Classes != Training

I see the “training” thing is still circling the drain of the Internet, refusing to go down. Maybe I can throw some gasoline on the fire.

Training is repeating an action until it becomes muscle memory. You can’t train for the unknown. You can only train for known, specific actions. Dry fire practice is training. Practicing your draw from a holster 10,000 times is training. Shooting hundreds of rounds a week is training.

Taking a class is not training. You may use the knowledge you gain from a class in later training but I’m betting you won’t. Nothing wrong with that, some classes are just fun.

But classes are not training.

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7 Responses to Classes != Training

  1. Agreed.

    Regarding hand-to-hand, what little I learned in the Corps I’ve forgotten. It’s my humble opinion that HTH takes much more time to keep up to speed … very perishable skills.

  2. DirtCrashr says:

    Ingrained neural pathways is a better description, there’s no such thing as “muscle memory”. Classes that train you in repetition help start the process but you have to keep it up and you have to recognize the correct pathway. You have to be aware of what the practice or repetition is doing to you/where it’s taking you – to what end. Training classes that “trained” Cops to stop and pick-up their brass trained for a particularly bad outcome in the middle of a fight. Some argue today the head-swivel is another one of those bad things since you can’t really (and really can-not) process that much visual information in the time it takes to make that movement – a movement that takes you out of the fight.
    A class that makes you/forces you to recognize your “blank spaces” – those parts of *training action* where you don’t know what to do, is also a good means of actually increasing your awareness so you can begin to involve repetitions that enhance it…

  3. Linoge says:

    Hm. Lemme guess: a self-absorbed narcissist put to rest his claims of disdaining the drama llama recently, did he?

    On a more topical note, training is an interesting thing… I took taekwondo for around five years back before and during high school, and then took off until recently. I have picked it back up again, but with a slightly different style, and when we get going on drills and such, I find myself automatically doing what I practiced to do hundreds of times a decade ago. That is “training”.

    It is also not terribly useful when you are trying to learn what the instructor is trying to teach you, but that is a separate topic for a separate post.

  4. Old NFO says:

    In the fight or flight mode, you’re down to ‘stem’ memory and gross motor skills. Unless you ‘practice’ those repetitive actions time and time again, you will NOT be able to perform them under real stress. Taking a class ‘may’ point out gross errors, or force you to try to modify already ingrained habits; but you have to ‘train’ yourself through repeated actions.

  5. LawDog says:

    “Training” comes to us from the 15th Century Middle English word “trainer”, which is an evolution of the Latin “trahere” which is “to draw” or “to pull”.

    The definition of “training” is “forming by instruction, discipline or drill”; “teaching so as to make fit, qualified, or proficient”; or “to make prepared (as by exercise) for a test of skill”.

    LawDog

  6. DirtCrashr says:

    Maybe I should try getting back into Kung-Fu, but it’s been over thirty years. What I experienced in class made me alert to the need to train to let go of magazines, and to stop trying to “manage” my immediate handfull of *things* and move to the next element more quickly.

  7. Jim says:

    I don’t cotton to this here practizin’, Sergeant

    -Alan (Alvin York) Snarkybytes

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