In college so many years ago I discovered a book written by Maxwell Maltz that had a profound effect on my life at the time, and continues to do so today. I was deeply involved in competitive skydiving and training for the freefall event involved a very expensive plane ride to give mere seconds of actual training time. His book Psyco-Cybernetics put forth an intriguing method of improving performance without the expense of making an actual parachute jump.
Shooting also involves considerable expense with ammo costs today being what they are. Dry fire is an exceptional method to reduce costs to become proficient. There is also the repetitive actions needed to train "muscle memory" so that when the hippocampus, or instinctive portion, of our brain takes over in stressful situations where we are reduced to Fight, Flight, or Freezing so we can produce the instant response needed in an attack carried out by a weapon holding assailant.
Flight is easy, everyone knows how to run. Fighting is far more complex and diverse, blocking a "sucker punch" is often a matter of seeing it coming, responding to an armed attack is similar, and here situational awareness allows a more complex defense to be initiated. Draw, aim, and fire are three steps that must be undertaken and extensive practice of these three steps is the only way to imprint them into the sub conscience mind so they are available once the animal mind takes over.
Putting Dr. Maltz's method into practice involves using the mind's eye to visualize successful performance. Visualizing the draw, aim, and fire sequence can help to build the muscle memory. It's not a substitute for actual range time, but it augments dry fire practice to program one's response to being attacked. It also allows you to run different scenarios and pre-program responses to these situations so that if confronted with one of them in real life you will be able to react instantly to the multitude of possible venues of attack.
Street thugs trying to rob you, drive by shootings, active shooters, hostage takers, the range is almost limitless and infinately varied, but if you can imagine them then you can prepare to respond very quickly if you have pre-visualized this multitude of situations and programmed your sub conscience to act when it takes over, and it will in any of these cases.
Carrying a weapon is only the first step in being able to protect yourself and loved ones. Becoming proficient in it's use is the second step, but training to the level of automatic deployment and response is an ongoing effort that one must undertake to be truly ready for what the World can throw at you.
I use this all the time, walking down the street I allow my situational awareness to go beyond just being alert. I visualize an attack by passers by, especially if they are the least bit skanky. I mentally perform my draw, aim and fire, use of available cover and, if with my wife, where to shove her for a more protected position. This can actually be fun, while shopping for furniture or some such I'll often transform the mostly boring sales person into a crazed attacker, putting him down with blazing speed, ether with a smoothly exicuted draw, aim, and fire, or if within arm's length a stiff fingered stroke to the adam's apple.
Before criticizing this mental training method please use you google fu to see what Psyco-Cybernetics is and the success it has proven to have on performance in controlled tests in many areas of human endeavor.
Digiroc
