There is no such thing as a free lunch. Regardless of the political, social, or economic context of our actions, there is a give and take associated with everything. Economists define this as opportunity costs, which are the potential losses or gains we make by choosing one option over another.
With regards to tactical training, the give and take is between creating a realistic training environment without distracting the learning process. For example, a worthwhile stress shoot may physically exert a student prior to engaging in a course of fire. A distracting stress shoot may unnecessarily exhaust a shooter to the extent that performance becomes irrelevant.
Special Operations training schools and selection courses recognize that the best way to induce purposeful stress on students or candidates is by limiting their sleep, caloric intake, and increasing their physical activity. However, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Creating this type of training environment requires a lot of resources and most importantly time.
For range training events, it is both impractical and logistically inefficient to limit a shooter’s caloric intake and sleep. Instead, instructors rely on physical exertion as a primary method for inducing combat-like stress within the restrictions of flat range.
But what is purposeful stress on the range? Attempts at creatively inducing stress outside of physical exertion also manifest in the form of yelling at shooters, throwing objects at them, duct taping body parts, and even beginning drills by falling on the ground to simulate being knocked down.
We should keep an open mind with regards to training methods, but be cautious of over-the-top behavior that correlates harder with being better. At the best training events and commercial schools I attended in the military, stress induction was always supplementary to the overall training objective, and patterned in manner that didn’t distort our perceptions of real world performance.
At shooting schools, this meant courses of fire designed to induce stress were either front loaded with some type of physical activity (e.g. sprints, push-ups, a kettle bell carry), or physical exertion was built into the activity by means of distance travelled during a scrambler, or moving a casualty during a scenario.
At a commercial shooting school that was fun-but distracted from learning-we were maced prior to engaging in a break contact drill. Did this induce stress? Absolutely, but it wasn’t meaningful because it was not patterned after any type of real world situation. Under these circumstances, harder was different, but arguably not better for students.
But I’ve never done push-ups or a kettle bell carry before getting in a firefight! The validity of conducting PT prior to a course of fire is that it is fundamentally different than the shooting activity itself. This allows students to disassociate the two acts, which mitigates any chance for misinterpretation of the overall training objective.
In marksmanship or mechanics based drills, disassociating artificial stress from real world expectations is not as difficult. For example, a shooter recognizes that by performing sprints before a drill he is forced to control his breathing and also shoot with an elevated heart rate. Where trouble arises is when scenario-based or “what if” drills attempt to induce stress, but actually end up confusing a shooter.
This is best demonstrated in the “fall down then draw from concealment on my back” type of exercise. Can a threat knock you down? Yes, but further examination of this type of drill exposes its negative returns.
Although drawing from concealment on your back is easily learned (even without falling down), the benefit of this type of drill is that you complete repetitions that reinforce a non-standard draw position. However, the consequence is that it does not properly condition a student for what may actually happen if an aggressor pushes you to the ground in the real world. More than likely he will be on top of you continuing his assault, and may actually disarm you if he identifies you are reaching for a concealed weapon.
This should cause a shift in the training method so that we do not distort our understanding of what happens in the real world. Instead of falling on the ground and drawing from concealment, perhaps we should move to the sparring mats, use inert pistols, and develop an exercise that closely resembles what would happen in the real world.
Is there a training value in getting up and falling down? No, because it distracts from the overall objective of preparing students for a close quarter fight. Measuring value added in training exercises should also be applied to physical exertion. For example, do you need to do 200 push-ups before shooting a drill, or can you instead do 20 and have the same desired affect of shooting with an elevated heart rate?
We should always seek to pattern exercises to prepare our minds for the real world. Harder or different is not always better. In the earlier example of breaking contact after being maced, my team’s performance did not suffer. Because we had years of experience executing the drill without unnecessary gimmicks or theatrics, our minds had been patterned in such a manner that we knew “what right looked like” regardless of any added pain stimulus.
The military refers to the “what right looks like” training technique as the jumpmaster method. In order to train soldiers to properly inspect parachute equipment and lead paratroopers on airborne operations, jumpmaster students are repeatedly shown how to inspect a properly rigged parachute.
When deficiencies are finally added to the inspection process they noticeably standout. Deficiencies are also added in a no nonsense manner that replicates real world rigging issues. This allows instructors to continue patterning a student’s perception of what to expect in the real world without distracting the learning process.
Special Operations uses this same training methodology with combat marksmanship and small unit tactics. Rather than distracting a student with gimmicks, soldiers are instead drilled (often to the extent of boredom) to standards that reinforce “what right looks like.”
When artificial stress is eventually added, shooters fall back on uncorrupted fundamentals. This means that throwing rocks at students or duct taping their hands provides little value added to the training environment when compared to more purposeful methods of inducing stress.
Range events do not have to be boring and we should always keep our minds open; but there is opportunity costs associated with everything. By choosing to perform activity X, what am I losing by not performing Y, and is this actually ruining my perceptions of what happens in the real world?
Or think of it this way, which jumpmaster would you want inspecting your parachute? The individual trained under rigorous standards that replicated real world circumstances, or the individual that was exposed to poorly thought out “what if” gimmicks that distracted his learning process?
Aaron is Special Forces combat veteran. Find out more about his training courses at:
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Great article!
I work in the outdoors, and one of my surefire ways of identifying an inexperienced and/or unqualified ‘instructor’ is an overreliance on inducing stress. Even at introductory levels stress is great tool to quickly underscore the potential severity of a situation, but it needs to be wielded with precision and experience. Too much stress too soon often shuts clients down and out. Those who make it through, often have look on their experiences favourably but have massive gaps in understanding. It’s all about building layers of skills and making early positive experiences. The early stress heavy training doesn’t do any of that.
My particular annoyance is the premature the use of artificial worst-case scenarios. I find that among my clients that are introduced to such training techniques (coming from other organisations) often end up with a skewed view of basic risk management and priorities. I also often find that they have a poor understanding of what elements are added into a scenario solely for the sake of stress and what are legit concerns.
That is an interesting point and the over reliance on introducing unnecessary stress might be because that instructor lacks confidence in front of his students and feels pressure to entertain them.
The distraction of confusing students might also be misinterpreted as purposefully challenging them, which creates a false-positive feedback loop.
For what it’s worth – I don’t want ANY Jump Master inspecting my ‘chute….I’ll leave that to the riggers! Great article! – I have always benefited more from drill, drill drill, and then a culex type scenario. This may tag team onto Nicco’s response somewhat but I will say that I think there is some value in reaching physical exhaustion prior to practical shooting drills on occasion. There’s nothing quite like trying to shoot and maneuver precisely and effectively when your muscles are burning and your chest is heaving – we can’t rely on adrenaline to be some kind of equalizer. Fitness is key, of course, in real world scenarios – but even the fittest can find themselves smoked in shoot and maneuver situations. That being said – in the beginning, the middle ,and the end there must be solid fundamentals in order for any advanced training to be of any value.
Haha, fair point. A rigger with a paddle has done more to fix chutes than I ever have.
A CCT Jumpmaster found my chute malfunction after inflight rigging on December 19th, 1989. I jumped at 0100 20DEC89 with 100mph tape around my canopy release assembly. Who’s fault was it that I got a bad chute?
I assume you’re talking civilian rigs as we don’t get to have riggers with us wherever we go (went) in the military, not to mention you pack your own HALO rig after your first jump.
Aaron was using the analogy of different military schools training techniques of seeing what is correct, repeating correct until you build your muscle memory and scanning what is correct. When something is incorrect, it jumps out at you. The muscle memory allows you to perform a sequence without thinking about it while still being able to think.
Applying that to shooting, you should be able to conduct mag changes and FTFs without thinking, all the while conducting command and control, target PID, and mission critical tasks at the same time, whether tired or fresh.
Calm down, it was a just s word play joke. Jumpmasters don’t inspect the parachute – just the container, harness, and equipment. It was a light-hearted joke….not an opportunity for you to whip out you ‘Look how cool I am’ card.
The point about working when tired is so that the shooter understands the effects of fatigue. Which I think is a valid point.
Really, “the look how cool I am” card?
ETADIK
Don’t come to the party with Keystone when the men are drinking single malt there “internet commando”
Spot on….alphabet soup, duct taped hands, flopping around on the ground…simunitions turned paintball..entertrainment for fantasy camp. Nothing more. All marks of inexperienced instructing
All representative of the current trend of poorly regurgitating something that has already been poorly regurgitated from social media instruction.
Every “stress shoot” I did for awhile involved doing burpees or some workout for time, then trying to shoot with the elevated heart rate and breathing. So you learn to take a breath, and engage targets slowly.
The best stress shoots I’ve seen involve a task completed to time. With some type of physical exertion tied to it, like a sprint or a body drag. When it gets competitive, you react differently.
My favorite shooting comp is still the 9 minute match.
9 minute match is a smoker! No where to hide during that course of fire.
Dang, this is a good one. All of Aaron’s articles are well written and very concise. Dude seems like a smart cat. Hope he comes teach on the east coast one day
Great article and well written. Reminds me of the bs at Griphon Group. The whole duck tape thing and rocks blows my mind. As far as laying on your back your in a gun fight not doing jiu jitsu. Keep up the great work .
I agree with much that the author wrote. On the other hand, due to extreme ingraining of what right looks like, I find that artificial stress shoots are just artificial. If you want to see how well I shoot after X activity, that’s fine. We can measure that and try to use it for something. If you want to replicate real world stress, it needs to be more mental stress than physical stress, for me at least. There are ways to add mental stress to a shoot, but they are harder to do, especially on the commercial side (author kind of mentioned this up front when talking about time and resources). Nonetheless, the schools and courses I’ve been to that successfully added mental stress, were some of the best courses I have ever taken. SERE is a good example, though obviously without the shooting part.
Good article.
Thats a good point. SERE school is the epitome of stress induced training, and none of it is fashioned around cheap gimmicks meant to entertain.
Well said.
Every “stress test” I was involved with in SOF, never had any exercise. That part came later.
What is never told to you is that a “stress test” is intended to test your brain housing group. It’s all mentally induced. We took 1 stress test at the end of weeks of marksmanship training. During those weeks they kept saying the word stress test. When you were standing with your back to the range not knowing what the target array looks like you are freaking out, “I have to pass”, “I hope I do good”, “I hope I don’t embarrass myself”, on and on….
Then the buzzer goes and you either relax and do it or you stress out and suck.
The physical portion comes after you prove you have the skills to move into a shoot house. When you are running around with breaching tools, litters, SAR saws, extra body armor, etc.
Very well written piece and I agree 100%. I also agree that all the extraneous and artificial gimmicks are mere window dressing for inexperienced instructors catering to the “social media tacticool crowd”. While it may be entertaining to some, those that take a class to actually learn new methods or to hone their skills find this type of tomfoolery a waste of training time and dollars.
Duct taping appendages, flicking rocks at shooters during drills, squirting fake blood in the eyes, spraying shooters with fire extinguishers, all the while constantly sticking a “malfunction stick” over the shooter’s shoulder creates a total artificial environment in which “training” takes a back seat to “entertainment”. I find that instructors that choose to to operate their classes in this manner care more about self-promotion than they do about preparing their students for a real world fight.
I’m all for inducing stress into training, but at some point the law of diminishing return kicks in and it becomes more about the instructor’s sadism and giving the Facebook and IG masses something to gawk at than it does about accomplishing the objectives of the POI.
Its really interesting that social media has actually caused a paradigm shift in the training industry both good and bad. Ten years ago we would have watched the tacticool crowd and chuckled, but now bro science is everywhere and often mistaken for “right” due to popularity; which is crazy because we have over 15 years of combat to cross reference material with. Not saying GWOT lessons learned are the “end all be all”-but they’re a pretty damn good starting point for tactical marksmanship.
The beginning of every day at CQB school was a 3/4 mile run, often in a gas mask. The next 8 hours of shooting in full gear were tiring enough already. When not shooting you were running from the line, to the ammo table, to the shed to await your relays turn to shoot again. No cheap gimmicks or tricks.
+1
Outstanding article.
I have a pet peeve at training sessions/courses that teach a technique the student isn’t familiar with and then adds a stress inducer on top of that. One really should allow the student to execute the technique dry or slowly to learn what right looks like before adding stress which can camouflage or even induce errors into the technique. I’ve found instructors that make this kind of mistake are trying to stay true to the concept of realism while forgetting “crawl-walk-run”. My approach is training including stress happens at the tail end of the run phase.
Not sure of the specifics of the exercise Aaron was referring to but there have been incidents where criminals have used mace. Probably not appropriate for a room clearing drill but might be appropriate for a car jacking/mugging drill.
Again, great article and very well made points.
That’s one of my pet peeves as well!
Most training isn’t and shouldn’t be ‘realistic’. Claiming that it is right out of the gate just muddies the water.
To use a particularly harsh example, it’s like briefly describing to a kid how to tread water then shoving him/her into the deep end of the pool. It certainly fits the bill for being realistic, but isn’t really of any substitute value. At worst you have traumatised a kid for life, and at the best the kid develops a poor water treading technique. Neither outcome actually achieve the original intent of teaching a kid how to swim.
Aaron Barruga is my spirit animal.