Celt
.338 Win Mag
I want to start by thanking Ben (and the whole team) from @OnSight Firearms Training for another excellent class last night.
I attended the previous Force on Force training class he held at the Paladin Center in Carmel back in December. Last nights class was quite different, and the additional variety showed me even more weak points in my preparedness for potentially deadly scenarios in the real world.
You can't attend the class like this with an ego because it is going to get bruised. I'll admit my whole life I've had a bit of an ego but it has gotten a lot easier to keep that in check as I've gotten older and wiser. Going to a class like this is not something where you're going to run through a training evolution and feel like you are the baddest man on the planet, it feels as if they are designed to attack your weak points and Ben is the kind of instructor that is good at reading people and his students to be able to identify these in each of us.
My personal perception is for each evolution to create some mistakes and in this we learn and grow. This type of training is not designed to make you feel like a badass, it's designed to make you realize what you need to work on and becoming better in all of those aspects. Im not saying its an 8 hour class of failing, as there are things that we are also good at and Ben will point that out as well, but there is less learning and growing in our successes than there is in our mistakes.
Last night had a strong theme of cognitive function, and decision making while under stress. We dealt with attackers with knives, and we also had 1 on 1 battling for a weapon. This was physical and if you have an injury or not comfortable with it you don't have to participate but nearly everybody did. I have a bit of a nagging shoulder injury I've been dealing with but I participated regardless because I love the physical aspect of training.
I learned a lot in this part of the training as well, and as I thought about it this morning over coffee I realized that I was working from a more restrained position. I was not thinking out of the box, the stress of each scenario limited my thinking, but I realized there were areas where I could have been more crafty in the hand-to-hand aspect which may have helped. Not that anyone was going 100%, and there were some rules and guidines to follow to keep it safe as it is training and not real life or death, but I saw some "shortcuts" I could have taken that would have helped me "get to gun" faster. Wasted movement is wasted time and time is life. So I learned some valuable lessons from this last night. I spent years as a wrestler in my youth, dabbled in some martial arts, and have had countless "street" encounters that became physical, but never where there was fighting over a weapon where my life was truly on the line. So regardless of my past experiences I have a lot to learn.
I dont want to explain the different scenarios we had because I don't want any spoilers for anybody as the idea is to be caught off-guard and to be surprised by each scenario. There would be no benefit to going into a scenario knowing what's going to happen because that would only be ego stroking and that's not what anyones goal should be.
Last nights class really showed me how much more I need to train and how much better prepared I need to be while carrying a firearm for self-defense, and even when Im not carrying (which is often since I work in crappy areas of NYC). I can't stress enough that anybody who values self-defense needs to get this kind of training. There is no replacement for it, to be put under shoot or don't shoot scenarios with stress is the greatest learning tool any of us could experience, and having hand to hand and weaponless training is equally important.
Im looking forward to taking more of this training in the future. Besides, with the cost of ammo this is a far cheaper way to get in some training.
As an added bonus I got to spend the evening hanging out and training with other Forum members.
@Dr. Evil , @fnfalguy , @PauleySquats
I attended the previous Force on Force training class he held at the Paladin Center in Carmel back in December. Last nights class was quite different, and the additional variety showed me even more weak points in my preparedness for potentially deadly scenarios in the real world.
You can't attend the class like this with an ego because it is going to get bruised. I'll admit my whole life I've had a bit of an ego but it has gotten a lot easier to keep that in check as I've gotten older and wiser. Going to a class like this is not something where you're going to run through a training evolution and feel like you are the baddest man on the planet, it feels as if they are designed to attack your weak points and Ben is the kind of instructor that is good at reading people and his students to be able to identify these in each of us.
My personal perception is for each evolution to create some mistakes and in this we learn and grow. This type of training is not designed to make you feel like a badass, it's designed to make you realize what you need to work on and becoming better in all of those aspects. Im not saying its an 8 hour class of failing, as there are things that we are also good at and Ben will point that out as well, but there is less learning and growing in our successes than there is in our mistakes.
Last night had a strong theme of cognitive function, and decision making while under stress. We dealt with attackers with knives, and we also had 1 on 1 battling for a weapon. This was physical and if you have an injury or not comfortable with it you don't have to participate but nearly everybody did. I have a bit of a nagging shoulder injury I've been dealing with but I participated regardless because I love the physical aspect of training.
I learned a lot in this part of the training as well, and as I thought about it this morning over coffee I realized that I was working from a more restrained position. I was not thinking out of the box, the stress of each scenario limited my thinking, but I realized there were areas where I could have been more crafty in the hand-to-hand aspect which may have helped. Not that anyone was going 100%, and there were some rules and guidines to follow to keep it safe as it is training and not real life or death, but I saw some "shortcuts" I could have taken that would have helped me "get to gun" faster. Wasted movement is wasted time and time is life. So I learned some valuable lessons from this last night. I spent years as a wrestler in my youth, dabbled in some martial arts, and have had countless "street" encounters that became physical, but never where there was fighting over a weapon where my life was truly on the line. So regardless of my past experiences I have a lot to learn.
I dont want to explain the different scenarios we had because I don't want any spoilers for anybody as the idea is to be caught off-guard and to be surprised by each scenario. There would be no benefit to going into a scenario knowing what's going to happen because that would only be ego stroking and that's not what anyones goal should be.
Last nights class really showed me how much more I need to train and how much better prepared I need to be while carrying a firearm for self-defense, and even when Im not carrying (which is often since I work in crappy areas of NYC). I can't stress enough that anybody who values self-defense needs to get this kind of training. There is no replacement for it, to be put under shoot or don't shoot scenarios with stress is the greatest learning tool any of us could experience, and having hand to hand and weaponless training is equally important.
Im looking forward to taking more of this training in the future. Besides, with the cost of ammo this is a far cheaper way to get in some training.
As an added bonus I got to spend the evening hanging out and training with other Forum members.
@Dr. Evil , @fnfalguy , @PauleySquats
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