I tend to go in hard on things…sometimes quasi-obsessively. For example, in the past two decades, I spent probably about 1/3 of the weekends in any given year either teaching some type of self-defense course or participating in some type of self defense event either as a student, or as a competitor (in the case of BJJ). It was a busy time. I think that lots of it was that I was chasing ideas, trying to see how, “this next guy,” does things. What does he say, do or teach that is different than the last 12 guys I trained with, and maybe even more significantly, how does it differ or sound from the previous guys who have served as my mentors in the past? The people whose form and concepts I most closely identified with and used as a, “home base,” and basis of comparison for parallel or competing techniques. I have used this prevailing philosophy to guide my training over the past 35 years, and in that time I have had highs, lows, losses and plateaus. I’ve also had times where life just brought me other challenges and hobby training took a back seat. Even though I have found myself in several existential threat situations OUTSIDE of my career as a professional first responder, I have still considered my training to be my hobby. When I was a kid, it was martial arts/guns, horror movies/sci-fi, comic books, model rocketry and the saxophone…after I went into public safety, it was a hobby that had an overlap into my professional career choices, and now that I am comfortably set into my middle age years as a health care provider, it is back to being an elective hobby…but I still run into miscreants and others who who’d do me harm, if given the chance. So let’s call it a hobby with significant overlap into the, “self-improvement,” realm, but landing squarely in the realm of, “lifelong pursuit of martial arts.”

In Musashi’s line 16 from the aforementioned, “The Way of Walking Alone,” he states, “Do not collect weapons or practice with weapons beyond what is useful.” He never states what is useful. If you think about this, it will vary greatly from person to person. Everyone has their reasoning for what a weapon collection is, and also what practice is. We can safely assume by, “practice,” that Musashi was talking about training and/or practice. “Collecting weapons,” is a strange thing to consider in modern times, because what defines a collection is extremely subjective. I’ve seen news stories where they describe the massive arsenal that the police recovered or confiscated, and I’ve known guys that carried more guns and ammo than that in their pickup. And the amount of practice someone does? Again, highly variable. Musashi likely was thinking along the lines of not allowing so much training and practice consume your life to the point that your entire life is ONLY training and practice. That’d be weird, you won’t have any friends, or money, you won’t bathe and you’ll probably die of dehydration or starvation because you’ve forgotten to eat. I jest, but you get the point. Everyone’s idea of what is enough training/practice is different. Most hobby shooters in the training circles shoot FAR MORE than even the most well-funded, well-trained police departments. They also tend to get into the least amount of trouble beyond a defensive gun use where display of a firearm ends the altercation. After some point (different for everyone) the situational awareness increase that comes with certain types of defensive training goes a long way towards preparing to deal with existential threats. Of course, on the flip side of that coin, there are 80 year old UNTRAINED women and men who defend themselves with firearms, successfully, every year. So it again boils down to a philosophical question (like many topics in the defensive space do). “What are you prepared to do?”

We learned a number of things in K.A.’s class that are foreign to many, outside the practical shooting sports worlds. For example, EXTENSIVE one handed shooting conditioning. In most of the widespread concealed carry centric courses, weak hand shooting is mentioned, and strong hand only shooting is covered but mostly just given lip service and perhaps, a magazine or two worth of familiarization. Also, skills like drawing, hitting a low probability target under time pressure, while a bunch of your peers watch, and quietly judge you? Well, that’s also a consideration (everyone in our class was super cool so there wasn’t any smarminess that sometimes happens in classes). K.A. was quick to point out, “Will you need these skills in real life? I don’t know…you might.”

SKILL BUILDING VERSUS TACTICAL CLASSES

Most people get it wrong. They say things like, “I am attending a tactical training class.” What they mean to say is that they are attending a skill building class or just a firearms training class. Learning how to draw, pay attention to the universal firearms safety rules and also loading, clearing malfunctions, shooting with both hands and single hands, those are all skills. There aren’t any tactic(s) in there, those are all skills, whereas tactics are specific methods or actions used to achieve a goal or gain advantage in a situation. K.A.’s class was very much a skill based course, that while coming primarily from the application of his defensive pistol based skills applied to competition, this inspired me to wonder what got him to where he is, and how I can sharpen my skills to be a better defensive shooter.

“Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world.”

When I worked for Tactical Response, the gear list for the class had at the top of it, “ONE OPEN MIND.” After working for James for a number of years, I understood this to be an evolution of the often repeated BJJ maxim of, “Leave your ego off the mat.” It’s harder than it sounds…nobody wants to look like the guy or gal that doesn’t know what they’re doing, and it’s worse when there is an audience, but without ego getting involved, it is easier to make great strides in training.

I had a first-hand experience when I first started BJJ that reinforced that idea. I attended training at an AOJ (Art of Jujitsu) school, where my Professor, Felix Garcia, is a black belt under Gui Mendes. Professor Mendes would come give seminars at our academy with his cadre of very competent competitors, to teach blocks that tied into what they were currently studying at the time. If you’ve ever attended an AOJ seminar, you know that at the end of the seminar, the AOJ Professors and coaches will accept challenges from anyone in attendance. I was a zero stripe white belt at the time…I had about 3 months of experience. My Son and I attended classes regularly, several nights a week, but like so many of the Father/child attendees at our academy, we were new, and basically anonymous.

At the end of the seminar, I raised my hand to challenge any of the AOJ staff. As Professor Jonatha Alves saw my hand and waved me to the mat, I saw my Son look terrified and I think he believed I was going to die. It would be an extremely bad business model to kill off (effortlessly BTW) students at their seminars, but I knew that I was safe in their capable hands. I then spent the next five minutes of the round pushing the Professor to no avail, around the mat in our respective quadrant of the academy. I felt like Cool Hand Luke…I was giving it my all and I tried really hard to make something connect, but Professor Jonatha was a great sport and let me work, but also showed me where I was going wrong…again and again and again. I just kept coming back, hitting him with nothing. At the end of the round, I shook his hand, hugged him, and rejoined the line. Shortly after, the seminar ended. As is customary in BJJ classes in true martial arts gyms, you shake the hand of every participant and thank them for the training. Somehow, everyone remembered my name now, and congratulated me on getting out there in the very deep end of the pool, and my amazing loss! And although I looked like a complete sweaty try-hard to everyone who knows what BJJ is supposed to look like, I learned what not to do, and also I learned firsthand what it felt like to risk my ego, and still come out unscathed! It didn’t hurt…it was instructive.

I think most of the attendees in KA’s class also risked their ego to test themselves against the standards and evaluations that were given in the class. While it would be easy to stomp off, get mad, be frustrated, and carry that negative grief through the rest of the class, it is preferable to think, “That didn’t work,” or, “I need to spend some time hammering these dents out of my routine.” I had several, AH-HA moments in this class, and I am sure that I will think of some more as time marches on, but here are some thoughts in no particular order.

DRAW STROKE FOR EFFICIENCY vs. DRAWSTROKE FOR WEAPON RETENTION

For about 20 years now, I have used the 4-step drawstroke in my defensive pistol work. STEP ONE…establish a full firing grip on the gun and harness and move the cover garment. STEP TWO…draw the gun back to the high retention position. STEP THREE…the hands meet at the mid sternum level and then press the gun from the center chess into the eyeline, picking up the front sight/dot along the way. STEP FOUR…complete the press out and engage the trigger. I watched KA and several others in the class complete their draws, including my friends and colleagues like Rick Remington, John Johnston, Mirko Muggli, Matt Rakestraw, and I thought, “I seem to be moving in molasses compared to them! Where am I going wrong?” KA outlined HIS method of the drawstroke and referred to the STEP TWO section of the draw as a, “culdesac,” you CAN take if there is a close range issue you will need to fire from retention on, but in the absence of a close range problem, you can skip directly from STEP ONE to STEP THREE!!! “EUREKA!!!” I thought back to another class, taught by Gabe White when homeboy John Hearne said to me, “Dude, you’re a solid shooter but your draw is SLOW. Fix that.” He was right then and he’s still right now! I didn’t have a path then to fix my draw speed, but now, I had an idea. Eliminating 25% of that movement with my long arms would shave time off and bring the gun to my eyeline at the threat, quicker.

PREDICTIVE SHOOTING

This is an industry buzz word I have heard a bunch lately but I haven’t given a ton of thought to, because I didn’t know what it meant. I understand it now, thanks to KA to mean an out branching of the Colonel Jeff Cooper idea of the hammer pair…meaning two shots fired using one sight picture, and relying on index and a best guess of the learned recoil characteristics of THAT gun in YOUR hands to fire the shot, cycle/recoil, and return to the starting position to send an additional shot or shots along that same trajectory to the target. Fortuitously, I had great success with this. I have been using some flavor of the 9mm M&P for nearly two decades now, so I know how the gun recoils in my hand(s) and how it feels as I work my way through the magazine. I was able to pick up the dot, send my shots and see my gun return to the starting position with little deviation which resulted in a tight pattern on the IDPA target. Sub-3 second Bill Drill here I come! Right? Well, kinda…

Drawing and Shooting FAST is hard

Being a primarily defensive shooter, with very little competition experience, and practicing at a range that doesn’t allow drawing from the holster (except in competition and in coursework) and requires a rate of fire not to exceed one shot per second (except for hammers/double taps, not to exceed one volley per second) my shooting speed has slowed down. I take round accountability very seriously, since I came from a public safety background, AND I have treated lots of injuries from RULE 4 violations in extremis. I am VERY weary of pressing off shots willy-nilly, without an extreme level of control. Probably too much. The prescription for the class under KA’s watchful eye was to push the envelope. For me, that meant generating split times that exceeded my normal splits of 1.00 seconds! Many of the folks in this class were probably in the .16 to .20 range with regularity, so there was some fast shooting indeed. I did my best to take my foot off the brake, but my core programming would always say in my inner voice, “WATCH IT…” This may be inconsequential, or as KA often said throughout the course, “Will you need this skill? I don’t know. You MIGHT!” As my buddy Rick Remington remarked (who was also the most-excellent host of this class) said, “Most gun toters would be better off refining/speeding up their draw to a solid first shot than spending time worrying about fast splits.”

PREPARATION

I am a creature of habit and order. I set out my clothes for the next day, every night before I go to bed. The Keurig is set…I have a valet on my nightstand that I use to organize my EDC equipment pocket it all before I leave the house. Before I perform a surgery, I do the exact same process, to make sure my light is charged/and my magnifiers are focused at my focal length, and that my mask is in place. The point being, I’m pretty organized and habitual. With that said, I don’t have a routine I do when I go to the line to shoot a drill. MOST OF THE TIME, I just say, “F*** it, let’s go! It normally works out for me. I don’t do anything once I put my loaded gun into my holster in the morning other than make sure my optic is working and that the gun is loaded…and it cost me an evaluation event. I screwed up my counting. I’ve seen this happen in Tom Givens’ classes before the Casino Drill, but I have never had it happen myself! But I sure did in this class. The funny part was, after I screwed it up royally, and was laughing and saying, “WTF!?!” I completed the drill and I saw where my shots went, and they were dead nuts centered! I shoot better when I don’t care about the score anymore! So for the rest of the weekend after that blunder, I always drew at speed, checked the mag and made sure the chamber was loaded, and the optic was powered on and still centered and not loose. No more worries with the rest of the drills.

IT WAS A MARATHON FULL OF SPRINTS

Sprinting is hard. Shooting single evaluation drills is also hard. It is mentally taxing and requires great concentration to go from zero to 100mph, complete what is required, and then calm back down. It’s a strange adaptation. I tend to start calm, stay calm, and end calm, most of the time. I think I broke my sympathetic nervous system years ago, and it takes a lot of danger, novelty and/or epinephrine to get me to really feel a spike in nervous system tone. So cuing myself to start at the, “B,” of, “BEEP,” is challenging. I recall I actually start moving around the, “EP,” of the beep. I don’t think anything is going to overcome that other than the line from, “Man On Fire,” which was the line from the swim training of, “the gunshot sets you free.”

Along that same line, I can’t recall a class I’ve ever taken before that was quite as fulfilling and but also very mentally taxing and fatiguing. I devoted computing power to tasks I THOUGHT I had automated. I will definitely spend more of my practice time in focused mode, with a higher percentage of time spent on the Rangemaster Drill of the Month, the IDPA 5×5, and other drills (I won’t say what KA had us do; people should go into it cold like we did…don’t study for the test; you WILL have time to redeem yourself).

SPRINGER’S FINAL THOUGHTS

I’ve been in a training lull without much motivation to do anything beyond marksmanship lately…I have become that old guy at the bench shooting playing cards at 25 yards. Stacking injuries, a busy work schedule and a practice range that offers time but very constricted activity has all been a detriment to my regular training and practice routine. KA’s class has given me MORE to think about, that I never considered before. I enjoy thinking deeply about the world…that’s why I earned a BA in Philosophy when my career path required a science degree (I got one of those too). KA ALSO is a graduate student of Eastern and Western philosophy and he ties those connections into his training. Thinking about thinking isn’t new…neither is thinking about the finer aspects of human on human warfare. This banter you see on YT between the latest talking heads is not new at all. Just in my lifetime, these conversations have already been penned by people like Jeff Cooper, Charles Askins, William Aprill, Todd Green, James Yeager, Paul Gomez and hundreds of others who went before them and us. There are even more extant thinkers that have forgotten more about this subject than most would believe (try to stump a Tom Givens, John Farnam or Mas Ayoob…I have TRIED; they’ve heard it all before, or done it or tell you who did it before). There is very little under the sun that is truly new, or novel. Yes, technology has improved, but the application of it and the purpose of that application is largely unchanged. What IS new is what have you NOT thought about, or tried or tested, or done to change your way of thinking? I recommend that whether you are a student of defensive pistol craft like me, or an action sports competitor, AND YOU LIKE TO THINK, take KA’s class. You’ll be glad you did.

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