Marcus Wynne: "How To Use The Research To Actually Train Better, Faster and Cheaper"

In his article, Wynne was presented with the problem of retraining himself to use the “thumbs forward” grip on a pistol rather than the older "crush" grip that he had used for many years. Using research on rehabilitating stroke victims, he decided to focus on retraining using his off-hand (the left hand, in his case) rather than the right-hand. He explains:

      This approach has implications for firearms trainers and users.

      1) It can be used to accelerate new learning of motor skills fine and gross when those skills must be overlaid over a previous skill set and/or experience.

      2) It is a *dramatically* faster way of remediating problem shooters or learners when presented appropriately by an experienced instructor.

WHAT TO DO:

      I wanted to train the skill set of utilizing a new shooting grip while under stress into my dominant and non-dominant hands (strong and other strong, for those who think that way, of which I are one) —

     So I trained the left hand. Exclusively. For 21 days.

      1) First I “walked” myself through the grip with my left hand. Felt how it was in my hand. The differences were highlighted because it was my left hand (I’m right dominant). So the differences had a higher “signal value” than they did on my right.

      2) I marked out the difference in kinesthetic index on the weapon and my hand.

     3) With a holster and mag pouch set up for left hand usage, I trained 15 minutes a day or so. The session went like this:

 a. Closed eye visualization with kinesthetic recall of the feel of the weapon. Blow the visualization up full size (see previous post on controlling your internal imagery…you know how to do that, right?) and coloration. Moving at 1/5 speed, eyes closed, acquire firing grip *feeling* for kinesthetic (feels right) check. Go through presentation, eyes closed but visualizing, *feeling* your way through kinesthetic checks. At full extension, hold, open your eyes and check alignment of the weapon in your hand, the alignment of your sights with your training target. If not in alignment, adjust appropriately. Only press the trigger when everything is perfect. Repeat 5 or so times.

b. At speed, go through presentation w/eyes closed and open to check alignment and grip. Keep your visualization big and bright of perfect grip and alignment. Keep at this till you can do ten reps in a row and maintain perfect alignment each time. Again, only press the trigger on the perfect ones.

c. With pistol at whatever ready you favor, again work with your eyes closed, except moving. Not a lot, just spinning around, shifting from side to side, moving laterally or diagonally or forward. Align your weapon and open your eye to check alignment.

d. Then, eyes open and preferably while you are moving around, do a series of full speed presentations aligned with your target and press the trigger — only on the perfect ones. When you can do ten in a row, call it good and move to the final exercise.

e. Add your emotional content (fighting state access) to the presentation; in other words call up the psycho-physiological state you ideally want to be in when utilizing the weapon — if you don’t know how to call that up, on demand, and calibrate/monitor it appropriately, refer to previous posts or I’ll recap it later on. Ten perfect reps in your fighting state.

f. Finish on a good shot, and visualize big and bright the entire process.

For live fire, I’d wait 7-10 sleep cycles before I’d add that.

 He also goes on to describe his specific firing routine and how he cured a couple relapses to the "crush" grip when he switched back to shooting with his right hand. Read the whole thing.