2014 PDN Training Tour Update 3/31

All right, the Personal Defense Network Training Tour has begun. We're coming to the end of the first week of the tour. I'm down here in Florida as I always am to start my cross country drive, and it's been a great week. We started with a reality-based Training Instructor Development course. Now this is a new course for I.C.E. Training company we just launched it in January and this was only the third iteration. Anytime you launch a new training program, I always say that the plan survives first contact with the student. The students are always going to bring questions that you didn't anticipate. They're going to pick things up faster than you maybe thought they would. And other things they're gonna struggle with. And you have to sort of massage the course content and the time allotments for each section of the course, to suit any given student body. And when you haven't taught any students with a new program, it's always interesting to see what you were right about and what you were completely wrong about. So in the first three iterations of this program, we've definitely learned a lot. One thing we've learned is that it's a long course. We anticipated one day of live training and then up to 20, 30 hours of distance education in order to get a certification, in running high-level scenario training. What we found out is that we're gonna go ahead and expand that course into a two day program. We've run three courses. We've had between eight and 12 students in each one. And every one of those days has been a 15 plus hour day. In fact the day that we ended on Saturday, went to about 1:00 am. So it was about a 17 hour training day. I think that's great. We're invested in the day anyway, the students got a lot out of it and their feedback was amazing. But what we've learned is we need one 12 hour day and probably one eight hour day after things have settled in process to give the students a chance to process the information come back and actually test for their certification. So we're going to be cutting the distance education and expanding the live in person training. Course that comes with an increase in price and an increase in time commitment from those students. But I think it's going to be well worth it. As an instructor it's important to understand when you come into a course and you want to teach it a certain way you need to be open to what the students really need, and to a certain extent what the students want, as that course grows and evolves. And that course has certainly has evolved early on in this training tour. The second course that we ran was the first Live Fire course and that was an Advanced Pistol Handling course here at Ancient City Range in St. Augustine. One of the first things we got to do, was take advantage of one of our sponsors, one of our demo guns, and let one of our students use this XDS four-inch model this single stack nine millimeter that holds seven plus one with the flush magazines, or nine plus one with the extended magazine, and happens to be augmented only with a claw rear sight, everything else on this is stock. This gun performed outstandingly. So what we did was we had a student whose gun wasn't quite fitting her hand, wasn't working for. She needed something that was not only going to fit her hand and allow her to perform, but also a gun that she could think about carrying in the future. And that's one of the great things about this single stack, nine millimeter XDS. So Springfield Armory has sent several guns out on the tour. This happens to be identical to the gun that I'm actually carrying right now for my own personal defense as a primary gun. And it worked great for her. So she got to use it. She probably put about, 600, 800 rounds through this gun. Of course we induced malfunctions in that class and we learn how to clear them, and this gun performed really well for her. So that was great. The Advanced Pistol Handling Class focuses on shooting in unorthodox positions and pistol handling issues like extreme precision. We were actually out on this range shooting at over a hundred yards on torso size steel with our handguns and at stand up right offhand position. Extreme precision on small targets and all the malfunction, one handed reloading, weak handed shooting, weak handed reloading, weak handed malfunctions that we can get into a two day class. So that's a great class, and this was a great way to kick off a first week of the Personal Defense Network Training Tour. Keep an eye on this webpage. We're going to be updating through social media, we'll be updating of course through YouTube and right here at the Personal Defense Network Training Tour page. Every week you're going to get a new report from me, from one of the other instructors on the tour. And I'll be sharing a lot more information with you about what we are going to do throughout the tour in terms of the other instructors and the other classes that are coming up. Check the schedule, there's still plenty of time for you to get involved in the PDN training tour, 2014.