Chapter 7 — Training Methodologies

Principles vs. Dogma

Ben

If your instructor can’t tell you why, find a different instructor.

That is the entire chapter, distilled. Everything that follows is an expansion of why that single sentence matters more than almost any other piece of advice in this guide.

The defensive firearms world is full of instructors who teach techniques. The best of them teach principles. The difference is the difference between a student who memorizes and a student who understands — and the second student is the one who keeps growing long after their last class.

— Ben

Principles vs. dogma

A principle is a conclusion you can defend. It connects to a reason. You can explain why it is true, and you can describe the conditions under which it might not be true.

Dogma is something you were told once and now repeat without testing. You cannot explain why it is true. You cannot describe the conditions under which it might not be. You just know it is right because you were taught it that way.

Every instructor — every instructor, including the ones you most respect, including Ben, including the giants of this field — carries some dogma. None of us tests every habit we hold. The work of the serious student is to learn the difference between what your instructor knows and what your instructor was told.

The industry has changed its mind. Repeatedly.

The honest history of defensive pistol craft is a history of revision.

Grip technique has evolved meaningfully in the last twenty years. Stance has too — the rigid Weaver-versus-isosceles debates of a generation ago have largely given way to a more flexible understanding of what works under stress. Ready positions have been re-examined. The role of sighted fire versus pointed fire is still actively debated. Carry positions, holster designs, even the language we use to talk about safety have shifted as new evidence has come in.

Reasonable people still disagree about much of it. That is not a weakness of the discipline. It is a strength. A field that revises itself in response to evidence is a field that is alive. A field that does not is a field that has become a religion.

Marcus learned to grip a handgun forty years ago, on his father’s land. The grip he learned was a thumbs-crossed-over revolver-era grip. It is not the grip that today’s research and competitive evidence supports for a modern striker-fired pistol. It is not wrong, exactly — but it is no longer the grip considered best. When Marcus’s instructor showed him a modern, high, two-handed grip, Marcus’s first reaction was that the instructor was wrong. His second reaction — which took a few sessions, and some honest reflection — was to recognize that the world had moved, and he had not.

Ryan ran into the same wall, from a different direction. The Army taught him a specific shooting stance and a specific way of holding the carbine. Some of what they taught him has held up well; some of it has been refined or replaced in the years since he served. The piece of his ego that wanted everything he was taught to be permanently right is the same piece of ego that delayed his progress in the first six months back behind a pistol.

This is the work. The infinite system has to be willing to update.

No absolutes

A useful rule of thumb when you are sorting principle from dogma: be suspicious of any instructor who says “the only right way.”

Different bodies have different proportions. Different missions have different requirements. Different contexts produce different correct answers. A draw-stroke that is excellent for a six-foot-three competitive shooter may not work as well for a five-foot-two grandmother in a wheelchair. A grip refinement that helps a strong-handed twenty-five-year-old may not help an older student with arthritis. A defensive sequence that fits a concealed-carry context may be wrong for a home-defense one.

This is not relativism. There are wrong ways to do things, and there are objectively better ways than others to do most things. But “better in most cases” is different from “the only right way” — and an instructor who treats the second phrase as if it were the first is an instructor whose dogma has crowded out their principles.

How to evaluate a technique

A short checklist when you encounter a new technique, whether from your own instructor or from anyone else:

• Does the instructor explain the reasoning behind it?

• Does the reasoning hold up under stress, or does it depend on perfect conditions?

• Does the technique match the way your specific body actually works?

• Has the technique been tested — by people who teach it, and ideally by people who have used it — against pressure?

• Are there reasonable practitioners who disagree, and if so, on what grounds?

Five answers in the affirmative is a principle. Three or fewer is dogma in a uniform.

Sidebar — Marcus’s first “wait, that’s not how I learned it” moment

It happened in a private session, in front of no one but Ben. Marcus had been gripping a pistol the same way for forty years, with his support-hand thumb crossed behind the strong-hand thumb — a holdover from the revolver era. Ben showed him a high, two-handed grip with both thumbs pointing forward.

Marcus’s first words: “My dad taught me the other way.”

His second words, ten minutes later: “Why does this work better?”

His third words, twenty minutes later — already drilling: “What else have I been doing wrong?”

That sequence — defensiveness, curiosity, work — is the entire shape of an experienced shooter learning to be a student again. It is uncomfortable. It is the work.

Sidebar — Ryan unlearns one habit and keeps another

Some of what Ryan was taught in the Army has held up under modern scrutiny. His safety habits, his trigger discipline, and his general respect for the firearm as a weapon were excellent — and they transferred cleanly to civilian practice.

Other habits did not. His instinct to “fight the recoil” with body weight rather than with grip mechanics produced a particular pattern of misses he had to slow down and rebuild. His muscle memory around magazine changes, formed under different equipment, took conscious work to update.

The point is not that everything he learned was right or wrong. The point is that some of it was, and some of it wasn’t, and the discipline of telling the difference is itself the work.

Where this leads

You now have a framework for evaluating instructors and a framework for evaluating teaching. The next decision — and one many readers are wrestling with as they read this — is whether to buy a firearm before you have started training, or after.

The honest answer is the same as it is for most decisions in this discipline: it depends.

Let’s get into it.