Video Transcript
Getting better with a handgun can be a very difficult and confusing process sometimes. A lot of people on the internet nowadays are teaching about this technique or that technique or hey, you should train this way, you should never train that way and sometimes you don't even know who to listen to or even how to even start the process. But Ben Stager and Joel Park came out with a book called "Practical Shooting Training" and it lays out a great foundation and kind of a journey to go as your training progresses and what you should start with and also kind of the steps you take in between them.
So this book has a lot of great information in it of actual like principles of training, of how to be efficient, how you should structure your training, what different types of training you should do, but also a really cool key component this does is actually breaks the kind of shooter levels or shooters into different levels. So like your entry level shooter is gonna be getting a little bit different information as well as training, then kind of a higher level or somebody who's shooting matches a lot or actually winning matches, those are gonna be kind of tailored to different aspects. So it breaks it up into four different levels of level 1 being kind of like your, hey, I've never shot a match, I can know how to like operate a handgun, but I'm really not that good, okay? That's kind of your entry level.
How the book describes it for level 2, it's kind of like that B class shooter. I would also summarize this as like somebody who has shot for maybe a couple of years, maybe a law enforcement officer who's kind of, he can pass a qualifier, like an accuracy standard, but the time and the speed really isn't there. Then you have more so of a level 3, which they kind of say as a M class or a GM class shooter. So this is somebody who's like shooting matches a lot, they're putting a lot of time and their effort and money into it, they're traveling shooting matches, doing halfway decent at the matches as well.
Then you have your level 4 guys. Those guys are gonna be the guys who are actively winning matches, who are traveling to your major matches, to your area matches, to your national matches, being a contender for every single match, if not winning, those guys training is gonna be different than the level 1, level 2 and level 3 guys. And so that's why they break it up is very, very beneficial for that.
All of these levels, it maps out different dry fire and live fire drills associated with the individual levels. So like a level 1 dry fire drill would be a Blake drill and part time may be like close to like 4 to 5 seconds versus a level 4 Blake drill and dry fire, maybe the par time is close to like 1.9 seconds. So it really does a great job of kind of sticking you in the different levels and having those dry fire part times as well as what you're looking for, change per level as well.
You will have dry fire, you also have a lot of live fire drills to actually go and put into your practice of your training days. And they kind of change and adjust the level you're shooting at, but sometimes they're the same of like it's a bill drill. You can have a bill drill on level 2, at level 3 and level 4, but kind of what you're focusing on might change or the cues you're trying to input might change depending on the level as well. Also kind of the accuracy standard and the par times and kind of like what times you should also be hitting.
Now, when it comes to choosing which level you should hop in, make sure you are very critical with yourself and very honest with yourself about what level you're actually at. It would be much more beneficial for you to hop into a lower level and work your way up instead of hopping at a level that you're way not capable of. If you're thinking you're a level 2 or maybe a level 1, go ahead and hop in level one and start from there and you'll quickly blow through and go to level 2. However, if you start at level 3, you might really have missed some of the concepts that they really implement and hammer home in the level 2 aspects. That level 3 just takes for granted.
So overall, I think this is a great book to buy and to learn from and to actually just work as your training plan. There's also lots of areas to take notes in this book, so you can literally go to the dry fire, into your garage, into your spare room, whatever it is, and write down your par times that you're hitting, then go up to the range and do the same exact drills or the different drills that it does in the book, write down those times and kind of track your progress from there. But overall, I would highly suggest using this book. If you're interested, if you're not interested, then continue to fumble around and not have a structured training plan. But we are now offering this, so go out and buy you one. And if you have any questions about this, email us at team@trex-arms.com.