2014 PDN Training Tour Update 7/16

Hey, Rob Pincus here. And this week I'm coming in for the tour update from what appears to be the Dagobah system, somewhere in the Star Wars universe. This is actually the home range of Mike Hughes, the developer of the SIRT pistol, Next Level Training. And we're out here today. We're gonna do an advanced pistol handling class but one of the things we're gonna do that's pretty interesting today is we're gonna do what Mike refers to as an uncalibrated drill. So he asked me this morning, these guys had been through CFS training. Obviously, these guys are great shooters. What drill can we do that is unique and really will test our abilities? Where were we the last time we left off? Well, for an advanced student like these guys are, I love coming out and just jumping right into a figure eight drill. When we're out of here on the PDN training tour, we really have to be open to whoever shows up on the class. We may have someone who's literally shot 10 rounds out of their gun or we may have military special operations guys come into a class like we did last Saturday down in Portland when we were doing the extreme close quarters tactics course. When we're in that environment, we might have somebody who's a great martial artist and great with their elbows and their knees. And we have somebody who's very uncomfortable being in physical contact with another person and has never been through any of that training. So today's a pretty unique day. Not only is it Mike Hughes' birthday, but for me it's kind of cool to be out here with some very experienced shooters that I know we can throw a lot of different things on. Now, the tour is coming to an end. I'm here in the Pacific Northwest. Normally we would be ending the tour right now but because of the Alaska trip that's gonna come up and we're going all the way into August this year, I'm actually gonna fly back to the East Coast. I'm gonna be part of the Shooting Industry Masters Event. I.C.E. Training Company's a platinum sponsor this year. It's a great event. A lot of good people from the industry will be there. I'll be teaching a class in New Jersey. There's actually still a couple of slots left in that class. Then I'm gonna fly back down to Florida and do some Gander Mountain Academy broadcast classes. We're gonna do the counter ambush lectures. We're also gonna do one of the dynamic home defense handgun classes. So that's gonna be really awesome. We've got six locations around the country. We do the broadcast classes. You can learn more about that at Gander Mountain Academy's website or, of course, at personaldefensenetwork.com. There's still plenty of time left in the tour. So we've got a lot of updates coming. We're gonna talk a lot more about our sponsors and things like that. But today I want you to take a look at exactly what we're gonna do with this figure eight drill. Now, if you follow Personal Defense Network, if you follow combat-focused shooting in my training programs, you're probably familiar with the figure eight drill already. And the figure eight drill is one of our evaluatory drills. You want to see if our students can apply the things they've been learning to do in isolation in a more realistic context. So what we've got is a series of targets spread out here. We've got two markers we're gonna put out here. We're gonna move in a figure eight. One of the students will be moving in a figure eight and then they'll get their command to react. You know, we do always do a startle reaction in this kind of a counter-ambush drill. They will react. They will get their gun to the ready position. They will find the number or letter that indicates what their target is. And then they will engage the target. And something I've done today, I don't normally do this, but there's huge intellectual value to it. I get it. The idea of bowing a target out to create a three-dimensional surface. This was first shown to me many, many years ago by Louis Auerbach, who our community lost recently, truly one of the pioneers of the first generation of defensive training instructors in our industry. He was a friend. The way he ran his business, the way he lived his life, the way he taught, the way he innovated and kind of did what he thought was right for his students, definitely was inspirational and serves as a bit of a mentorship to me as I came into this industry. You can go back and read every great thing he ever wrote at SWAT magazine in the back pages there. Just a really great guy. And, kind of a tribute to him, we're bowing some of our paper targets out today to create that three-dimensional surface. So, we always think about shooting into the center of the target, but if I'm over here and we think about shooting it in the center of the target we see that it's really just going to skim across the front of this target. And we probably wanna come in a little deeper and then the figure eight drill, the students will be moving around. So this target will give us an ability to evaluate those angles. Meanwhile, check out all the great information at personaldefensenetwork.com. I'm also gonna put up the website for Next Level Training and for the SIRT pistols. If you aren't familiar with them, go check their stuff out. And of course Mike Hughes is a contributor to Personal Defense Network. So you can see his videos. We got a lot of video clips of his on there. And of course, we've got a couple of DVDs we did with him as well. Eight! So much better. Six! Let's take that as a talking point Mike. Jeremy, I mentioned Mike Hughes earlier, here he is. Let's take that as a talking point, because this is one of the things we get a lot on the internet, right? People say, well, if you're not running timers how can you put any value to it? You gotta have a timer, you gotta test it. You gotta evaluate it. You gotta quantify. One of the things that I always say, you can't, you have to, you looked for the six, right? So you're in a mall, shot goes off. Something's going on. You go to a ready position but you don't see an immediate threat. You know something's going on. How do we time how long it takes you to see the six? What was going through your mind as you were looking for the six? Just pattern recognition, six, six, six, six, six. And, as we talked about, just doing that leap like, okay six is bad, shoot six. So the connection being, of course, if someone saw gun or something crazy like that. Perfect, 'cause that's what we're looking for. Processing information prior to, or concurrent with the execution and the motor skills. So not a choreographed drill where you know you're gonna turn around and shoot the six. But instead it's like, I gotta find a six. And when I find a six, that's the stimulus to act. You know Rob, one other thing, a point if it's appropriate, is one thing I do like about this drill with the six and what have you, is of course we want to drive our motor skills into subconscious competence. And I do think you're onto something by processing, I guess, the upper brain, the recognition brain, something else. So the motor neurons skills of shooting and drawing and then extend and all that, might drive into subconscious competence quicker because you're kind of distracted so to speak by finding the threat. That is the exact goal. Yeah, that is the exact goal. Is that through this kind of repetition of processing information with the skill, it becomes subconscious because that's the whole point of subconscious competency is that you want to be able to execute the skill while your brain is doing something else. When we're doing it here on the range, more often and faster, earlier. Cool, let's go again. Square root of 100! That 3-D target is cool. Yeah. Alpha! Head shot! All right, cool. So let's take a look. Let's take a look at how this 3-D target works. This is, the ideas is, you know, Louis explained it, explained it a lot in his classes, obviously, and to us. In fact, it was even part of a SWAT magazine TV episode. The idea is, you ended up on this side of the target. So shooting in at this angle and coming into the target this way is what makes sense. And it's three-dimensional presentation obviously kind of drew you into that. And clearly you started off centering and drifted over here which is exactly where you would want to go to go through what would be the high center chest, that center mass area. And take a look at the rest of the targets. Obviously Mike Hughes is great shooter, so we expect the shooting to be good. How about that process of square root of a hundred in the brain instead of 10? Yeah, no, that's good. That's, I liked that. And as I know, it's almost fun, if I can not misuse the word fun in this environment, to kind of challenge yourself, get a, get some processing going and see how the mechanics are, how subconscious they truly are. So I'm thinking square, did he say square or square route? Or is it a thousand? It must be 10 because I didn't quite hear you right. So yeah, 10 is our second 10, you shoot it. And then in the meantime, you're looking at the target and this is brilliant too. I gotta say I like it. 'Cause you point up on it. You get a sense of the depth, which we lose, which is flat paper. And so it does just, I think, drive into that 3-D realm of identifying and again, pointing, press, send rounds into something that's not flat paper. Well cool. Happy birthday, man. Thanks for sharing. All right, buddy, good stuff. Always good to see ya. Check out more stuff from me and Mike at Personal Defense Network.