AAR: pistol-forum.com Diagnostics Workshop

[Jay Cunningham]

Protective Shooting Concepts
pistol-forum.com Diagnostics Workshop
Nov. 8th, 2014
Beaver Falls, PA

This is the official AAR/Course Review thread for the free PF class conducted in Beaver Falls, PA on November 8th, 2014.

[Rich@CCC]

It was great to meet some P_F members in person!

Thanks to Jay, Ashton, Tim and Dan for a great class today. Very well presented and informative. Being totally unqualified to present any real AAR critique, I'll leave that up to others. I did however take a lot home with me to work with.

Thanks to Stimpee for the Beretta Swag!

[foxj66]

I will chime in.. I enjoyed the class, it was my first formal training.

Thanks Rich and stimpee for the swag.

The class was very informative to me, I learned a lot about my grip and trigger press that I can take back to improve my own practice and dry Fire.

Jay, Ashton, Tim and Dan did a great job running the class!

Thanks for putting this on

Jared

[D.O.A.F.S.]

Wow... what a day I just got home, 8 plus hours of great instruction and almost 10 hours of driving. A long day for sure, but with all the information I took away from the workshop today well worth it. With continued practice, dedication and focus it will certainly help to advance my lacking skills. One nice thing about the long drive home, it allowed me the time to reflect back over the day and actually absorb it better. Jay, Ashton, Tim and Dan I again want to THANK you guys for volunteering your time and putting together such a great curriculum. The fact that you took the extra time to make sure it "made sense" rather then the mentality of "this is how its done now just do it" went along way with me and I'm sure with the other students as well. The little details as well, example... with the grip pushing your elbows out slightly to apply torque to your grip close to the bore axis made a huge difference in control and made getting good hits on target a lot easier. It was also nice to be able meet and put faces to the screen names of the members that I had the pleasure of shooting with today. And lastly a big THANKS to Rich and Steve for the swag. Mark

[HRL]

Want to put this in while still somewhat fresh in my head...what a great experience. Learned so many technique nuances and things to keep in mind on safety. I was definitely the most inexperienced shooter there but Jay, Ashton, Dan, and Tim helped keep me working in my comfort zone. Generous gifts from Rich and Stimpee was icing on the cake. Getting to shoot steel the first time was sweet and just getting personal feedback on my issues was great. Shooting on a timer was very eye opening. It was great to meet everyone and all had awesome input. Very grateful to all who volunteered time and came from all over, looking forward to training with the western pa crew in the future.

Gear: G19 ran great. Glock stock sights need to go ASAP; astigmatism issues plus those huge blocks were wooping me today.

Belt and holster were a real...floppy combo. Rich's holster will be replacing that spongy glock thing immediately.

[Odin Bravo One]

Glad to hear it went well........I had wanted to make it, but alas, work is demanding most of my time, and the family gets what is left over as it is.

Still, I'll keep my eyes a little wider for the next one and make sure Jay and Ash get a love package of parts, accessories, and other goodies to hand out to the membership shooters.

[TumblinDown]

I was sorry I couldn't make it Friday evening to hang with everyone, but the day was a lot of fun! Jay, Ashton, Tim and Dan covered a lot of territory during instruction, including safety, risk-based decision making, body positioning/stance, aiming and sight alignment, grip and trigger control. There wasn't enough time for presentation, but we covered all of the fundamentals in detail. As others have said, it was really good to hear "why" and not just "what" and "how." Most of the time we moved between three positions from 5-25 yards. It was great to be pushed on a timer. Making 5 good shots from 25 yards in 3 seconds was not easy for me.

Discussions and practicing good grip as a foundation for trigger control (probably worthy of a thread all by itself) were particularly detailed and interesting for everyone. Most of us made significant improvements in that area. Aggressively committing to the trigger was an important topic for me. Tim had a great analogy of running the trigger quickly but still under control; he likened it to getting on the accelerator of a car without feeling a sudden, violent lurch as weight transfers. It was more about running the trigger at a consistent speed, rather than accelerating through it. The made a lot of sense to me, and seemed to help avoid disturbing sight alignment. Learning to do that at different speeds based on the difficulty of the shot is my homework. We did a lot of work on the timer to push us along. We started with an exercise at 3yds., moved out further, and eventually started working on steel from ~10yds, going from a ready position to a hit on steel with the timer. IIRC, I made 0.29s with a DA trigger, but nowhere near the best of them... two of the guys were at 0.18s and 0.19s. We finished up shooting individual runs on five steel plates, working on vision and driving the gun. A lot of fun, for sure!!!

Thanks to AlphaSierra for letting me shoot one of his CZs! Different feel for me, but still very nice. I can see why there's all the love... and it was still a stock gun.

Steve with his prototype Beretta was a hit... it will be interesting to see if that gun makes it to production early next year. I only dry-fired it a couple of times, but the DA trigger was pretty nice, although at ~8.5lbs lighter than what I am used to. Lots of guys seemed to be hoping he had stuff in that black case that wouldn't make it back to his office in MD!

Overall, this was really a great time and I hope that we'll have more opportunities for P-F members to get together and do what we all love to do!

[Alpha Sierra]

I'm gonna echo everyone's thanks to Jay, Ashton, Dan and Tim for investing that most important commodity (their time) on us.

Jay's focus on the things that we as armed citizens will find most useful was a welcome change from other training that I've had and something that I think others would do well to follow.

Being only one day, the sharp focus on the fundamentals of trigger control AND the diagnostic tools to take home and work with made the day very, very productive. I've already made some changes based on direct input (thanks Tim, Jay) as well as other nuggets that were directed at others in specific or to the group in general but made me go AHA! For example, I thought I was gripping the gun hard. And I was, just not directing the force of my hands to where it would do the most good. Dry firing today showed me the difference for real and I'm itching to try out some of those changes in live fire tomorrow.

It was a lot of fun putting faces to the names and I think we all want to do this again. Someone mentioned scheduling similar get togethers in different areas of the country and that is definitely an idea worth following through on.

[Jay Cunningham]

Glad to hear it went well........I had wanted to make it, but alas, work is demanding most of my time, and the family gets what is left over as it is.

Still, I'll keep my eyes a little wider for the next one and make sure Jay and Ash get a love package of parts, accessories, and other goodies to hand out to the membership shooters.

I'm still handing out pieces parts from your last love package - thanks again for your generosity!

[Jay Cunningham]

Here's a link to my Dry Practice Misconceptions post. Guys in this weekend's class: now that you've had in depth context on the front end, I think what I wrote here should really resonate with you. Let me know if you have any questions, comments, or concerns.