Natural & Neutral Stance: Why It's Important in Training

Natural and neutral stance. I teach people and I tell you train in a natural and neutral stance. How many of you shoot bladed right now? Or when you first started shooting, shot in a bladed position? Strong leg dropped back usually, right?

I was one of ya. Right? Most people learn to shoot that way. It's a very popular way to shoot. It's very easy if you're trying to push and pull the gun to blade yourself and you bend that one elbow and push and pull to isolate the gun's movement.

When you're doing target shooting you do want the gun to have as little movement as possible. Now you're not doing much for recoil management. In fact, because that was the popular way to shoot for a long time, that's how we ended up with the double-tap. Right? You can shoot a double-tap this way relatively fast.

But if you try to shoot five shots really fast this way that gun's gonna start climbing, because you're pushing, pulling, you're not using your body weight. You're not using your kinesthetics to hold the gun still. So we teach natural and neutral stance because it allows us to shoot faster. It allows us to use both arms equally to control recoil and things like that. It allows us longer strings of fire.

But one of the other things that it does is it fits with the real world. Those of you who still to this day shoot with one arm or one leg back all the time. Simple experiment. All I want you to do the next time... I don't know if you guys can even see that because of the table.

So, the next time that you're out there if you're on the range and you're always shooting like this I want you to do a very simple experiment. Take this leg and put it up here and then try to shoot. And if you've been doing this as long as I used to do this, if you've been doing this for five years, 10 years, 50,000 rounds, a hundred thousand rounds, 20 years, 30 years, 40 years some of ya it looks like, you're gonna feel like you're on a boat. You're gonna feel weird and off balance. Now, question.

Should you feel weird and off balance just because your right foot is in front instead of your left? What percentage of time do you spend with your right foot in front of your left? Probably about 40% of the time, right? 20% of the time you're probably standing still, relatively neutral. And the rest of the time you're moving your feet or who knows what?

And if I get somebody attackin me from my left my left foot's gonna be in front at first. If I get somebody attackin me from my right my right foot's gonna be in front at first. I don't really care where your feet are in your fight. What I want you to do is train in a way that is natural and neutral so that when it comes time to fight you aren't dependent on one foot or the other being in front. You don't have to stand in any special position.

You can be sitting down, sittin in a chair, with your left foot forward, right foot forward, standing on one foot, somebody just threw you off a roof and you're flying through the air but you're gonna shoot that guy on the way down. I don't care where your feet are in the fight. But in training, I want them to be natural and neutral. All right? All this information, by the way, I'm throwing a lot of stuff at you, right?

All of this information is in the combat focus shooting book. All the information and the science, the explanation, the physiology, the anatomy, all that stuff, the empirical evidence, all the analysis, all the most likely event stuff is all covered in the counter ambush book and the counter ambush home study course. You can also take any of these topics and look at them for free, articles and videos at personaldefensenetwork.com