2015 PDN Training Tour Update #9

All right, Rob Pincus here. I am just over 12,000 feet in elevation over Leadville,Colorado. Normally the tour ends when I get back to the East. This year I'm ending it at my Western headquarters in New Denver, and obviously we're up here celebrating at the end of a very successful 2015 Personal Defense Network Training Tour. Certainly go up to the mountains for a couple of days. Actually we just bested the best performance of the old FJ tour trucks on this very summit. So we never quite got to 12,000 feet in the other vehicles. This vehicle, we were able to crawl up here above the tree line and get all the way up to the top. So that's pretty cool. Again Leadville's down here, that was the scene of one of our classes. This year in 2015, we had more classes, we had more attendees and we stopped in more places than ever before. We had 10 other contributors and instructors on the tour. They helped us out quite a bit. But here at the end of the tour, I wanna make special a chance. I'm gonna take this chance to really thank the Tour Sponsor. One of the key things that our sponsors allow us to do is to be able to go to more remote places and run smaller classes. Especially the smaller classes where we're trying to build training communities. We've been really successful with that over the years. We have some places where we used to go, a couple years in a row, we get two or three or four students to a class. The Tour Sponsors help us make that financially feasible. And then over the years we see some of those places grow to where one of them in particular this year had over 30 students with five training days that we put on classes at. And again, several years in a row we had classes with very small attendance. We had to build and invest in the future of that training environment. Our sponsors help us do that. Liberty Ammunition,Breakthrough, GunVault,Benchmade,Springfield, Crossbreed Holsters,Viridian Green Lasers. And of course CMMG back again for a second year as our rifle sponsor. Now,this year we did something a little different. If you look at our Personal Defense Network Training Tour updates, I didn't really feature the Tour Sponsors like I usually do. Where I bring out some products and talk about them. What we did instead, was we had a much higher production quality level talked about each tour sponsor individually. So we had fewer tour updates this year. And again, this is the last one. But we also have other videos that are supporting and specifically geared towards letting you understand why these sponsors fit into what we do and why I think you should check their companies out and see if their services or products, are the right ones for you in terms of your preparation for personal defense, home security, family safety, whatever your interest is. Now Personal Events Network as we end the tour is getting ready to launch a brand new website. This new website is gonna be easier to navigate and especially for our premium members, it's gonna put the content that we believe you want. And that you're most interested in right in front of you every time you log in. It's gonna be easier to find videos and articles by topic. And we're gonna start combining our video content with our article content to give you a more thorough in-depth multifaceted perspective on a lot of the different topics we covered. We've got some new contributors coming online and we've got some of your favorite contributors that are going to be participating more frequently as we also add a new blog to personaldefensenetwork.com. So check it out. Look at the features that we're offering. Look at the new expanded range of topics that we're gonna be covering in the new contributors. I appreciate you following along the 2015 Personal Events Network Training Tour. Get ready for 2016. Omar Broussard here out in Columbus, Kansas. I just finished with the Shooting Industry Masters charity event. Out here representing I.C.E training and the Personal Defense Network team wanted to give a training tip because we just finished the PDN tour 2015. I hope everybody had a great time. I know I did traveling across the country, working with different shooters at different levels and in different contexts. And that's the tip for today. Training in context. There are certain things that are out on the internet or in books or DVDs that you'll find as far as techniques. Whether it's reloading,presentation from the holster or whether it's certain shooting positions,right? Every technique has a certain context for which it can be used. I.e. if you learn a certain technique that's mostly used for law enforcement situations and you're a civilian and you're trying to apply that technique to a home defense situation, you gotta understand the different contexts, right? The how you train is largely dictated by the context you're in. I.e.your lifestyle, your environment. These are all dynamics that are going to affect how you should train and what you think. Hey, Deryck Poole here with Echo-5 training. Just got finished with two days at the Shooting Industry Masters as a member of the I.C.E training Personal Defense Network shooting team. If you're not aware of the Shooting Industry Masters, it's an event that gets put on every year to benefit the NSSF's First Shots program. It's an honor to be a member of this team because the First Shots Program brings a lot of new shooters into the community and that is always a great benefit to all of us. While I was there though, our team was comprised of other Personal Defense Network contributors. And with the tour just wrapping up it gave us a chance to sit down and sort of debrief each other on our experiences at our stops around the US. One of the things we came up with was to put together some short video clips to give you guys some tips that'll hopefully help you maximize your training. The first tip I wanna share with you is vetting your gear. Sounds kind of obvious that you would wanna vet your gear. But you'd be surprised at the number of students I would find on the range that they'd never shot their gun before. Never drawn from a new holster that they'd just gotten. Or never tested out a new belt that they were using. It's really important to make sure that you get on the range in a training class or with a training partner and put this new gear through its reps of your reps in context. It's one thing to stand in your house and do dry fire drawing from a holster and a whole another getting put into a dynamic drill standing on the range, moving around, trying to get a full firing grip as you're moving. So make sure you take the time to get out there and vet your equipment. Hey, what's up everybody. I'm Barret Kendrick with Bearco Training. We are out of Covington Louisiana. Down here we do a lot of handgun courses, we do a lot of long gun courses, but we also do a lot of reality-based training classes. And right now, it's late July, just about two weeks ago I finished up my last Personal Defense Network Training Tour stop in Reno, Nevada at Reno Guns & Range. We were out there preparing their instructor team to be able to create a reality based training program that they're gonna be offering to their students and to the general public. You know, one of the main goals of a reality-based training is that we can evaluate the student's ability to be able to apply a skill in a complex environment. In an environment where they've gotta make major decisions, in an environment where lots of stuff are happening, in a chaotic environment. You know, sometimes I see students that are able to perform the skill well out on the range but unable to apply the skill in that realistic environment. I'll give an example. A lot of times, you know I'll see students, I'll watch my students, we're on the range. They're doing things like getting the firearm all the way out at full extension both arms all the way out, kinesthetically aligned, with their eyes,with the target itself. And they do very well with that on the range. Getting good solid hits. Then I bring them into a scenario. To where now they're trying to decide, you know is that somebody that's walking at me with a gun or a knife or does that person have a cell phone in their hand? Or is that a bad guy or is that just simply a good guy in that scenario? Lot of stuff happening. Sometimes the lighting's not as good. So is that a dog coming at me. You know, what are those noises that I'm hearing. There's a lot of complex decisions that have to be made. So they're able to get out there on the range and do well performing the skill but in that complex environment all of a sudden I see them do things like when they finally do decide, that it's time to get the gun out of the holster and start putting rounds down range, they do things like fire from a lower position. They're not an extension. They've got the gun down much lower. And as a result, we can't depend on being able to get good solid hits. So in paying attention to the skill development cycle the students had the opportunities to learn that skill. They got on the range and they develop that skill. But when they were actually tested in that evaluation phase, they were unable to apply that skill in that realistic environment. So in paying attention to that we need to get them back on the range. We need to do more developing and get them to the point where they can perform it better and ultimately get them back into the real environment, that realistic environment and test them and evaluate them and see if they now have the ability to be able to perform that skill or apply that skill under the stress of the chaos and major decision-making during that environment. You know, it's kinda like this. If you got out on the range and maybe you could get good. A lot of people watching this video might be able to go out on the range and I put up a 12 inch circle on the target. So you alright, just slow fire. I want you to put holes in the paper. A lot of you all have no problem whatsoever just drilling that paper. But what happens if I started picking up like rocks and I started throwing rocks at your back? Be very distracted. All of a sudden, we'd see everybody's group size begin to open up. You know unable to apply that skill when I'm sitting there chunking rocks at you. So that's what we're looking for. You know,for tips like this or more on scenario based training, more reality-based training, go over to personaldefensenetwork.com. We've got plenty of information over there. Go check that out. Again,I'm Barrett Kendrick down here in Covington,Louisiana at Bearco Training. I hope to see you out on the range someday.