PDA

View Full Version : AAR: Frank Proctor 3-Day Pistol & Carbine on Oct. 19-21, 2012 Los Angeles, CA



GM77
10-26-2012, 05:26 PM
http://i784.photobucket.com/albums/yy121/gm_77/WotG_OCT12/WotG_01.jpg
Instructor: Frank Proctor (http://www.wayofthegun.us/)
Company: Way of the Gun | Youtube Channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/wayofthegunpsllc)
Location: Angeles Shooting Range
Dates: October 19-21, 2012 (3 Day Shoots 2 Night Shoots approx 31 hrs)
Cost: $600.00
Students: 11 (Civilians w/ mixed background in competitive shooting and training)

Frank has served 18 years in the military and 11 of those in the US Army Special forces. He has served as the instructor for the Special Forces Advanced Urban Combat Course and is also a Grand Master in the limited division as well as holding a Master rank in the IDPA stock division.

This is a review of the 3 days of training I took from him and is focused on giving you a feel for the instructors goals, ideas and mindset. It is unfortunately really long but there should be some video and photos up later on that might be easier to digest or encourage you to look into Frank's classes.

Day 1: Pistol only with Night Shoot
We started the class with the range rules and safety brief then Frank started into his class. He talked about getting into the programming mode as we approached each lesson and he talked about what I believe is one of the main core aspects of his shooting and that is seeing.

“See fast, “

Frank talks a lot about seeing, seeing is everything and everything starts from there. He talked about seeing your sights flip and how they flip. Seeing your target or seeing things that were coming in from the peripheral and driving your sights to them. The more you can see, the faster you can shoot and the more corrections in your shooting you can make. Situational awareness is also seeing and something Frank incorporates that into drills that he would describe as “working on seeing”.

So, on that theme we started into dry firing with a pistol. We used some zip ties to keep our pistols out of battery and worked on seeing, just the sights on the target to practice seeing.

“Shoot fast, “

Next we got into the grip of the pistol. It basically had the universal concepts of having your firing hand as high up on the gun as possible and your support had thumb was parallel to the frame. But Frank went into further detail and talked about each hand and what exactly it was doing to minimize the recoil of the gun. All of which would translate to more control over the gun and faster follow up shots.

He also talked to positioning the gun to align with our shoulders, both arms slightly unlocked and hanging a bit (not the aggressive elbows up). Also stretch your neck out instead of tipping your head down so you can look through the center of your eye pro and eye sockets.

Frank focuses a lot on fast follow up shots. The stance and grip are both designed to maximize the speed of your follow up shots as well as maintaining mobility.

Now that we got everything down we went back to dry firing again with sights only and no triggers looking at the target. Frank went down the line looking at everyone’s grip and stance adjusting anything out of place. Lastly we talked about an efficient draw stroke to complete our shooting platform. This also received as much attention to detail as the grip. The focus of his draw stroke is speed to get the gun into a position to fire and speed to get the sights aligned. Then we shot a few magazines of single fire working on seeing, and the draw stroke.

I liked the individual attention he gave to everyone each time we started working drills. It wasn’t cursory either as he would stick with you until he was fairly satisfied with your shooting. Since the drills were run at an individual pace everyone got a great deal of practice and personal instruction.
After a break to reload we got into recoil management a little deeper. We started off by running a recoil management test which was shooting a 3x5 card as fast as we could run the trigger. Frank went down the line individually and adjusted each student’s mechanic. Frank had the student fire 2-3 strings with him watching and adjusted anything he saw that could help.

After he finished going down the line we shot three round strings into the 3x5 card. At this point if you remembered everything that was taught so far on this drill we worked on.


Grip and Stance
Efficient draw stroke
Seeing the sight come into your peripheral as you present the gun
Executing: Target + Sights = Trigger


As well as managing the recoil correctly.

After we worked through some more drills that dealt with shifting focus on paper and steel targets Frank got into his take on efficient speed reload and tactical reload. If you ever see Frank reload you can tell it is very efficient (i.e. no wasted movement) but still practical in the sense that your eyes are mostly on target except for less than a tenth of a second. His tactical reload also has similar efficiency and minimizes the time a magazine is out of the gun.

During this time he touched on scanning after your engagement. I won’t get into the entire details of the what’s and whys but his deal was this. “Your world was THIS big (arms and hands making a large circle), you got in an engagement and it became this big (fingers making a small circle) now your needs to get THIS big again… Train that.” I simply nodded to myself and thought /thread.

He set us up again and we worked reload drills and he went down the line assessing everyone. The drills are setup to work on the concepts we just learned. There is no actual limit to the repetitions so normally we would go through 2-3 normal capacity magazines worth of the drill.

“Get gone fast!”

The next topic we touched on was movement. First he talked about efficient movement techniques, mainly about shooting and then moving to another position to setup another shot. He went into details of how the torso should move as well as how the feet should move to cover ground. We also talked about shooting on the move and worked on that. He said a 2-3 mph pace as you are shooting is a good pace to train at and nothing less.
Frank is big on using competition to shake out what lessons we learned up to that point. Anything that hasn’t soaked in is going to break down when you are competing so it’s a great way to sand down the rough points or correct something out of place. It is also a lot of fun when you have students with great attitudes.

So he put together some man on man competition to put together all that we had learned about moving efficiently and shooting on the move and then we broke for dinner.

After dinner we returned for a night shoot with pistols. Frank went over a few hand held techniques and what he has seen people do with weapon lights. Then he described how he used his weapon light and integrated turning it on into his draw stroke. The rest of the night was drills and working on weapon light manipulation. The drills ranged from target ID and shooting (i.e. 3x5 index cards on paper targets with letters or numbers on them) to more weapons manipulation + light manipulation. Such as moving from barricade to barricade while squeezing off a shot in between, or working in a reload as well. I had a holster with a light loaned to a friend so I ran with a handheld and did not do as bad as I thought I would but I could see the clear advantage to a weapon mounted light.

GM77
10-26-2012, 05:26 PM
Day 2: Rifle
Frank jumped into the rifle topic with the stance first and talked about feet position which was slightly wider than shoulders and a bit squarer than the usual boxing stance. He talked about rolling shoulders forward to push into the rifle. Your support hand is going to grip the rail with the thumbs forward, similar to pistol, and then the elbows are left to hang.

We then started out in a similar fashion to pistol by doing dry fire and getting used to seeing the target and our sights. We took single shots and did similar seeing drills with the rifle and moved onto the recoil management test. Again we shot as fast as we could 5 rounds into the target as Frank looked on. He did this for each person and made his corrections as he came down the line.

When watching some of Frank’s videos, this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nKijRpi8Oc&feature=plcp#t=1m30s) particular sequence caught my eye. His reloads are fast and smooth but there was something about his rifle reload that just felt different. So I was all ears and eyes when he dove into this topic. He first talked about a deliberate loading procedure he does to make sure he is ready to rock. Then he jumped into his rifle reload as well as his tactical reload. Sure enough there was just a slight bit of difference in hand positioning and weapons manipulations to account for the smoothness. This is another thing I noticed is that a lot of the principles are things that have a commonality with other trainers but there are slight tweaks here and that will make up .5 seconds. This is something that is clearly of interest to competitors but maybe have tactical implications as well since that could mean a difference of 3 rounds from a pistol coming at you or 5 rounds from an AK.

So up to this point we had worked on recoil management which involves our stance (feet, hands, shoulder) and reloads. Like the previous day we transitioned to drills that worked on those fundamentals plus SEEING. Again Frank is big on seeing so we worked on some eye speed drills on paper and then moved to steel targets. As we broke for food he mentioned there would be a lot of movement and running so a handful of people made sure they had some gut bombs for lunch.

After lunch we worked on target transitioning. As Frank said it is just about executing a simple mathematical formula, “Target + Sights = Trigger”. And so we were off and running doing drills that involved working on target transitioning.

One thing I keep coming back to is the individual attention Frank gives to each student (note the class speed was good with the medium size of 10). Frank set up a target transition drill on steel with four targets. Two were close together on the left side of the range and the third was half way to the middle and the fourth was on the right side of the range. He would have one shooter at a time shoot the first two, then #1 and #3 and then #1 and #4. If a shooter had trouble somewhere he would have them repeat it after giving some tips. He would watch the students eyes and see if they were leading with them or if they were moving their head first or gun first. The final string was shooting #1-2-3-4 and you did that a couple times to put together everything he helped you with.

Towards the end of light we worked on drills that put everything we learned so far together. One in particular was a 20 rounds string that worked on “Targets + Sights = Trigger” and movement. You would shoot, move, shoot, move over and over until you finished your magazine. This was timed and any misses meant a fail.

We went for dinner just before dusk and then returned for the night shoot. Similar to pistol night shoot, Frank went over the thought process on where to position your light and how to manipulate it. Then we went through drills that worked on light manipulation and then worked on rifle light manipulation with transition to pistol. I didn’t have a pistol weapon light because of my holster so when it came to my turn I ran my rifle then as I transitioned to pistol I had to pull my flashlight out with my handgun. Frank saw that and as I came back he told me that instead of doing that, I should just keep my rifle light on and use that instead of turning it off and reaching for my handheld. He even had a couple different positions that I could hold the rifle with that were pretty stable.

The bonus to this night shoot was that a student had brought some night vision mounted on a helmet and laser on his rifle. So toward the end of the night he ran the final drill totally dark with the night vision and laser. A couple of people asked to try it out, including me, and he was more than eager to help us get it on and run it.

Now Frank jumped in and started to give us input on how to actually shoot the rifle with that setup and mentioned how he had run it before. He also gave the student some input on other details about working with the laser and night vision. This emphasized for me the true depth of Frank’s experience as a SF Operator and competitive shooter. He can go from tactical to practical and he has the background to back up what he says.

Day 3: Rifle

The beginning of day three we ran the last drill we did at night with rifle/pistol and then with pistol only as warm up. Then we worked throughout the morning working on different stages that incorporated a lot of what we had learned. The final morning stages were some housekeeping stuff and then we broke for lunch. Frank’s teaching has been consistent. He teaches principles and then we drill the principles individually. At the end we run drills that put everything together.

After lunch we moved out to about 100 yds and worked on some barricades. Frank went over many different positions that one could use around the barricade. He also went over a number of prone positions we could use to shoot under the barricade or if need be a car or other object. Having solid points of contact and very secure firing position was underscored in each position. As I have said before Frank puts an emphasis on fast follow up shots and even mentions that while doing single fire drills you need to put in the same amount of effort to control the gun as if you were going to do multiple shots.

We also worked on shoulder to shoulder transition to work on opposite sides of the barricade. Throughout the barricade work Frank went around helping people through their positions and getting them right.
As is tradition in Frank’s class we wrapped up the final part of the day with shooting competitions that worked the different principles we had learned.

Summary:
Frank has a very good background in shooting that starts with his experience in the Army Special Forces but his background in competitive shooting is solid as well. If you were to draw a Venn Diagram with Tactical Shooting and Competition Shooting, where those two overlap is where Frank seems to live. If needed he is able to step over to either side with ease because of his hard earned experience in both areas of shooting. He is a very approachable instructor and a good coach as well. He was able to push everyone to another level through his personal coaching. I would also say he sets the example of a great student and blends in with us to shoot some competitions or set the pace. I always like to see the instructor shoot; it is good to see how someone at that level pushes to achieve a time or problem-solve their mistakes.

Frank puts an emphasis on seeing, seeing is everything. In fact seeing is probably the difference between a fast/accurate shooter and an amazing shooter. Frank started the class with this principle and kept it going throughout the class. In this class he presented fundamentals that were tuned to bias toward efficiency in seeing, shooting, moving, weapon manipulation and solid platforms for fast follow up shots. After presenting the fundamentals or principles he would have us drill those specific skill sets and would correct each individual to his satisfaction. After those were drilled we ran more drills, this time to put together what we had learned and to give them a final shake down. Teach, drill, correct, drill, put everything together, drill correct and repeat. If I get another chance to take a class from Frank I certainly will each time, I am certain I will learn just as much.


Special thanks to SuperSetCA for setting this up and getting the equipment, this was an excellent course and you put together a really excellent weekend!

Misc:
Probably one of the best shooters I have seen in terms of accuracy, speed and efficiency. His sling is worth a look, I personally like it because it is minimalistic and allows you to do what you are supposed to do with slings when it comes to getting a solid shooting platform.

GM77
10-26-2012, 05:27 PM
http://i784.photobucket.com/albums/yy121/gm_77/WotG_OCT12/WotG_03.jpg

http://i784.photobucket.com/albums/yy121/gm_77/WotG_032_zpsa094ce5e.jpg

http://i784.photobucket.com/albums/yy121/gm_77/WotG_OCT12/WotG_004.jpg

http://i784.photobucket.com/albums/yy121/gm_77/WotG_OCT12/WotG_006a.jpg

http://i784.photobucket.com/albums/yy121/gm_77/WotG_OCT12/WotG_016.jpg

http://i784.photobucket.com/albums/yy121/gm_77/WotG_OCT12/WotG_017.jpg

http://i784.photobucket.com/albums/yy121/gm_77/WotG_OCT12/WotG_018.jpg

http://i784.photobucket.com/albums/yy121/gm_77/WotG_OCT12/WotG_019.jpg

Stare down for one of many Thunder Domes
http://i784.photobucket.com/albums/yy121/gm_77/WotG_OCT12/WotG_020.jpg

http://i784.photobucket.com/albums/yy121/gm_77/WotG_OCT12/WotG_021.jpg

GM77
10-26-2012, 05:28 PM
http://i784.photobucket.com/albums/yy121/gm_77/WotG_OCT12/WotG_022.jpg

http://i784.photobucket.com/albums/yy121/gm_77/WotG_OCT12/WotG_023.jpg

http://i784.photobucket.com/albums/yy121/gm_77/WotG_OCT12/WotG_024.jpg

http://i784.photobucket.com/albums/yy121/gm_77/WotG_OCT12/WotG_025.jpg

http://i784.photobucket.com/albums/yy121/gm_77/WotG_OCT12/WotG_026.jpg

http://i784.photobucket.com/albums/yy121/gm_77/WotG_OCT12/WotG_027.jpg

http://i784.photobucket.com/albums/yy121/gm_77/WotG_OCT12/WotG_028.jpg

http://i784.photobucket.com/albums/yy121/gm_77/WotG_OCT12/WotG_029.jpg

http://i784.photobucket.com/albums/yy121/gm_77/WotG_031_zpsfa342518.jpg

Video done by SuperSetCA (http://www.youtube.com/user/SuperSetCA). Lots of video of Frank and some lessons as well of other classes he has done if you want to check him out further.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5Jb6NFlfjA&feature=plcp

JHC
10-26-2012, 07:42 PM
HOLY SMOKES, the mother of all AARs. ;) I just trained with him and know what you mean. Thanks!

Skold
10-26-2012, 10:40 PM
Thanks for the AAR that class sounds great! Does anyone know what type of rifle that is that Frank is running in the pictures?

GM77
10-26-2012, 11:02 PM
HOLY SMOKES, the mother of all AARs. ;) I just trained with him and know what you mean. Thanks!

Thanks, that was one heck of a class! I envy people close to Frank that get to take his other courses.

JHC
10-27-2012, 05:56 AM
Thanks for the AAR that class sounds great! Does anyone know what type of rifle that is that Frank is running in the pictures?

In our two day my son and I were in sponge mode so much I consciously avoided distracting all of us too much with guns and gear talk - there was so much "software to load" but he mentioned building the rifle he was using with us (Oct 15th, 16th) and it looked remarkably like the one pictured here.

NickA
10-27-2012, 11:06 AM
HOLY SMOKES, the mother of all AARs. ;) I just trained with him and know what you mean. Thanks!

No kidding, and great pics too. Very well done.

Kyle Reese
10-27-2012, 01:25 PM
Outstanding AAR. Very well done and it looked like a great class.

Skold
10-27-2012, 03:07 PM
In our two day my son and I were in sponge mode so much I consciously avoided distracting all of us too much with guns and gear talk - there was so much "software to load" but he mentioned building the rifle he was using with us (Oct 15th, 16th) and it looked remarkably like the one pictured here.

Thanks for the insight, I was wondering if anyone knew who made the rifle he is using in the pictures/videos?

SuperSet
10-28-2012, 04:37 PM
Thanks for the insight, I was wondering if anyone knew who made the rifle he is using in the pictures/videos?

He mentions it on his FB page here. Hope that helps.
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=218636361600805&set=a.208895919241516.49650.208207132643728&type=1&theater

Skold
10-28-2012, 05:37 PM
He mentions it on his FB page here. Hope that helps.
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=218636361600805&set=a.208895919241516.49650.208207132643728&type=1&theater

Thanks SuperSet, From what I can tell it is a Troy upper on his rifle in the pictures.... not sure about the lower.

SuperSet
11-01-2012, 11:12 AM
Thanks SuperSet, From what I can tell it is a Troy upper on his rifle in the pictures.... not sure about the lower.

You're correct in that it's a 13" Troy Alpha BattleRail. I think it's a LaRue lower with CNC trigger and Ergo grip. If you haven't noticed already, it's a parts gun and this is usually what he'll recommend. Find the parts you like and put it together.

JHC
02-25-2013, 08:51 PM
A bit of a necropost but I judged it worth it this time. This is such a great Frank Proctor AAR thread I thought it ok to put this here.
Unfortunately as far as I know this vid is only loaded to Way of the Gun's Facebook page.

But it's pretty epic Frank. http://www.facebook.com/#!/photo.php?v=157866691034478

The story with it is that he's is having some fun during a shotgun class at his home range. For those without access to see it . . . spoiler alert. Frank hammers two close poppers very quickly with the shotgun then runs to his right. As he's running a clay pigeon is launched and he shoots the clay pigeon out of air ON THE RUN then stops and hammers a another steel silo with a slug at the back of his long bay - about 120 yards I'd guess from where he was when he took the shot. All very quick.

Matt O
02-25-2013, 08:56 PM
Like a boss! I'm signed up for Frank's class at Echo Valley in April - definitely looking forward to it.