Now that you’ve received training on your self-defense skills, it’s time to master those skills through practice. Many people confuse training with practice, but they are not the same thing.
To put it simply, training is learning the skill, while practice is ingraining the skill. You must first have the training to ensure that you are practicing the right things in the right way. Without training, you’re flying blind, and you’ll almost certainly practice the wrong things. Proper training should also show you how to properly practice once the class is over to ensure you can continue to improve on your own.
In the rest of this blog, we’ll briefly go over the reason for practice and your mindset heading into it. Then, next time, we’ll cover in more detail how to actually practice what you have learned.
The Five Levels of Competence
Earlier, we talked about being Unconsciously Incompetent. This state is one of the Five Levels of Competence.
Intentionally Incompetent: You don’t want to learn the skill. Believe it or not, many gun owners fall into this category. They might be afraid to admit they don’t know, they think it will be too difficult to learn, or there might be some other reason. The fact that you are reading this is a very good sign that you are not Intentionally Incompetent!
Unconsciously Incompetent: You don’t know what you don’t know. As we discussed earlier, this is where most people are in respect to owning a handgun. You can only leave this level when an external event or person helps you realize what you need to learn.
Consciously Incompetent: You are now aware of what you need to learn, but you have little knowledge or ability about how it’s done.
Consciously Competent: You can perform the skill, but it requires conscious thought and concentration.
Unconsciously Competent: You have ingrained the skill and can perform it without conscious thought.
Proper training should get you to Conscious Competence. Proper practice will get you to Unconscious Competence.
How to Reach Unconscious Competence
The ultimate goal of practice is to ingrain the skills you are practicing to the Unconsciously Competent level. For the average person, that means practicing a skill about 300 to 500 times. That might seem like a lot, but if you structure your practice right, you can practice that many repetitions in a week or two.
By contrast, if you fail to practice after reaching Conscious Competence, over time the skill will start to degrade. Like all motor skills, skill at arms is a perishable skill. As your memory of what you learned fades, your skill deteriorates, and you will regress to Conscious Incompetence.
Let me give you a personal example. In spite of a year of Taekwondo lessons I took as a kid, I couldn’t show you a single strike or block today. On the other hand, despite the fact that I haven’t played regularly for years, I can sit down behind a drum kit and start playing. With some minimal rehearsal time, I could probably play with a band. The difference is I didn’t practice Taekwondo enough to reach Unconscious Competence, and I consequently lost the knowledge. On the other hand, I played drums regularly throughout high school and college, ingraining that knowledge to the point that I can still call upon it when needed.
That’s the level of skill you must achieve with your weapon. When your life is in danger, you should be able to perform well enough to win. And remember, you’ll only perform about half as well in a gunfight as you do in practice. You won’t rise to the occasion; you will sink to your level of training. Practice enough to bring your skills to Unconscious Competence, and set yourself up for success.
Practice Does Not Make Perfect
When you were young, your mom probably told you that “practice makes perfect”. I hate to break it to you, but your mom was wrong.
Practice makes permanent. Only perfect practice makes perfect.
Every time you practice a technique, you are building habits and “muscle memory”. (To be more technically correct, you are strengthening the neural pathways involved in performing that technique, but “muscle memory” is a common term that most people understand.) Each time you do something, whether right or wrong, it becomes more and more ingrained. Eventually, if you practice enough, you’ll build the skill to Unconscious Competence. If you practiced correctly, this is a valuable benefit, as you’ll now be able to perform the skill instantly, at a moment’s notice, without having to think about how it’s done. In a gunfight, you have no time to waste, and you must have the necessary skills at your fingertips.
Don’t Build Bad Habits!
On the flip side, if you practice bad habits, you’ll build those to an unconscious level. That’s why it’s important to be diligent in your practice to ensure that you are doing it correctly. Practice is like so many other things: you get out what you put in. If you practice wrong, you’ll get really good at doing it wrong. If you practice correctly, you’ll eventually become a master.
Once you learn the skill, it is very tempting to start going fast. After all, we all want to look like John Wick or Vincent from Collateral. (Incidentally, Keanu Reeves and Tom Cruise both underwent significant amounts of professional firearms training in preparation for those respective roles.) However, you should only practice as fast as you can perform correctly. If your speed starts causing you to be sloppy or start missing shots, you need to slow down a bit to ensure you are ingraining good habits.
Speed is a natural by-product of proper practice.
Be patient with yourself. The speed will come. Work first on doing it correctly. Build speed only after you are consistent.
Next time, we’ll cover some tips for dry practice.
Aaron is a retired Army Reserve officer & a two-time combat veteran (Iraq & Afghanistan). He left a career in IT to become a firearms instructor. In over fifteen years as an instructor, he has trained soldiers and civilians, & attained instructor certifications from Glock, Sig Sauer, & the NRA Law Enforcement division. He also worked for three years as a full-time range master at Front Sight, the country’s largest private firearms school, and has personally trained over 6000 students. When he’s not teaching, he enjoys real estate investing, stock market trading, board games, and ballroom dancing with his wife Brandi.
