Chapter 13 — Practice Between Classes

Ben

What you do between classes matters more than the classes themselves.

I have said versions of this several times in this guide because it is the single most important thing I want you to take from it. The classes are the seeds. The practice between them is the soil. Most students lose the harvest because they tend the seeds and ignore the soil.

This chapter is about the soil.

— Ben

What “practice” actually means between classes

Practice is not range time. Range time is part of practice. The larger and more important part — for almost every defensive student, in almost every life — is what happens between range visits.

That work breaks into three kinds.

Dry practice. Covered in detail in Chapter 4. Short, structured, repeatable, safe. The core of between-class work. Most progress in your fundamentals will come from here.

Live-fire practice with structure. Range visits run as actual sessions, not as casual shooting. A specific drill, run under a timer, with results recorded. A skill being worked on, not “let’s just put some rounds downrange.” The hour you spend in deliberate practice produces more progress than the hour you spend in unstructured shooting — by a wide margin.

Mental practice. Less famous than the other two, but real. Mental rehearsal of presentation, grip, draw, and decision-making is a documented training tool used across many performance disciplines. It does not replace physical practice; it complements it. Visualizing a clean draw, mentally walking through a defensive sequence in the car or before sleep, can meaningfully reinforce what physical practice has built.

A simple weekly rhythm anyone can adopt

The shape is the same across almost every student. The minutes shift.

• Three to four short dry-practice sessions per week. Ten to fifteen minutes each. With a timer. With a drill. With a written log.

• One live-fire session per month, at minimum. Run with structure. Two or three drills, scored against your prior visit, written down.

• One formal class or private session per quarter, at minimum. Two per year if a quarter feels too aggressive.

That is the baseline. More is fine if your life allows. Less is the path most students take, and it is the path that produces the plateau most students never quite escape.

How to know if your practice is helping

The honest answer is: you measure it.

A practice plan without measurement is a hobby pretending to be training. A practice plan with measurement is training, regardless of whether the totals are large or small.

The measurement does not have to be elaborate. A notebook works. A spreadsheet works. A simple chart on a refrigerator works. The point is to capture, after each session, what you did, what your results were, and what you noticed.

The most common failure mode in defensive practice is the one most adult learners are vulnerable to: confusing familiarity with competence. Familiarity is what comes from doing something often. Competence is what comes from doing something well, repeatedly, and being able to prove it. Without measurement, the two feel the same. With measurement, the difference becomes obvious.

Memory is a liar about practice. Notes are not.

A note about tracking — and a small confession

I built a tool to make this easier.

For years, I watched students start practice journals on paper, lose them, restart them, abandon them, and ultimately stop tracking — and stop improving. I built a tool called ShootTrackPro because I could not find one I was willing to recommend to my own students that did what I actually wanted it to do: capture sessions, drills, dry-practice work, AI-assisted form analysis for grip and stance, and progress over time, on the device you already have, with no friction.

This guide is not a sales pitch for a piece of software. The principle matters more than the tool. If you want to track your training on a spreadsheet or in a notebook, those work. If you want a tool built specifically for this purpose, ShootTrackPro is mine — and it exists because the principle of measuring what you do is the single best leverage point I have found in nearly a decade of teaching.

Whichever method you choose, choose one. The students who track are the students who progress.

Sidebar — David’s fifteen-minute weekday morning practice

It is six fifteen a.m. David is awake before his kids. He has approximately eighteen minutes before the household stirs.

He clears the safe. He confirms the firearm is unloaded, twice. He sets a small target on a designated wall in his home office; the wall is a load-bearing brick, on purpose. He places his small range bag with his timer and his snap caps on the desk. Live ammunition is in a different room. He has not changed any part of this routine in eighteen months, because the routine is the safety.

He runs four blocks. Two minutes of grip rehearsal. Three minutes of trigger press from compressed-ready. Five minutes of draw to first sight picture from concealment. Five minutes of focused repair on whatever did not feel clean.

He logs the session in thirty seconds. He puts the gear away. He pours coffee.

He is downstairs to greet his children twelve minutes later.

That is what capable looks like in a busy life. Not a heroic effort. Not a daily two-hour commitment. Fifteen minutes, repeated until it is the most boring part of the morning, for years.

Where this leads

What happens on the range and in your living room is one half of becoming a competent defender. The other half — and an underappreciated one — is what happens around your kitchen table, in conversations with the people you live with.

Let’s talk about your household.