks for the next month and a half, once a month for the three months after that. Once a quarter for the year after that. And then a couple of times a year for the rest of your life. You know that's the path to owning the skills. As opposed to you know we have to practice once a week.

I don't even know what that means. Some weeks you can't practice. You know. Some people don't have the money, the time, the interest, the range access whatever. So this is how you should spend your resources.

Once you've learned something you wanna keep.