On Training: On Training, #2

By Dustin Salomon

In 2016 Dustin Salomon upended the firearms and tactical training community with his book, Building Shooters. Widely considered to be a game changer by both instructors and academics in the industry, this book stood as the first serious effort to apply fundamental neuroscience and psychology research to HOW training systems should be structured for tactical applications. This book, Volume 2 of the On Training series, expands upon those same fundamental scientific principles. It covers the practical application of brain-based training for both entry-level and remedial students. It also debunks a number of widely held training myths that negatively impact student performance and contains a detailed analysis of the civilian training market, to include science-based recommendations for improving long-term student outcomes and performance. This book is a must-read for firearms and concealed carry instructors, trainers of law enforcement, military, and security personnel, and others who want to better understand the challenges facing this unique industry, as well as how the application of neuroscience and psychology research can help solve them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Innovative Services and Solutions LLC
• Release date: May 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9781952594038

Book preview

On Training

Volume 2

Selected Essays (Revised and Edited by the Author)

Dustin P. Salomon

and

Innovative Services and Solutions LLC Silver Point, Tennessee

Thank you for purchasing this book.

If you care about gun safety as much as we do, please visit the website below to access our free video series on safety and fundamental gun handling.

https://www.buildingshooters.com/free

This program contains some of the most important skills anyone who uses firearms will ever learn.

Yet these same skills are still frequently ignored in formal programs of instruction, leading to many avoidable accidents.

Join us in working to make the firearms industry, and society in general, a safer place. Secure your access now.

Copyright © 2020 by Innovative Services and Solutions LLC

All Rights Reserved.

Kindle Edition ISBN 13:978-1-952594-03-8

Imprint: Building Shooters

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020909803

LCCN Imprint Name: Silver Point, Tennessee

Table of Contents

Foreword by the Author

Section I: For the Teachers

Chapter One: Foundations

Chapter Two: The Gift of Ignorance

Chapter Three: Child’s Play

Chapter Four: Learned Helplessness

Chapter Five: Progressive Interference

Chapter Six: What if They Don’t Like It?

Chapter Seven: Do Something

Chapter Eight: Mentoring Matters

Section II: Debunking Training Myths

Chapter Nine: Myth 1 – People Have Different Learning Styles.

Chapter Ten: Myth 2 – Find What is Comfortable for You

Chapter Eleven: Myth 3 – Train to Standard Not to Time

Chapter Twelve: Myth 4 – Find What Works for You

Section III: Remedial Training

Chapter Thirteen: Don’t Make Them Worse

Chapter Fourteen: Go Low Resource

Chapter Fifteen: Fix Yourself

Chapter Sixteen: Context Matters

Chapter Seventeen: Establish Dominance

Chapter Eighteen: Fringe Benefits

Section IV: Understanding the Civilian Market

Chapter Nineteen: Motivators

Chapter Twenty: The Business of Firearms Training

Chapter Twenty-One: Structures

Chapter Twenty-Two: To the Instructors – Do No Harm

Chapter Twenty-Three: Regressive Stabilization

Time Hacks for an 8 Hour Training Course

Thank You and Join Us!

More from Building Shooters

Foreword by the Author

This book, when combined with Volume 1 of the On Training series, comprises an edited, lightly revised collection of the first three years of our articles, starting after the publication of Building Shooters in March of 2016. My goal personally, and the goal of Building Shooters as a company, has always been to drive fundamental change for the better in the training side of this industry, with a strong focus on the unique challenges that are associated with armed workforce management.

A lot has changed over the past 20 years. There was a time when even finding information about how to learn combative firearms skills was a challenge. No longer. Now the challenge is sorting through the vast volume of information to find a source that is valid. Anybody who wants to achieve virtually any level of shooting skill can access the information, equipment, and resources necessary to do so. It is not a lack of quality information or methods that poses a challenge for the civilian industry: It is a lack of structure. The information is there, but there are few places where it can be learned efficiently.

The professional side of the industry, where people carry guns for a living, faces the same problems. Equipment has improved significantly. Technique (as taught) has too. What has not changed very much is proficiency, which leads directly to the doorstep of training and qualification. It does not matter very much what techniques are taught or what equipment is used if the training methods and structures are not capable of making the students learn.

These are the issues that Building Shooters (the company) is here to fix. I hope the reader finds these books helpful in explaining why what we do, as general practice, does not work very well, as well as how we can fix these fundamental training issues. Thank you for reading and please stay tuned. Building Shooters has a lot more coming….

Dustin Salomon

Author/Founder, Building Shooters

Section I:

For the Teachers

What if skillsets and performance could be greatly improved? What if costs can even be cut in the process? We need to start training people the same way that they learn. It is long past time to start looking at maximizing efficiency and improving the rate of return on our and our students’ investments.

Chapter One:

Foundations

The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock....

—Matthew 7:25

This is going to be like drinking from a firehose.

Once we start putting out information, we do not stop. We don’t have time.

We have too much information to cover and not enough time, so buckle up. We are going to hit it hard!

We are going to pack as much information into today as we possibly can.

We do not go backwards in this course, only forwards.

Do any of these quotes sound familiar? If you have been around a while in the shooting and tactical training industry, they probably do. If you are an instructor, you have probably said something similar. In fact, you may say something similar virtually every time you teach.

If you do, do not feel bad. You are not alone. The author has used all of these phrases as an instructor on many occasions in years past. In fact, he distinctly recalls opening each iteration of an advanced weapons training block for a military unit with a speech about how we were going to pack over a month’s worth of information into a week. And we did—or at least tried to.

There are several reasons that instructors do this. It is not worth attempting to analyze them all here, but the biggest reason is because they really care about their students. We deal in life and death subject matter—even in training. As instructors, we know that if the students do not learn effectively, they could die—even in training. Most of us have internalized this quite personally at some point in our respective pasts, either as armed professionals or as concerned citizens, so we take what we do seriously.

All of this is good. Unfortunately, the methods of teaching that manifest through this burning desire to help our students sometimes are not so good.

For effect, let us reiterate something stated above: "As instructors, we know that if the students do not learn effectively, they could die" (emphasis added). Let us assume we agree on that: It says students must learn effectively, yet it says nothing about our teaching. Learn. Not teach. Learn.

This might seem like it is splitting hairs; however, it is not. Sure, our teaching impacts the students’ learning. However, teaching is not the same thing as learning. It is quite possible to be a very good instructor or presenter and teach very good content, while producing very little in the way of effective learning in the students. In fact, it is more than possible: It is common.

The final section of this book is about the civilian training market. Chapter Twenty-One is about various training structures and their impacts on the different aspects of the training industry. (Hint: learning suffers greatly.) Chapters Twenty-Two and Twenty-Three are focused on how to apply what we know about brain-science to improve outcomes and do what we can to reduce the negative impacts on students that result from the common, one-day training structure.

Real-world limitations are what they are. Sometimes we must work within them whether we like it or not. However, working inside those limitations is not our primary interest at Building Shooters. Rather, our objective is to help drive fundamental change in training design across the industry—change that bypasses these artificial limitations in favor of exploiting the capabilities of the human brain.

Like you, we are passionate about what we do. We also fully recognize, from personal experience, the life and death nature of this subject matter, whether it be for armed professionals, civilians who carry concealed, or simply folks who want to safely own a firearm for recreational purposes. The application does not particularly matter: A fight is a fight, and people are people. Whether you are a Delta Force ninja, a security guard at the mall, or a yuppie in suburbia who goes to the range a few times a year, we all have the same basic brain functions.

This crucial fact is something we often fail to recognize in the world of firearms and tactical training. Part of this is due to training myths, like the one about people having different learning styles (see Chapter Nine). However, just as often it is because we are simply teaching the same way that things were taught to us back in the day. Monkey see, monkey do. (Please do not take this as an insult: Trust us, we have also been the monkey—it is how we know.)

This is the area in which we want to stage an intervention within the industry. Here is a fun fact: All people have brains that pretty much work the same way, and the brain is what is responsible for learning.

What does this mean to us as instructors? It means that if we want to ensure that our students learn, we need to understand how their brains work, then use this knowledge to our advantage. For the military folks out there who are functioning as trainers, the student’s brain is the terrain you are fighting on. If you want to win the fight, it is critical to know and understand the relevant KOCCOA. (For non-military folks, this is a military terrain analysis tool: Key Terrain, Observation and Field of Fire, Cover, Concealment, Obstacles, Avenues of Approach.)

Our book Building Shooters is intended to provide a terrain analysis of the brain and guidance on how to exploit this knowledge to improve training outcomes. While we will not reiterate the book’s contents here, one of the things that we discovered during our research into modern brain science is that putting information into the brain is the result of a specific and consistent sequence. If we want to effectively make our students learn, this brain process is what we need to understand and then apply through our training systems.

If you are interested in the science, it is in the book. For purposes of the present volume, we will stick with a simple analogy to highlight the concept. You can think of training like a constructing a foundation for a new home (many thanks to Ken Murray of the Reality Based Training Association for brainstorming and coming up with this analogy).

The first step is to prime the surface. You cannot just slap concrete down; you need to prepare the ground first. It is the same with the brain. You cannot just throw information at it and expect good results. You need to prime it first.

Next you need to pour the concrete. In training terms, this is the actual teaching component. Once information is primed, and the brain is ready to receive it, it can be taught with far more effectiveness and consistency so that it actually goes into the brain.

After the pouring of the concrete is complete, the next stage is to protect it. Eventually, the concrete will cure and become the equivalent of a man-made rock. It will then support the structure and take a tremendous amount of strain.

However, just after it is poured, it is extremely vulnerable. Rain, animals, people, vehicles—all can screw it up before it hardens. During this vulnerable time, even concrete needs to be protected. It also needs to be left alone.

It is the same with the brain. Right after information makes it into the brain, it is extremely vulnerable to disruption. During this vulnerable time period, it needs to be protected from interference and other factors that can corrupt or erase it. It also needs to be left alone for at least twenty-four hours so that the brain can conduct its natural processes for transferring the information that needs to be retained into long-term memory.

Finally, if you are going to use the concrete as a flooring surface, you need to polish it. Concrete surfaces are rough and dusty. They might be structurally sound, but they are not functional as a floor. However, with a little more work and some continual maintenance, even a poured concrete slab can be turned into a beautifully polished surface.

It is the same with the brain. Once you get the information into the correct long-term memory system, you have a good foundation, but you still need to make it operationally functional. In training we call this process enhancement, which should involve a preponderance of applied, interleaved training methods.

Prime—Pour—Protect—Polish. When you think about it, it is an intuitive, almost absurdly obvious thing. So where is the rub? Why is this different from how most of our training is delivered today?

The simple answer is volume and timing. We currently try to do too much in too short a time. The result is that we never really build a solid foundation. In most training programs, students struggle with consistent grip and presentation. They frequently fail to acquire an adequate sight picture under even a minimal amount of stress.

After the training programs? Within a few weeks, many students, even those who are attending advanced courses, may struggle to even load and unload their weapons safely in some cases, much less employ them with skill. (True story: we have seen this firsthand on more than one occasion.)

This usually is not because the skills were not taught, nor is it because the instructors were fools or did not know how to present information effectively. Most often, it is a result of the training system used.

Too much information is put out in too short a time period. There is no priming, and information is not protected from the devastating effects of interference. Instead, it is barreled over by the next subject matter in line and corrupted through progressive interference (see Chapter Five) during well-intentioned training repetitions.

The practical result of these industry standard training methods is that most students very quickly learn a ton of bad habits that they must invest hundreds, if not thousands, of hours to correct if they ever want to become highly skilled. In fact, while there is perhaps some hyperbole here, consider that most shooters spend the first eight hours of their shooting experience learning every bad habit they will ever have. Then, if they want to be good, they spend the next ten years trying to correct them.

Let us reiterate: These harms are usually not happening because the instructor is doing something wrong in training or teaching bad material. Rather, they occur because the training system itself is fundamentally flawed.

This—the system—is what we need to change at a fundamental level. Instead of packing as much information as we can into a single training period, we should be