Todd Louis Green and the modern approach to using your sights

[HeavyDuty]

Thank you for this thread - it’s typical of the reason I came here to begin with, the kind of discussion where I shut up and try to emulate a sponge.

[JCN]

@TCinVA
@Clusterfrack

In thinking about “see what you need to see,” I think it’s actually a pretty good saying.

Part of the subtlety of it is that first you have to find out what you need to see. If you don’t know what you need to see and what your sight picture looks like to get the hits you need, that is the first part of it. Nobody just magically knows what they need to see because it is dependent on the mechanics in the wobble in the grip and trigger.

So inherent in that saying is hey, you need to first figure out what you need to see in order to get the hits. If you want to be able to see less and have more confidence, you need to work on your mechanics to get the vision to impact more faithfully.

That’s why training and practicing to never miss, you never learn your rangefinding and you wind up over-confirming for things. Part of what Max Michel says is “see what you need to see, nothing more, and nothing less.”

It’s basically a shorthanded way of saying know your mechanics at different distances and target engagements. Don’t under confirm nor over confirm. Have confidence in your vision-to-hit correlation because you practiced and trained to know what they are. A lot of people just practice to hit the target and take more time than necessary. That is the great thing about a competition sport that is time based. Too slow is too slow and doesn’t train you. That’s why untimed Dot Torture is missing a big part of what we are trying to train.

I will often do rangefinding exercises at the range and different distances to figure out what cadence and what vision I need for what kind of hit.

[JCN]

To piggyback onto that.

I ran this challenge without practicing but felt confident about it because I knew that I could transition to the point I was looking at precisely and I knew if I could see my dot on the shot shell hull my mechanics would allow me to send it.



That’s why I like a 6MOA dot. If I hold the dot totally within the target, I know I’ll hit it (because I get 2MOA of margin on each side).

[TCinVA]

Well, shit. Silly me went to the range today and tried this.

I'll be 71 on Thursday. I started shooting bullseye in my 20s, shot both UIT and bullseye through my 30s and 40s, and got pretty heavy into IDPA in my 50s. I haven't shot much competition since, just self-defense classes and defensive practice. But I've lived by the front sight for about 45 years.

I used my M&P40 1.0, stock except for the Ameriglo Hackathorn sights. I did this at baby-step level, first at five yards, then at seven, shooting at a B-8. I started at low ready, raised the gun, saw black in the rear sight notch and noticed the front sight somewhere in there, bang. Most of two magazines went into a 2"x3" hole starting at the X and going down. A few other shots were in the black and I jerked a couple out due to hurrying. My shots were much quicker than usual because I wasn't waiting for that perfect, steady sight picture. I didn't use the timer because it was just an experiment. But yeah, it worked. I need to work with it some more.

It works.

It isn't a perfect encapsulation of "see what you need to see" by any stretch, but it's going to be something that helps pretty much anyone who isn't at an M/GM level make immediate improvements in speed and accuracy...and that's the point.

I don't tell SEALs how to SEAL, Rangers how to Ranger, or GMs how to GM.

I try to help normal earth people get a shortcut to better performance with their pistol whether they want to use it or have to.

That was the core of AFHF, and that's what I'm trying to carry forward.

[TCinVA]

In thinking about “see what you need to see,” I think it’s actually a pretty good saying.

No, it really isn't.

If you have acquired a fairly advanced level of skill through repetition and self diagnosis...understanding that the ability to coach yourself is an uncommon trait in and of itself...you can go into all kinds of depth about what you need to see. That's lovely.

It's also essentially just tautology to someone who doesn't have that reservoir to draw from. And that describes easily 90% + of people picking up a handgun to protect themselves or maybe to eventually compete.

Teaching especially defensive pistol should be done like teaching first aid. We're trying to take someone who isn't an expert and give them a useful set of actions that allow them to have a useful intervention that prevents death and disaster.

If this is done properly it doesn't harm anyone's ability to progress to the highest levels of performance anymore than knowing CPR disqualifies someone from being an ophthalmic surgeon. What proper instruction at the level most people are actually at does do is demystify, decode, and simplify so that they can get better results right then and there.

[Clusterfrack]

"See what you need to see"
"Call your shots"
"Go fast; don't miss"
"Slow down; get your hits"
"Slow is smooth; smooth is fast"

None of these are good for teaching shooting unless accompanied by detailed instruction and technique specific drills. As a professional instructor of highly technical material, my experience is that cliched phrases like this make instructors seem wise and students feel stupid.

Back to "See what you need to see". What do you need to see, exactly? How can you learn that? A good starting point is to distinguish between (1) no sight picture, (2) flash sight picture, (3) stable sight picture. Next, explore what difficulty of target and context requires each type. I know this is not new to anyone here.

Shooting is not complicated, but it's not simple either. What it doesn't need to be is mysterious.

...by itself, "see what you need to see" is sort of BS. I know it’s blasphemy to question an Enos zen koan, but I find it fairly unhelpful unless combined with detailed instructions about what you need to see for a given target and context.

I also agree with TC that “see what you need to see” is an empty cup. It’s true, but empty, and needs to be filled in with the perspective of a developed, experienced shooter. That person has actual concrete answers in “see what you need to see” and it is not an empty cup, but useful instead. This is something highly developed by competitive shooting, and anything else where you shoot lots of different stuff under differing circumstances and physical regimes and thus slowly gives you the answers to what you need to see. I think it’s an empty cup to a beginner.

@TCinVA
@Clusterfrack

In thinking about “see what you need to see,” I think it’s actually a pretty good saying.

Part of the subtlety of it is that first you have to find out what you need to see. If you don’t know what you need to see and what your sight picture looks like to get the hits you need, that is the first part of it. Nobody just magically knows what they need to see because it is dependent on the mechanics in the wobble in the grip and trigger.

So inherent in that saying is hey, you need to first figure out what you need to see in order to get the hits. If you want to be able to see less and have more confidence, you need to work on your mechanics to get the vision to impact more faithfully.

That’s why training and practicing to never miss, you never learn your rangefinding and you wind up over-confirming for things. Part of what Max Michel says is “see what you need to see, nothing more, and nothing less.”

It’s basically a shorthanded way of saying know your mechanics at different distances and target engagements. Don’t under confirm nor over confirm. Have confidence in your vision-to-hit correlation because you practiced and trained to know what they are. A lot of people just practice to hit the target and take more time than necessary. That is the great thing about a competition sport that is time based. Too slow is too slow and doesn’t train you. That’s why untimed Dot Torture is missing a big part of what we are trying to train.

I will often do rangefinding exercises at the range and different distances to figure out what cadence and what vision I need for what kind of hit.

[TCinVA]

This thread has been the best and most fleshed out explanation of what I've been learning to do but couldn't explain as precisely. Blew my mind.

Right.

Something that needs to be understood here is that vision differs from person to person by VAST margins.

In highly technical fields like medicine, an entire language exists to communicate complex concepts in single words or acronyms that everyone involved has been through extensive education to understand. We have no such commonality in the world of shooting shit with handguns. As a result, descriptions vary. Beyond that, a significant chunk of shooting involves descriptions around using a sense that is as variable as possible. You have absolutely no idea what "blue" is to me.

We can both point at something and say "That is blue" and agree on it, but if you stop and really think about what is involved there you have absolutely no clue how I'm perceiving what we are both pointing at. You simply assume it looks the same to me as it does to you. The physiology between us is similar enough that it should be, and yet due to any number of variables (genetics, lighting, age, etc) we can look at the same thing and see it very differently. Anyone remember that stupid dress that was going around on social media a while back where everyone disagreed on what the colors were?

Point being that if we were able to objectively quantify what a lot of top level performers are seeing through their hardware, it would probably look considerably different than what we'd see through the hardware of a normal person. Part of that may be genetics. Some people have exceptional vision. Some people have exceptional conditioning in their vision.

In addition to changes in our vision brought on by age and diet, the "eye" (here meaning our entire visual system) can be trained. The more we spend time behind the gun, the better our system gets at seeing what is going on.

"Soft focus" and similar concepts can make sense if you have the time behind the gun and the conditioning to make sense of WTF that means. If I try explaining that to a group of cops I'm going to get glassy-eyed stares. Not because the cops are intellectually deficient, but because they only know what they were taught in the academy and what I'm discussing are concepts they've never even touched before. It's like trying to intelligently discuss high level theoretical physics to people who just learned algebra.

To help normal people I have to have something exact and crystal clear that I can communicate briefly and then reenforce immediately with followup exercises that highlight the teaching point.

I've been teaching adults who are experts in other fields the essentials on technology that they don't understand for more than 20 years in my day job. If there's one thing I've learned in that endeavor it's that simplicity is king. It's not a question of intelligence on the part of the audience because I regularly deal with people who are actual fucking geniuses. They have enormous depths of knowledge on topics I barely understand an overview of...but I have depth of knowledge on something they have little understanding of but have to use.

I'm not trying to make them the person that can rebuild the system they are interacting with from scratch. They want to use the system to accomplish their intended tasks. That's it. The more I can distill and refine what I tell them, the more easily it is remembered, recalled, and applied when they need it. With a certain percentage of them it leads to exploring a deeper level of curiosity where they start to figure out what else they can do with it and learn more. Some of them even get so good that if something is going wrong they can give me an accurate description of where the breakdown is sufficient that I can go right where the break is and fix it.

But it starts at that initial point of a clear concise explanation of "Do this and it will work." which is followed up by doing that specific, clear, unmistakable thing and it working.

That's what most instruction in firearms needs to be. The art of teaching is in the distillation of acquired knowledge into easily digestible and retained chunks. I'm shooting for the Feynman model because I've used it elsewhere to great success.

[Paul Blackburn]

There can be many variable that go into what you need to see. Size of target, distance, precision shot or not, urgency/time, and whether or not you know what you can get away with.

So there are some universal principles that apply and then there are individual techniques that are situational and dependent on skill level.

Not to mention differences in eye sight.

[TCinVA]

"See what you need to see"
"Call your shots"
"Go fast; don't miss"
"Slow down; get your hits"
"Slow is smooth; smooth is fast"

To expand on this a little bit, I'm aware of an institution who brought in a top level competitor many years ago to revamp their instructional program. A lot of these phrases exist in their curriculum.

In fact, one of the parts of the shooting process they teach is "call your shots"...and they have exactly zero exercises or explanation of what the hell "call your shots" means in that curriculum. It's taught as a part of the process, but it's taught in exactly the same way that the Underpants Gnomes explained their business plan:



Now when that top level competitor revamped their program and worked with that first series of instructors, things probably looked considerably different. But that generation of instructors left the job and replacements who weren't there at the founding of it came in. That second generation doubtless understood less than the first. Repeat that for a few institutional generations and you end up with certified instructors who are teaching what it says in the manual without understanding what the fuck is actually in the manual.

And all of this is being taught to people who mostly have never touched a gun before they've come to this institution as candidates for the job.

Every single one of those quoted sayings has value IF you actually understand the original context or have done enough work on your own to get at the core truth they are trying to communicate. Unfortunately what they have become is the shit you hear on a See'N'Say of bad instruction. It gets incompetently parroted over and over again by people who don't know enough to know what it originally meant, haven't done enough work on their own to figure it out, and don't have any idea that it's not useful to the people they are charged to teach.

It reaches the point where the words quoted above are the entirety of the communication because that's all that the instructors know or, even worse, that's all they're allowed to say because to do otherwise is to get the stink eye because you are challenging the institutional dogma.

I do my absolute best to exorcise the dogmatic statements I've heard in my time as a student from my use. I try to focus on giving clear, cogent direction and illustrating the "why" behind it with practical exercises and concise explanation.

That's hard to do and Lord knows I ain't perfect at it. But I learn more every time I work with clients.

[JCN]

No, it really isn't.

If you have acquired a fairly advanced level of skill through repetition and self diagnosis...understanding that the ability to coach yourself is an uncommon trait in and of itself...you can go into all kinds of depth about what you need to see. That's lovely.

It's also essentially just tautology to someone who doesn't have that reservoir to draw from. And that describes easily 90% + of people picking up a handgun to protect themselves or maybe to eventually compete.

Teaching especially defensive pistol should be done like teaching first aid. We're trying to take someone who isn't an expert and give them a useful set of actions that allow them to have a useful intervention that prevents death and disaster.

If this is done properly it doesn't harm anyone's ability to progress to the highest levels of performance anymore than knowing CPR disqualifies someone from being an ophthalmic surgeon. What proper instruction at the level most people are actually at does do is demystify, decode, and simplify so that they can get better results right then and there.

I disagree with your philosophy of teaching and that’s okay.

Like @Clusterfrack I’m a professional teacher of complex things.

Again Max Michel uses that phrase commonly in his online program BUT DEFINES WHAT THAT MEANS AS DID I.

It’s just short hand to refer to extensive lessons.

For a newer student I’ll explain it and set up drills so that they learn it.

Then I might refer back to it using short hand.

So for example to demonstrate the concept, I’ll set up drills that penalize over time as much as misses. That’s fundamental for preventing over confirmation.

And gets down to the root of “test how little you really need to see” at what distance.

Like for example, I had my wife run “The Test” and basically since she had been training to confirm without overconfirming, here was the result. Note that she hadn’t practiced on these targets or on this test prior.



You can hear the cadence difference when she goes when she sees what she needs.

I enhanced that vision ability with the center white circle.

Picking targets and drills that enhance their ability is part of being a good instructor.