Chapter 4 — Time

Realistic Commitment and the “One-and-Done” Myth

Ben

The hardest conversation I have with new students is about time.

It is harder than the conversation about money. It is harder than the conversation about gear. It is harder than the conversation about what your spouse thinks. The money conversation is solved by arithmetic. The time conversation is solved by honesty, and honesty is not as comfortable.

Most new students walk in carrying one of two assumptions. The first is that a single good class will get them where they need to be. The second is that they will train daily, religiously, for the rest of their lives — which they will not, because almost no one does.

This chapter exists to put both of those assumptions on the table and replace them with something realistic.

— Ben

The myth of the one-class graduate

A single class — even an excellent one, taught by an outstanding instructor — does not produce a competent defender.

That sentence is more controversial in the firearms industry than it should be, because it threatens a comforting story most new gun owners have been told. The story is that you can take a one-day class, leave with a certificate, and consider yourself “trained.” It is a tidy story. It is a profitable story. It is not a true story.

The reason it isn’t true is that defensive shooting skill is what Tom Givens — one of the most respected voices in civilian defensive training, and someone who has spent more than two decades documenting what actually happens to his students in real-world incidents — describes as a perishable skill. Skills built in a single session degrade quickly without practice. Skills built across repeated practice, and reinforced under stress, are the ones that hold up when the infinite system is asked to perform under pressure.

The implication is straightforward. Trained is not a status you achieve and keep. Trained is a state you maintain — or lose.

The most common example of one-and-done thinking is the permit class. That conversation is its own — see the sidebar.

The realistic minimum

For a serious defensive student, the realistic minimum looks something like this.

One to two formal classes per year — at least one of them with an instructor who is willing to assess you honestly and prescribe a plan, not just walk you through a curriculum.

Regular practice between classes — and by regular I mean something specific. At minimum: one focused live-fire range session per month, plus a brief, repeatable dry-practice routine at home. We will get to dry practice in detail in a moment — it is where the infinite system gets most of its repetitions, and most new students badly underestimate what it can do.

The students who get good at this are not the ones who go to a class every weekend. They are the ones who quietly, consistently, run ten minutes of dry practice three or four times a week, year after year.

The work is small. The compound is enormous.

A word on dry practice

Of all the practices in this discipline, dry practice is the most underused — and the most undervalued.

Dry practice is the rehearsal of shooting fundamentals with an unloaded firearm, in a safe environment, without live ammunition anywhere in the room. Grip. Draw. Presentation. Sight alignment. Trigger press. Reload. Movement. Scanning. All of it can be trained at home, in a quiet ten-minute block, with a clear backstop and a serious safety routine.

The reason it works is that the infinite system — your hands, your eyes, your body, your attention — does not care, for most of what it is learning, whether a round is going downrange. It cares about repetition. It cares about consistency. It cares about the quality of each rep.

What dry practice can train: grip mechanics, draw from concealment, presentation and target acquisition, trigger press without disturbing the sights, reload economy, scanning, and post-shot follow-through.

What dry practice cannot train, by itself: recoil management, the physical and auditory reality of live fire, live-fire target transitions, anything involving actual round flight.

This is why dry practice and live fire are partners, not substitutes. Live fire confirms what dry practice has built. Dry practice cleans up what live fire has revealed.

Intelligent incorporation matters more than time spent. Ten minutes of focused, drill-driven, timer-tracked dry practice three times a week beats forty-five minutes of unstructured plinking in front of the television. The structure is the work. Pick a drill. Set a measurable goal. Run it under a timer. Record the result. Notice what improved. Notice what didn’t. Adjust the next session.

This is also where, over time, a tracking habit pays off. Memory is a liar about practice; notes are not. The single biggest leap in your progress will come the day you stop trusting yourself to remember what you did and start writing it down. We will return to this in Chapter 13.

Dry practice has its own safety discipline, and it is non-negotiable. Cooper’s Four Rules apply with more weight during dry practice, not less, because the absence of live ammunition is what makes complacency dangerous. The protocol is simple:

• Live ammunition lives in a different room from the practice space.

• The firearm is cleared visually and physically, twice, before any drill begins.

• The practice direction has a real backstop — a load-bearing wall, a brick fireplace, a heavy safe — in case of the unthinkable.

• When dry practice is over, the firearm is reloaded (if applicable) deliberately, in a different room from the one where the practice happened, with full attention.

Most negligent discharges that happen in homes happen during careless dry practice. Train the safety routine until it is as automatic as the drill itself.

Not all training happens on the range.

The majority of it — for any serious student — happens in the time and the space you already control.

What a sustainable rhythm actually looks like

Five characters in this guide. Five different lives. Five different realistic rhythms. The shape of each one is different. The principle underneath every one of them is the same.

David — tech executive, two young kids at home, packed weekday calendar. His rhythm is built around small, defended blocks. Fifteen minutes of dry practice on Tuesday and Thursday mornings before the kids are up. One Saturday morning live-fire session per month. One half-day private session every quarter to keep his work calibrated. Two foundational classes a year.

Sarah — ER nurse, irregular shift work, two children at home. Her rhythm is built around a different kind of constraint. She does not get to plan a clean “Tuesday at six a.m.” routine. She trains in the windows that open. She keeps a small dry-practice kit at home that is set up to use in twelve-minute pieces whenever the moment is available. She picks one Saturday a quarter for live-fire and protects it. She takes one formal class per year, planned six months in advance to clear her schedule for it.

Marcus — contractor with grown children, plenty of weekend time, and a forty-year history of practicing the wrong things. His rhythm is not about adding time. It is about redirecting time. The same Sunday afternoons that used to go to plinking now go to a real practice plan. His instructor gives him drills. He runs them, with a shot timer, and he tracks them — for the first time in his life.

Diane — retired, plenty of time, physical considerations she has to plan around. Recoil management matters more for her than for any of the other characters. Her rhythm is built around shorter, more frequent live-fire sessions — once a week, not once a month — with reduced round counts and careful attention to fatigue. She trains in the cool of the morning, when her hands work best.

Ryan — former Army infantry, project manager, two young kids. His rhythm has to honor two truths he doesn’t enjoy admitting: he has less time than he wants, and he has more rust than he wants. His weekly time mostly goes to dry practice — ten to fifteen minutes most weekday evenings, after the kids are down. He gets to the range monthly. He takes formal classes twice a year, deliberately with civilian instructors who are not impressed by his service.

Block scheduling — treat training like any other professional skill

If you are an accomplished adult in another part of your life, you already know how to do this. You schedule the gym. You schedule continuing education credits. You schedule your kids’ activities. You don’t expect any of those things to happen if you find the time. You schedule them because that’s the only way they happen.

Training works the same way. The infinite system requires the same calendar discipline as anything else. The students who progress are the ones who treat their training calendar with the same seriousness they treat the rest of their professional and family life. Block the time. Defend the time. Treat it like a meeting you cannot reschedule — because you cannot.

This is also why the one-and-done mindset is so dangerous. It is not just that a single class doesn’t produce skill. It is that the one-and-done framing actively discourages building the kind of rhythm that does. Calling yourself trained is the fastest way to stop training.

Sidebar — David’s twelve-month training calendar

Annual total: - 2 formal classes (~10 hours) - 12 range sessions (~36 hours) - ~130 dry-practice sessions (~32 hours) - About 78 hours per year. About 90 minutes a week, averaged.

That is what a busy professional with two kids can realistically do — and it is enough to build and maintain real capability.

Sidebar — The permit class trap

The permit class is, for most carriers, the only formal firearms instruction they will ever take. The class meets the state’s legal minimum. It does not produce a defender.

A permit is a legal and compliance document — proof you have met the requirements to carry. That is useful in a courtroom. It is useless in an encounter.

The training has to continue.

Sidebar — A 10-minute starter dry-fire routine

For a brand-new dry-practice student. Confirm your firearm is clear (twice), the room is free of live ammunition, and your backstop direction is safe before you begin.

Stop when the timer hits ten. Do not continue past the point where attention fades.

Quality over quantity is the rule.

Where this leads

Once your rhythm is honest, the budget conversation becomes much easier. Most of what people think of as a money problem in this discipline is actually a time problem wearing a money costume.

Let’s talk about money.