The Muscle Memory Training Conundrum

Training with your firearm is one of the most important things you could ever do. And, if you have ever sat through one of our in person classes you know that the primary objective of ongoing firearm training is to build muscle memory.

Your primary intent is to teach your body how to react automatically and without thought or fine motor skill when under pressure. This requires a lot of repetition. The problem with that repetition is that one ends up getting really good at doing everything one way and really poor at doing anything differently.

If you always train shooting in an open standing position for example, you won't have the muscle memory to shoot over or around the cover that you are likely to put between you and oncoming fire. If you always train with a hip holster and one day you have to draw from an IWB holster you are unlikely to be able to make the draw fluid and will never get the opportunity to defend yourself.

The solution is best summarized with the phrase, “Get good at one discipline, and then work on another.” In this context we use the word discipline to refer to one set of circumstances. A certain holster, draw, weapon, position, stance, and target distance and parameters. Your best training plan is to repeat one discipline over and over again until it becomes reflex and muscle memory.

Then, once that becomes embedded add a new discipline. Train it over and over again, going back and forth between the two. Then add a third and so on.

If you constantly train different disciplines each time you shoot you end up not being good at anything. If you only train one discipline over and over again, you will only be competent in defending yourself in one unique set of circumstances.

We understand that not everyone can make it out to our classes, so we developed a means of bringing the training directly to you in the form of our Guardian Nation membership. In short, it's a subscription that gets you access to all of our training videos, like how to best draw your weapon wearing different types of clothing, to moving with a firearm, to shooting behind cover and many other skills necessary to defending yourself and family.

In addition, you'll also get the quarterly box filled to the brim with tactical goodies, valued at your cost of membership. What this means, is that you get your money back in the box alone, while the training archive and all other benefits is the icing on the cake. That's me in the above video showing off the contents of the last GN Gear Box.

Make sure you sign up for it to take advantage of all we offer. There's nothing else like it on the web.