Gunsite or Thunder Ranch first?

[rpenmanparker]

They found that the techniques they learned did not allow them to shoot accurately at a competitive speed.

A large part of that was caused by their buying into Front Sight's preferred Weaver stance where the focus was on isometric tension between the hands and pulling the gun down from muzzle flip

Is that a bad technique or is that just a case of one method does not work equally well for all people? IMO it is the latter. This is not one-on-one private instruction after all. I would have had a negative result from the isosceles stance if that had been taught there. What is the alternative to pulling the gun back onto target between shots?

By the way, at Front Sight I objected to their insistence on the high thumbs grip due to my hands not being large enough to accommodate it. I had trouble with both thumbs over the 1911 safety and reaching the trigger. They did not object to my using the thumbs forward variation.

 

[Kevin Rohrer]

What is an extensive range? Front Sight has more than 50 huge ranges. How many do you need?

I don't know anything about Front Sight, but 50-ranges sounds pretty good.

 

[rpenmanparker]

I don't know anything about Front Sight, but 50-ranges sounds pretty good.

It’s a big piece of Nevada desert. Very strange business plan kind of like Amway. That is the weakness.

 

[Deltaboy1984]

It’s a big piece of Nevada desert. Very strange business plan kind of like Amway. That is the weakness.

Explain please cause I remember Amway!

 

[rpenmanparker]

Explain please cause I remember Amway!

It is kind of a pyramid marketing thing. Members of the organization get credits for membership they can sell cheap to others. The owner bombards everyone with emails every day trying to sell ownership credits cheaply. The only way to understand is to sign up with them and see what happens.

 

[Terry Vincent]

All our responses are focused on training at various companies properly identified as competent providers. I have only attended Front Sight (last month) as a refresher course for myself and to analyze their course curriculum and instructional delivery. My LEO experience (forty years) provided substantial training experiences at several police academies, special weapons and tactics, as well as designing and implementing introduction and advance gun-fighting curriculum for new officers and tactical units.

I mention this not in passing, rather, because what we learn in any training scenario is perishable if not continually reinforced with frequent, intense, and realistic training. It is well documented in law enforcement we will fight as we have trained, and it is mandatory to maintain regular practice to realize the skill level reached in the training exercise. Civilian employment of deadly force requires equal follow-up training to maintain a skill set.

It is a high probably any of the venues being discussed will provide the new and or seasoned shooter a positive learning experience. The students will take with them skills likely not attained before the curriculum delivered by competent instructors. Certainly, as noted in several responses, this instructional style will vary, however, I suspect excellent results for the students are indicative of quality instruction. I doubt any of these private offerings would survive if they lacked requisite competent and experienced instructors.

I firmly feel confident all of the schools we are addressing will give the participants a well-rounded foundation that will contribute to their individual needs. The students will take home this new skill set and build on their specific needs as well as designing additional frequent practice sessions to maintain those capabilities learned at the school they attended.

 

[westernrover]

I would read those employee reviews of Front Sight that I posted again.

 

[9mmepiphany]

Is that a bad technique or is that just a case of one method does not work equally well for all people?

It is a case of the Weaver technique being based on a less than optimal philosophy of recoil management. I shot from the Weaver for years, through the 70s, and didn't change over to the Modern Isosceles until the mid-80s...after I had proven to myself that it actually worked better

I'm not saying there isn't a place where teaching the Weaver wouldn't be appropriate. It I only had one opportunity to instruct a set of shooters and I wasn't sure there were ever going to practice to maintain their skill level, I'd teach them the Weaver.

I would have had a negative result from the isosceles stance if that had been taught there.

What are you basing that belief on?
How long did you try the Modern Isosceles before it proved not workable?

What is the alternative to pulling the gun back onto target between shots?

Letting it return to your original POA as the Modern Isosceles does. You control muzzle flip with your latissimus dorsil muscles

The problem of pulling the gun back onto target is that the tendency is to pull it pass the original POA , resulting in you having to realign the sights on target

I objected to their insistence on the high thumbs grip due to my hands not being large enough to accommodate it. I had trouble with both thumbs over the 1911 safety and reaching the trigger.

I've noticed this in former Front Sight clients I've worked with. No one else teaches the Weaver that way...certainly not at Gunsite where it was originally labeled and taught. The inventor Jack Weaver didn't grip his gun that way either

 

[rpenmanparker]

It is a case of the Weaver technique being based on a less than optimal philosophy of recoil management. I shot from the Weaver for years, through the 70s, and didn't change over to the Modern Isosceles until the mid-80s...after I had proven to myself that it actually worked better

I'm not saying there isn't a place where teaching the Weaver wouldn't be appropriate. It I only had one opportunity to instruct a set of shooters and I wasn't sure there were ever going to practice to maintain their skill level, I'd teach them the Weaver.


What are you basing that belief on?
How long did you try the Modern Isosceles before it proved not workable?


Letting it return to your original POA as the Modern Isosceles does. You control muzzle flip with your latissimus dorsil muscles

The problem of pulling the gun back onto target is that the tendency is to pull it pass the original POA , resulting in you having to realign the sights on target



I've noticed this in former Front Sight clients I've worked with. No one else teaches the Weaver that way...certainly not at Gunsite where it was originally labeled and taught. The inventor Jack Weaver didn't grip his gun that way either

Mainly the locked elbows in the original Isosceles Stance would cause me some trouble. MI was unknown to me before your mention of it. When I said Isosceles, I meant my understanding of the traditional embodiment of it. Rigid, straight arms, no body blading whatsoever, feet on a line straight across the line to the target, etc. even all that may have not been accurate considering I never had any real Isosceles training. That was just my impression. I just read up on MI and am enthusiastic about trying it. Thanks for the heads up.

As for the isometric tension method of recoil control, I admit that doesn’t work well for me. That intense a grip funnels the natural shake from my hands into the gun. The tighter I squeeze the gun, the more it shakes and the worse I shoot. A more relaxed grip gives me much better results in slow fire. I’m not sure how the tightness of the grip affects my rapid fire results, either accuracy/precision or speed.

 

[Deltaboy1984]

It is kind of a pyramid marketing thing. Members of the organization get credits for membership they can sell cheap to others. The owner bombards everyone with emails every day trying to sell ownership credits cheaply. The only way to understand is to sign up with them and see what happens.

Thanks

 

[Jim Watson]

Why not Gunsite 250 followed by 350?
Or Thunder Ranch DH1 followed by DH2?

I wonder if mixing two instructors' ideas at the basic level is the way to go.

 

[luzyfuerza]

I've done a Gunsite course at a remote site, as well as several Front Sight courses and a MAG40 with Mas Ayoob. Plus others. I did the Gunsite course with a 1911 (figured I'd go full "Cooper"). I used a variety of handguns at Front Sight and in the MAG40, including a revolver.

Rather than ask a trainer to adapt to me, I generally take the attitude that I want to hear the material that an instructor is most competent teaching. After the class, I take what they give me, practice with it, evaluate it, and adopt what I think will work best for me.

That being said, I do tell the Front Sight instructors that, say, I'm working on MI in that class, and I've never had one push me to Weaver.

Mas' approach regarding stance was interesting...he suggested that we become competent with all of the major styles. His rationale is that in a real fight where you may end up shooting from unconventional positions, being able to shift from one stance to another would likely be an advantage.

 

[9mmepiphany]

Rather than ask a trainer to adapt to me, I generally take the attitude that I want to hear the material that an instructor is most competent teaching. After the class, I take what they give me, practice with it, evaluate it, and adopt what I think will work best for me.

That is what I do also. I'm there to be exposed to something "different" and maybe learn something I've never considered before.

Even Gunsite won't push to you into using the Weaver...especially if they can see that you are competent with something else...but I told them that the whole point of my being there was to see if I was missing something. It was interesting to note that that the Weaver and Modern Isosceles use identical foot placement. All the differences are in the upper body and recoil management philosophy...the differences can be characterized as the difference between Karate vs, Kung Fu; Hard vs. Soft styles

 

[luzyfuerza]

Oh, and if you do stick with your resolve to use a revolver, regardless of where you go you'll get lots of practice doing reloads with that gun. This is a good thing, of course. No sense spending precious time in the class getting better at mag changes on a bottom feeder if your objective is to learn to run a wheelgun.

We typically think of revolver reloads as primarily involving speed strips and speed loaders. But I've never done as many revolver tac reloads as I did in the courses I've taken using wheelguns.

Fortunately, the basics of stance, sight alignment, sight picture, trigger press, etc. don't vary that much between hardware platforms. You'll get good exposure to these fundamentals no matter which facility you go to or the order of the courses you take.

 

[9mmepiphany]

His rationale is that in a real fight where you may end up shooting from unconventional positions, being able to shift from one stance to another would likely be an advantage.

This is very true. You should be familiar and able to utilize multiple techniques. He points out inn one of his books that you should be able to transverse 270 degrees without moving your feet, basically transitioning from the Quell to a reverse Chapman

 

[ATLDave]

Two other points I'd toss in re: Iso vs. weaver:

1) The original inventors of the iso used (or at least thought they were using) modest grip pressure. Most of the guys winning these days say they are "gripping the [expletive] out of the gun." Some of them say they are also using chest muscles or some kind of arm rotation thing (and some do not), but they almost all agree that they are squeezing pretty darn firmly with the gun.

Some confusion (including, perhaps, that of some of the innovators) arises because of varying grip strength. Brian Enos, who literally wrote the book on the topic and said (at the time - he later recanted) that he used relatively little grip pressure, was a professional mechanic.* Those guys tend to have a lot of grip strength. People who possess a lot of grip strength may only have to use, say, 60% of their available gripping force to really effectively control the gun in recoil, while someone with moderate grip strength might need 85%, and someone with weak hands might use 100% and still find control lacking.

Now, it's certainly possible to get the gun to return on its own without using a crush grip (unless the gun is slipping in the hands), although getting recoil springs just right becomes important. But it will return faster if the grip is really firm. The gun will stay "flatter," and it will be faster to re-acquire the sights (they won't move as much, more of the movement will be later in the cycle and briefer, and they won't be as likely to dip on return).

2) Everyone talks about feet. Feet matter in Weaver. One of the real points in favor of Iso is that the feet don't matter a whole lot. You stand facing the target because there's no reason to stand any other way... but shooting an array with targets 30° left, 0° center, and 30° right doesn't require any foot movement. That's a big part of why the IPSC/USPSA guys went to it... as field courses started having targets at varying angles and in positions where you simply couldn't insist on a classic Weaver... you basically end up shooting iso or quasi-iso a lot of the time simply because you're moving around and pivoting, and shooting while moving. Weaver stuff makes that harder or impossible.

If you shoot a USPSA or IPSC match, you'll see people shooting in all kinds of positions in terms of their feet... including shots taken while intentionally falling over (dragging their feet in-bounds like an NFL receiver), with one foot in the air, while moving at a pretty good clip, while seated, etc. So foot position is extremely variable. What will stay pretty consistent for most of the good competitors (for shots beyond 3-5 yards) is that their chest will mostly face the target, they'll have both their hands relatively high on the gun, the gun will be roughly centered in their chest. They may have straight arms or arms slightly bent, but they won't have seriously bent elbows. So far, competition shows that's the stuff that works best for getting fast, accurate hits.

*The late, great Ron Avery often talked in terms of Iso being "soft," but he also had insanely strong hands. I have no doubt he was gripping the gun hard Iso... he just wasn't trying to muscle it with the rest of his body.

 

[Jim Watson]

2) Everyone talks about feet.

Amen. Whenever somebody says "stance" I figure they are thinking too much about their feet. I learned my "natural point of aim" with respect to foot position and am ready to go at "Gunner, target Pepper Popper, front" but if there is a broad array of targets, I am pivoting to engage them. Ol Mas didn't call it the "turret" position for nothing.

 

[Jenrick]

I write this post having been involved in firearms training for going on almost 20 years now, and having just come off a 5+ year stint with my agencies firearms training staff (we're a large metro agency). I've been to a lot of classes, taught a lot of people, and had the opportunity to work/train with a lot of folks who have been in gun fights in addition to personal experience.

Not all good shooters are good instructors. Not all good shooters are good gunfighters, most in fact aren't. Not all good instructors are good shooters. Not all good instructors are good gunfighters, most in fact aren't. Not all good gunfighters are good instructors, most in fact aren't. Not all good gun fighters are good shooters, I don't have enough first hand data on this one to say where the majority lie.

If you are going to training to LEARN how to shoot better, instruct better, or gun fight better, you need an excellent instructor. It doesn't matter if they themselves aren't a world class shooter, or a former member of a SF unit. If they are an excellent instructor they will make you better at the area you are there for. Front Sight, Gunsite, Thunder Ranch, Shaw, Rogers, etc. all have excellent instructors. Particularly when you're looking at basic and mid level courses. Most of the issues that many find to be dogma (trigger types, stance/grip, slide manipulations, etc) are a very, very small issue in a gunfight. The ability to run the gun with competency, and to get the rounds in the vicinity of where you aimed them will handle 95% of the "gun" part of the gunfight, which is about 15% of a gunfight. The rest is tactics, physical conditioning, mental conditioning, etc.

Excellent instructors can be found outside of the big schools, but going to a big school gives you a venue with a by and large vetted staff and curriculum. Are there disagreements on what the different schools teach, absolutely, but for 99% of the gun owning public it will still be plenty to address that 1% of their students who get into an armed confrontation. As a professional LE instructor working at a ~2000 officer agency, I had no restriction on what technique I could teach if it was effective. The odds of one of my students being involved in a deadly force incident is FAR higher than any civilian class, I would venture. I usually spent half my day arguing some esoteric point about support-side thumb slide release activation versus strong-side thumb slide release activation or something similar with my fellow instructors. At the end of the day though, 99% of our students just wanted a single technique they could use that would be effective, and the civilian world is the same.

 

[Old Dog]

^ Great post.

This

Not all good shooters are good instructors. Not all good shooters are good gunfighters, most in fact aren't. Not all good instructors are good shooters. Not all good instructors are good gunfighters, most in fact aren't. Not all good gunfighters are good instructors, most in fact aren't. Not all good gun fighters are good shooters,

is something I've thought about and argued about for a lot of years. Seems every young guy/gal coming up where I work who can clean the basic line officer qual course thinks that makes him (or her) qualified to be an instructor; same with the guys we get who made multiple combat deployments to the middle east and SWA while on active duty. Anyone can be an instructor, though -- few can actually be teachers.

 

[Jenrick]

Anyone can be an instructor, though -- few can actually be teachers.

Amen. One of the thing I was/am very proud of was redoing our firearms instructor school, and our curriculum to make sure we had teachers on the line rather than just really good shooters.

One thing I changed was to make the teachbacks the graded portion of the course, not the shoots. I don't care how you shoot past a certain point, I care how well you can impart that information to others.

 

[taliv]

if that is the case, then you could simply buy the dvd and learn what you need at home without going to a school. of course, that is helpful, and there are some dang good books on how to shoot handguns and rifles too.

what you get by attending the classes is really more like coaching than instruction. it's what 9mm was describing above. diagnostics and correction. the teacher needs to be able to identify what is the student doing wrong, and then know a dozen different ways to do it differently, and hopefully one of those will accommodate their body type, circumstances and lifestyle, eye dominance, injuries, budget, etc and still achieve the desired result.

the second paragraph requires someone who is a great shooter. it's ok if they're 80 years old and they can't shoot anymore. but at one time in their life, they had to be good at it. otherwise, they're just reading the book/video to you.