Fast Cold Weather Draw Stroke?? Only if You Train.
A couple of things caused me to do this video…
- The number of people who have told me that they never do dry fire practice wearing the same winter clothes that they wear out of the house.
- The difficulties that I’ve seen people have when they try to draw from concealment with winter clothes on…and how they stop and restart when they run into a problem instead of figuring out how to work through it like they’d have to in a real-world situation.
With that, I’ll get right into today’s video:
What lessons can we learn from this?
- There’s a lot that can go wrong with drawing and reholstering in cold weather, under multiple layers of clothing, and with gloves on. Do 100% of your early practice with dry fire and the majority of your practice with dry fire even after you’re proficient. Before moving on to live fire, consider using an airsoft, paintball, or sim platform and make sure to review LOTS of reps on video and/or with a critical training partner. If your finger is sneaking into the trigger guard on the draw, if you’re muzzling yourself on the reholster, or your clothes/finger are sneaking into the trigger guard on the reholster, stop, slow down…do not pass go…and do not move on to live fire until you’ve modified your technique, practiced it over time, and tested it with dry fire or less-lethal rounds.
- Early on in training a skill, you want to only do perfect reps. Later, you want to make that skill resilient by making your response to adverse events automatic.
- Drawing from concealment with winter clothes on can be super easy if you’re always going to keep your coat on…in those cases, you can carry in your coat pocket or use your coat as your sole method of concealment. When you’re going to go about your daily life and switch back and forth between warm and cold conditions and need to maintain concealment, it gets a little more difficult…but not THAT much more difficult.
- Modifications of a basic skill (digging through multiple layers of cover after practicing with a single layer) is more of a modification of a skill than a new skill. Think of it as familiarization and exploration. That means that it doesn’t take a ton of reps to get up to speed.
- Whatever you’re wearing, it’s worth doing a couple of reps where you practice clearing cover and getting a grip on your pistol. You don’t need to draw. The pistol doesn’t need to move. I practice 2 types of get-to-the-grip drills. The first is getting to the grip quickly. The second is getting to the grip in a sneaky manner using body position and distraction.
- If you want to punch paper really well, train for that. If you want to perform well in real-world situations, you want to incorporate factors from real world self-defense situations.
I mention Real World Gunfight Training in the video. If you don’t have your copy yet, I encourage you to go to https://RealWorldGunfightTraining.com and either download the summary or see how you can get the book for free.
Now…the book lays out how you can create your own training system and the science behind the process.
If you’re more interested in the done-for-you, step-by-step follow-along at-home video system that will walk you through a process that will help you build more real-world skill in less time than what’s possible with traditional training, head on over to http://dynamicgunfighttraining.com/ to watch a presentation on the training and then make sure to sign up at the end. It is the absolute best and quickest way to take a shooter who has primarily done range training and give them the skills to handle real world shooting situations. One of the best known industry leaders has privately told me that it’s “The Ultimate Shortcut” to real world skills with a gun.
Questions? Comments? Fire away by commenting below
