A gun is not a talisman. Shooting is a perishable skill that must be learned and maintained. While we certainly hope you train with us, we encourage you to get professional training of some kind. We use the Practice-Rehearse-Perform model.
Practice
The foundation of improvement. This is where you make a deliberate effort to master individual skills and techniques, your safe place to fail and go slow. Practice is about repetition of correct techniques, refining basics, and addressing problem areas. Practice is where you build muscle memory and things become second-nature. This is your dryfire practice, your magazine insertions, your draw in the mirror. It’s not glamorous, but it is productive.
Rehearse
Develop bigger ideas. This is where you integrate individual skills and techniques into more complex tasks. You combine the individual skills you’ve practiced into real scenarios and refine your approach to those scenarios to be more dynamic. When you rehearse, you train yourself to address new and novel situations. This is your more complex shooting drills, your team exercises, the classes you attend. It’s fun, but if you don’t put in the effort to practice, you won’t get much out of rehearsing.
Perform
Do it for real. This is where it all comes together. You’re focused on executing actions and making decisions under pressure, not learning. You can’t stop mid-action to correct a mistake, you have to go with it and adapt. This could be a real-world self-defense situation, but it could also be a competition, a hunting trip, etc. It’s when everything you trained for really matters.