Originally Posted by
okie john
Good advice thus far, but drills alone won't get you where you want to go. Once you can shoot decent groups in slow fire, take a basic pistol course that teaches the draw, malfunction drills, and the other fundamental stuff. You don't need a big-name instructor for this--there are probably several good teachers in your area who can get your feet firmly on the ground with a few hours of instruction.
From there, it really helps to have a coach. If you can't find one, get a training partner who is about at your level. One of the problems with learning to shoot a pistol as that you can't see yourself make mistakes, so having someone else who can watch you shoot and catch your errors is vital. Video is also helpful. I've made iPhone video of myself shooting, then dropped the files into iMovie and slowed them way down. My mistakes are there in glorious slow motion for all to see, which really helped when I got serious about shooting quickly. Once you get your act together at that level, it doesn't hurt to start shooting IDPA club matches, which will give you a chance to start doing some of this stuff in sequences that drills don't. At that point, it wouldn't hurt to take a course from one of the celebrity instructors.
Along the way, read all of the AARs you can find on the better celebrity instructors like Ken Hackathorn, Larry Vickers, Kyle Defoor, Pat McNamara, Rob Leatham, etc. Most of these guys have a serious presence on YouTube, so that’s an excellent resource. Their videos can inspire you to outrun your headlights, but that's also part of learning. Before you go too deep on any one instructor, check his reputation around here—the internet is full of idiots braying at the top of their lungs about stuff they don't understand.
Finally, write things down and plan at least a year at a time, just like you did on active duty. I base my year on the Redneck High Holy Days (deer season). When the season ends, I review my AARs for hunts and training, note how various things helped or slowed me down, then set the next year’s goals and allocate resources to support them. For instance, I focused on IDPA from about 2012-14, so I wrote about matches and what I learned in them. That led me to focus on more realistic training for a while, and by 2016, I had set aside money, vacation time, and ammo to train with Ken Hackathorn and Larry Vickers, and I put myself through train-ups for those classes to make sure that I’d get the most out of them. For 2017, I’ll maintain my handgun program, but most new work will focus on rifles and hunting big game, so I’m researching and writing plans for that now.
I do this in my training journal, which also has notes on load development, gear, results from tests and drills, lists of stuff I need to do/buy, etc. This helps me stay current on a range of stuff and reduces the number of times I make the same mistakes.
Okie John
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