Are Classes the Only Way to Become Proficient?

[JCN]

I came across this Kyle Lamb quote from an interview:
——///::
If you had to narrow it down, what’s the one thing that will improve a pistol shot more than anything else?

You need to train. There’s not one specific little task that you can perform, it’s a total package. You gotta draw safely, present the weapon, squeeze the trigger straight to the rear, follow through on the shot, and repeat as necessary. One mag, one kill. Get out and train on your own, and once you hit that plateau, go seek professional training from someone who is a better shooter than you. Then take it to the next level.

—-//::

I think for certain types of people, that is the best way to learn pistol. That’s my personal preference, train and track progress and when there’s a plateau or question, seek help. Preferably from someone who is a better shooter than me.

Note that’s different than getting advice on tactics or self defense, that’s a separate knowledge base than marksmanship although the two are often taught together.

[psalms144.1]

I came across this Kyle Lamb quote from an interview:
——///::
If you had to narrow it down, what’s the one thing that will improve a pistol shot more than anything else?

You need to train. There’s not one specific little task that you can perform, it’s a total package. You gotta draw safely, present the weapon, squeeze the trigger straight to the rear, follow through on the shot, and repeat as necessary. One mag, one kill. Get out and train on your own, and once you hit that plateau, go seek professional training from someone who is a better shooter than you. Then take it to the next level.

—-//::

I think for certain types of people, that is the best way to learn pistol. That’s my personal preference, train and track progress and when there’s a plateau or question, seek help. Preferably from someone who is a better shooter than me.

Note that’s different than getting advice on tactics or self defense, that’s a separate knowledge base than marksmanship although the two are often taught together.

Contrarily, as a semi-pro instructor, I spend an ENORMOUS amount of time re-training people who are "self taught" who have horrible, dangerous, unsafe habits and perceptions about defensive handgun use. Not pointing that at you or anyone else in this thread, just stating my experience over the last 30+ years of teaching firearms.

[JCN]

Contrarily, as a semi-pro instructor, I spend an ENORMOUS amount of time re-training people who are "self taught" who have horrible, dangerous, unsafe habits and perceptions about defensive handgun use. Not pointing that at you or anyone else in this thread, just stating my experience over the last 30+ years of teaching firearms.

Oh, I totally believe that. And I think for the most part that applies to most people.

But there is a subset of people who tend to be very curious, self-motivated and high achievers. For those people, they might have to "touch the stove" and work some things out themselves.
I thought it was interesting that there are a number of people like that (Kyle Lamb, Steve Anderson) who have that as an accepted style of learning.

[Yung]

I think folks really should go to a good force-on-force class.

[JCN]

I think folks really should go to a good force-on-force class.

I have a hard enough time convincing my wife to go to a square range....

[RancidSumo]

Key points of deliberate practice are:
PUSH your boundaries. Be just outside of your comfort zone.
You are not going for perfect. When you improve, then push the goalposts.
Having a defined goal for the short term is important, but you might have to change the routine to get there.
A coach can get you to a certain point in a defined field, but when you’re pushing the boundaries of the field you have to be your own coach.
Whatever the field, it takes a crap ton of hard work.

I got back into shooting last summer after taking several years off. At the same time, a friend of mine also picked up shooting again (also after having not shot for years) and we have gone to the range together consistently for a few months now. My approach has been to push boundaries every trip (trying for par times I know are a huge stretch, setting accuracy standards that really push my abilities, etc.), while my shooting partner has taken a very slow, deliberate approach. "Can't work on X yet because I'm still working on perfecting Y." The difference in the rate at which we have each progressed is pretty remarkable.

Now if only I could convince myself to take that bolded part more seriously.

[JCN]

I got back into shooting last summer after taking several years off. At the same time, a friend of mine also picked up shooting again (also after having not shot for years) and we have gone to the range together consistently for a few months now. My approach has been to push boundaries every trip (trying for par times I know are a huge stretch, setting accuracy standards that really push my abilities, etc.), while my shooting partner has taken a very slow, deliberate approach. "Can't work on X yet because I'm still working on perfecting Y." The difference in the rate at which we have each progressed is pretty remarkable.

Now if only I could convince myself to take that bolded part more seriously.

Spell it out for the PF crew...

Who has progressed more?

[Jeff22]

"Trying to learn something by making mistakes is a poor way to go. You are in the middle of a million bad habits, and without having someone qualified to teach correcting you, you are just wasting time."
-- Pat Rogers 04-07-2005

Having competent, structured training early in your shooting career can help you progress faster. One of the hazards in being entirely self taught is that you may have gaps in your knowledge that you don't know you have.

[Eyesquared]

"Trying to learn something by making mistakes is a poor way to go. You are in the middle of a million bad habits, and without having someone qualified to teach correcting you, you are just wasting time."
-- Pat Rogers 04-07-2005

Having competent, structured training early in your shooting career can help you progress faster. One of the hazards in being entirely self taught is that you may have gaps in your knowledge that you don't know you have.

I think the problem is that even shooters who attend multiple classes are essentially self-taught. Almost all of them went online, saw some reviews of a class, and picked and chose what they thought they needed to learn, from the person who they think they need to learn from. In my view that is still self-teaching. It would be like me trying to learn BJJ from a handful of 2 day seminars per year and then rolling around on a mat with a buddy. Technically I could say someone taught me, but in reality 99% of the work was done with no coaching (effectively self-taught, in other words).

Sometimes people choose instructors well and sometimes they choose very poorly and the majority of the class material just goes right over their heads. In my experience even the guys who attend multiple classes per year can have big gaps in their shooting knowledge depending on who they trained with and how much they retained. I have seen this myself in class, with shooters who have trained with the big name instructors, but cannot group at 25 yards, draw with an extremely inefficient gun path, reload with extreme amounts of wasted motion, etc.

Within the confines of the class the shooters are in structured training (hopefully), but for the vast majority of the year they are still left to structure their own training, or more often they just choose not to. I think there is a big opening in the "defensive shooting" world for someone to write a book that is a overview of all pistol shooting best practices, plus an overview of training best practices. IMO the only good way to avoid having big gaps in a shooter's knowledge is to expose them to a lot more material than you can cover in a 2 day class, but you can definitely do it in a book or a tightly edited video series. Ben Stoeger has books for USPSA shooters but obviously the competition background is a big turn off for a lot of people and by tackling different topics in each book there is some question in the reader's mind as to what material in the older books is still up to date.

[NoTacTravis]

For me personally, I like to look at this as opportunity cost.

I have extremely limited means and this is a surprisingly expensive hobby. Managing extended time away from home to pursue a hobby also burns relationship capital.

$500 for a course, plus say 500 rounds, plus gas, food (sure I normally try to pack all my own meals when traveling but I've always ended up with extra costs here) , incidentals, etc. Assuming no hotel cost here. Altogether my working figure comes out to about $700 conservatively (on old ammo prices) and say 20 hours of time investment from me for a typical weekend course. Plus using up one of my "hey honey... how do you feel about me disappearing for a weekend to...." spouse moments.

An example... Do I want to buy an SRO and take 500 rounds, shoot 250 rounds of doubles per day at the free outdoor range 30 minutes from my house and be back before the wife is home from a weekend shift? Or will I get better keeping my irons and taking all weekend at a class a few hours away? I see recoil control as my biggest lagging area in training at this point. The doubles and dot would probably get me further. The relationship capital of the class weekend away could be used to shoot a future match at Rio Salado if I get good enough locally to start feeling froggy and want to test myself against high level shooters in an unfamiliar environment.


Conversely, I spent a few hundred dollars on private instruction for the wife and I when we took out first shots. Doing it right and making sure we were going to be safe with a firearm was paramount. For the couple of weeks before the private lesson I bought a blue gun and watched about 10 hours of youtube focusing mainly on grip and sight alignment, memorizing the 4 basic safety rules, and probably practiced for 4 or 5 hours hands on with the blue gun and trigger finger discipline. I assumed we'd need at least 2 to 3 private lessons before shooting at the supervised indoor range on our own. At the end of the lesson the instructor (one of the range owners) told us "I'm perfectly comfortable with you guys shooting on my range on your own going forward. You should just do that and start practicing if you're comfortable. If you're not, I'd be happy to keep selling you private lessons."


I can totally see different people operating on a different matrix for improvement. I assume time, money, and motivation are in different supplies in different ways for every shooter. I've heard high level shooters comment that they would have burned 20,000 rounds trying to figure out what a good instructor told them in 5 minutes. For me, classes are likely to be a fun thing I might do in the distant future if we manage our retirement planning and stay the course. But I think I'll get better faster without them over the next few years by allocating my scarce resources to other areas of my training.

Obviously that's just my personal theory. But I also get a lot of motivation trying to "prove" it to be true for my own development. :shrug