Defensive Shooting Fundamentals Session 3: Defensive Shooting Stance

All right, let's take an in-depth look at our shooting stance and how we wanna be positioning our body when we're training for our defensive shooting situation. This of course doesn't mean that you're gonna to be in some preferred stance in your fight. That'd be impossible to predict. But what we do know is that we're going to spend most of our time training in a standing position when we're shooting on the range. So we want to make sure that our position is congruent with an actual fight and helps reinforce what we need to be able to do or we want to be able to do as opposed to working against it, because we don't wanna be practicing skills that aren't repeatable or applicable.

The big difference between training performance and training for the applied skillset that we're actually gonna need in the real world. And that's really where we start. Thinking about the natural reaction that we have to fighting, if we're startled, if we're scared, if we're in a fight mode, human beings don't stand up perfectly straight. Whether or not I shoot better, standing up perfectly straight becomes largely irrelevant. If I'm not likely to be standing up perfectly straight in my fight, what I can do on the range while standing up straight, isn't what I'm worried about.

Just because I can maybe rotate through multiple targets faster or I can get into a bladed stance, stand upright and lock the gun down and minimize the motion to the gun. I can do those things but it's not something I necessarily wanna worry about because in the fight mode, I'm very likely even before the gun comes into play to be in this lowered center of gravity. If I'm in the ready position, I'm in a fight mode, I'm probably gonna be on lowered center of gravity position also. So that's the first component of our good defensive shooting stance. Is the idea of a lowered center of gravity.

And that simply means we're gonna be bending the knee and closing the hip or bending at the hip, but bending forward. So we close the angle of the hip from this straight up and down to a closed angle. We close the angle at the back of the knee from straight leg down this position. This also helps us prepare to move, it makes us more stable, it does a lot of good things for us. Closing at the hip allows us to recruit our weight of our torso, our skeletal structure and engage our shoulders for that extended shooting position.

This also makes us more resilient, if someone were to bump into us, if we were to be on unsteady ground, if we were to be injured we're more resilient in this position here. If we're struck, then we're halfway standing up straight and we can be knocked down or bend over into an awkward position, much more easily. This is a stronger position also to resist anything that's going on, working against us. The next thing we want to look at, from a fundamental of stance issue is that our feet are not staggered very much. Our feet are not staggered more than a foot length.

And what that means is not 12 inches, but whatever the length of your foot is from the toe to heel, that's the maximum that we wanna stagger in our training environment. We don't want to have any gaps of light or air between our toe and our heel, if we were to move our feet over here. Now, of course, it doesn't mean that we can't shoot like this. For decades, people trained to shoot like this. But what we've realized, is there's no reason to put ourselves in a position where with our feet staggered like this, we are always going to be dependent upon that position.

One of the things I'll do on the range is I'll have student switch their feet. And if they're used to always having their strong foot back, switch their feet so they're strong foot is forward and it looks like they're on a boat. Really uneven. And if you're in the habit of always being staggered, switch your feet, see what happens. You're just as likely to have to fight to the left side and have your left foot in front, as you are to have to fight to the right side and have your right foot in front.

So stance, really here in the training environment is about variables. We wanna train in this natural neutral stance, that's what we call it, so that we can account for the variables we might have in our real fight. So we've talked about lowered center of gravity, we've talked about our feet not being staggered more than a foot length. The next thing I wanna talk about is making sure that our feet are basically under our body somewhat equally. So we don't want to have our feet in the middle, we don't have our feet way stretched out outside of our body, we wanna have our feet about shoulder width apart.

Again, we're playing the odds here. If my feet are a little bit wider in an actual fight, that's fine. If my feet are a little bit narrower in an actual fight, That's fine too. So I train to be in this, in the middle, about shoulder width apart position. Especially, if you train with lateral movement, you're gonna see that when you lower your center of gravity, your feet will probably be just outside of the armpits.

And that's again about shoulder width apart, so that's fine. So the bullet points of your good natural neutral defensive shooting stance for training are going to be to lower your center of gravity, to have your feet not staggered more than a foot length, to make sure that your feet are about shoulder width apart. And what that's also gonna do is then orient you towards the threat, so that you're not bladed off from the threat at different angles or turning your feet, standing very awkwardly. We wanna make sure that we're oriented towards that threat because overwhelmingly we are likely to face the threat that's going to shoot us. So whether we're here inside of this ready position or we're driving out into an extended shooting position, either way, we see components of that good fundamental lowered center of gravity stance, taking part in our training environment so that our trained skills are as applicable as possible to the real environment that we're gonna to fight in.