[MinisterMalice]

One of my New Year's goals is to get some serious training for my EDC rig, and work on my defensive scenarios. I know a lot of folks go to established places and pay a lot of money for training, and that is what I was planning on going that route as well.

However, through I friend I got to meet a man who, while not famous, has a TON of skills in training and experience in armed and unarmed combat. He has the martial arts chops, and has trained and worked with a good number of military units that go bad things to bad people. So I decided to hire him to train me! We ended up getting 10 people together from church and my kenpo training center and all hiring him together.

Friday evening the 1st we had a classroom session. There was a good bit of disparity in training in the room, so we spent the first 45 minutes or so on basic safety and anatomy and physiology of people and guns. Then we spent an hour and a half talking about defensive handgunning from a legal, ethical, and emotional/psychological perspective, including a great discussion on our own level of willingness to fight and pull the trigger.

Today we spent the day out practicing our skills. We loaded a bunch of people into trucks and found a nice, quiet piece of desert. (for anyone familiar with Phoenix we went to a spot off of New River Road about 5 miles north of Carefree Highway) We set up silhouette targets and spent the whole day working through defensive drills. We worked on:

1. Draw from concealment through presentation, shooting from hip single handed, close-held two handed, and at full presentation.
2. Shooting from concealed carry at close range, including touching the BG before fire.
3. Worked movement both before and after drawing, firing at multiple targets.
4. Used a barricade to simulate cover, shooting around it and maintaining a stable shooting platform.

Obviously that is the bare bones of what we did, but it was fantastic to get out and work on skills too. I probably shot 350 rounds out of my 9mm, maybe another 150 .40. (both through my XDs) Now I( have a bunch of drills to work on in the first part of the year until I can get very competent in them and we can take it to the next level!

Here is to 2010 being a great year of training and increasing competence.

 

[Harryball]

Sounds like alot of fun and good skill training. I love it when you find someone like that, they really do make a difference.

 

[Guardian]

Good training, good skills, good friends, good fun added to it. Sounds like a heck of a day.