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View Full Version : AAR: Trident Concepts Combative Pistol 2. Nov 7-9, Los Angeles, CA



luckyman
11-10-2014, 05:30 PM
This was a 3 day class taught by Jeff Gonzales. Jeff was the only instructor; there were 9 students in this particular class. This is a high round count class: approximately 2000 rounds.

I was a little nervous going into this class that I would be in over my head. It turned out good, but I definitely was glad I didn’t take the class any earlier than I did. I was looking for a “very technical fundamentals” class from someone who I thought would take significant individual time with each student to give personal feedback on weaknesses/opportunities for improvement . I had narrowed my choices down to either this or Bruce Gray’s “Practical Fundamentals”. I chose this one mostly based on scheduling and travel issues.

Jeff led us through a ton of detail on stance, grip, trigger finger placement, and follow-through. He explained both “what” and “why” for everything. His feedback to each student was specific to their individual situation, but the baseline things he stressed were:

Stance: Keeping your shoulder blades retracted, imagining you were pinching a nerf ball between your shoulder blades. Foot position was a typical athletic stance, but with particular emphasis on keeping the hips square to the target.
Grip: A bunch of details here, but the primary cue was to grip hard with your strong side pinky, to ensure you were providing enough grip pressure with your shooting hand. Overall Jeff’s grip philosophy felt fairly consistent with what I’ve read recently from Surf, although he used different cues.
Trigger finger placement: Start with the trigger finger in all the way to the first knuckle. Back it out as necessary due to avoid contacting the frame with your trigger finger. Jeff was definitely a fan of as much finger in the trigger as possible.
Sight alignment: Make extra-certain you are being very precise with the top edge of the front sight, and that you aren’t using the paint/tritium vial/etc as the alignment tool.


Much of the shooting was done from 25 yards to an 8” circle not visible at shooting ranges, on a bad guy wearing a black hoodie with no distinguishing features. Closer drills often went to a 4” head shot circle, or to a 2” circle. Most drills were graded; with passing score of 80%, and a DQ for any shot that completely missed the bad guy. Jeff led us through a whole bunch of drills that felt very structured with a lot of thought into the progressive nature of the sequence of drills. Drills included the expected ready positions, draw, reloading/ammo management, corrective action/failure drills, and strong hand only work. Again, the “why” behind every detailed piece of instruction was covered. It was very interesting hearing Jeff’s thoughts on the high ready; this was the first class I’ve taken that covered that ready position. Jeff also is a fan of manipulating the slide instead of using the slide stop during reloads, and had a good explanation as to why. He did express some openness to people using whatever worked for them on this subject.

A little SOTM was included, but not focused on. We didn’t do much target transition work other than going back and forth between body and head shots; most of the shooting was at a single target. Enough strong-hand-only shooting was done to firmly illustrate all the concepts, but not enough to really groove in the habits. No weak hand work was done. With 2000 rounds, all the techniques other than those I just mentioned got in enough reps to really solidify and smooth out the technique.

My results (i.e., feel free to skip this part):
This was a challenging class for me, in a good way. There were 3 shooters definitely head-and-shoulders above the rest of us in this class. Us other 6 were pretty close in capability. So there was a lot of good constructive competition.

8” hits under pressure at 25 yards and 4” hits at 15 yards were definitely at the ragged edge of my capabilities at the start of the class. SOTM past 20 yards was especially tough for me. I’ve actually reported in previous posts how I struggle keeping my shots from drifting left against a target with no defined aiming point. I had solved this at closer distances (10 yards and in). The range I go to is limited to 50 ft; at 25 yards this issue became immediately apparent again.

I had a huge epiphany the first day regarding my grip; finally getting the pistol to stay mainly flat during recoil and “snap back” into position sort of by itself. I’m going to be very curious to run bill drills next weekend and compare my results to what I could do before the class.

After I got past my grip issues, the first thing on day 2 Jeff had me take his advice re: putting my finger much deeper into the trigger. This was a much tougher adjustment for me, and my accuracy progress really slowed down for the next day and a half. Also I think it made me even more susceptible to “fliers”, and consistency wasn’t a big strength of mine to begin with. About 1 out of every 10 shots or so I would totally blow it, either just barely getting a hit or completely missing the bad guy by a fraction. When virtually everything is graded and you get DQ’d for any shot that doesn’t hit the bad guy, blowing it that often really sucks. It wasn’t until the very end of the third day that I finally “got” this part, and my groups started to tighten down significantly. Because I just “got” this at the end of class, I’m less bought in to it than the stance and grip changes I made. I figure I will give it another two good solid weeks of “Jeff’s way”, and then make a call as to whether to stick with this trigger finger placement or not. I’ve recently acquired a Shield to go along with my Glocks, and have found that I’m not good using the slide stop on the Shield. So I was already planning on switching techniques there. If I was sticking with just Glocks I think I would stay with using my left thumb to manipulate the slide stop.

At 3 days and 2000 rounds, this class was definitely an investment in terms of money, vacation time, and wear-and-tear on my hands. But I learned some things I’m guessing might have taken me years to pick up without the individual high-level instruction. So at this point it looks like I made a good investment. I’ll need to gauge my performance about a month from now to confirm that. It’s not the kind of class I would go to again the next chance I have (I’m trying to go to a class every 4 months), but I am hoping to attend it again this time next year.

Cheap Shot
11-10-2014, 09:38 PM
Thanks for taking the time to do this. Helpful and well written