I am coming up on 4 months of PSTG membership and getting video reviewed on a weekly basis, and I recently attended my first 2-day shooting class, taught by a well-respected competition instructor. I'll leave their name out of it because they did a good job with the class, they capped the enrollment at a very reasonable number, and they worked hard to get people their money's worth, so I really don't want anyone stumbling onto this post and thinking it reflects negatively on the instructor. In fact, we had multiple students who have been to all the big name instructors like Steve Fisher, Scott Jedlinski, Jared Reston, etc, who expressed that this class was run well. However, the class experience got me thinking about some of the limitations of a 2 day class format (regardless of who's teaching), as well as some of the strengths of video review.
Pros of in person teaching:
- Can actually do a demo. Some of the demos we got regarding grip pressure are tactile and can't really be done online.
- Longer blocks of time let you build from the ground up. Easier to explain the basics of grip, trigger control, proper transitions, etc. in lecture format for multiple people.
- Easier to see what the student is doing (sometimes). For stand-and-shoot marksmanship stuff it is easier to diagnose what the student is doing and correlate it with hits on the target in person. If it's not immediately obvious what the issue is, it is easier for the instructor to provide a suggestion to the student, see the result, and iterate on it in person vs doing the review online where there's a turnaround time.
Cons:
- Turnaround time from deciding you need instruction to receiving the actual training. I felt like I was starting to plateau in April-May of this year, registered for the class in May, and took the class in October. About 4 months passed between deciding I needed some outside instruction to actually receiving it and being able to apply it to my training. My understanding is that a lot of instructors have substantially longer lead times than that, if you want to get into a class with them.
- Individual time. This was my first class, but from what I understand from the other students' feedback, the instructor did an above average job in giving each student individual attention. I would estimate that over the course of 2 days, the instructor spent roughly 20-30 minutes working with each individual student. That is a decent amount of time and requires some class planning to make sure other students have something productive to work on during that time. For a video review, that isn't really a consideration at all, the whole review is individual time.
- Student fatigue. By the latter half of day 2 it was obvious that people were quite tired and that the rate of learning was slowing despite everyone's best efforts.
After this class experience, I am increasingly convinced that online video reviews are not inferior to in-person instruction. Between the cost of PSTG membership and this class, I am convinced that it would take some serious work to find a class that provides more bang for my buck than the PSTG membership. The caveat to that is that I have a decent understanding of marksmanship fundamentals as well as basic concepts in competitive shooting, and I train frequently. The PSTG video review format more or less involves Ben or Hwansik identifying the lowest hanging fruit to improve your shooting, and giving you ways to work on it in your training, but you ought to be doing a decent amount of training for it to work. If I were starting from the ground up I think in-person instruction might be more helpful. Curious to hear people's thoughts on this.