Anticipation and the Need to Shoot

Here's another important video from the Personal Defense Network. There are several factors that affect our balance with speed and precision when we're shooting both in a training environment and in a realistic environment. One of the most overlooked ones, but possibly, one of the most important ones, is the anticipation of the need to shoot. How ready were you to take the shot you needed to take just before you knew that you needed to take it? This factor is one that presents people with a lot of difficulties when they confront the reality of their training environment or their practice environment with the likelihood of what they're actually gonna have to do if they defend themselves or others with a firearm.

When you're standing on the line in front of a single target waiting for a buzzer or a command from an instructor or maybe just a self-initiated stimulus to go from your holster or from the ready position, you have 100% anticipation of the need to shoot. You know exactly what it is you're going to do long before that buzzer goes off or long before that command is given. What this means is that your brain is already rehearsing it. The exact neurons that are going to activate inside of the motor cortex, the brain's communication with the muscles, is already being rehearsed. Those muscles are already being energized.

The cognitive part of your brain doesn't have to get involved and process anything. You have a completely automated response to that buzzer or to that command. If you're standing in front of a plate rack, for example, and you know you're gonna shoot five or six circles from left to right and you're standing there in a ready position waiting for the buzzer, you're gonna get the firearm out and take those shots and swing laterally. Your body already knows exactly what it's gonna do. The brain has already rehearsed that, especially if you've practiced before.

That makes the plate rack little more than a circus trick. It's an athletic endeavor that you've practiced over and over again or that your body has learned to do very efficiently. The comparison between a plate rack and a true multiple-target environment is completely inaccurate. If you picture yourself standing in front of multiple attackers and you think that you're going to be able to magically pull the firearm out of your holster, extend, touch, press, and swing from target to target, you're ignoring the realities of both the anticipation of the need to shoot and the way your brain and body work together during a dynamic critical incident. Understanding that a worst-case scenario, a counter-ambush shooting, is going to give you little or no anticipation of the need to shoot means that you need to realize, you're gonna need to put more energy, more effort, and more time into getting the firearm out of the holster, getting the firearm into a shooting position, and controlling deviation during your defensive shooting.

Realizing that the anticipation of the need to shoot means your training may not be a one-to-one correlation, means ignoring those times, ignoring swinging between multiple targets that you already know are going to be there and maybe not valuing so much those competition courses of fire that you were briefed on before you ran through them. Variation, surprise, and plausibility are all important keys to understanding how to properly train the anticipation of the need to shoot. The next time you're on a range training, set up more than one target. Maybe put three targets in front of you and give your training partner or your coach the option of saying left, right or center. In this way, you can't cheat.

Your brain can't be rehearsing exactly what it is you're going to do until you take in that stimulus. Of course the fact is, a shot over here versus a shot over here versus a shot over here is going to be very similar but at least it gives you some level of training that isn't completely rehearsed, completely choreographed, and completely incongruent with a defensive shooting situation. Check out more videos just like this one at the Personal Defense Network.