A few years ago, I got a text from the owner of a coffee shop that I frequented. His son wanted to be a state trooper and was at the academy, but he was days away from failing out because he couldn’t pass the firearms qualification.
He had one more shot.
His instructors liked him…a lot…and they spent hours of time and hundreds of rounds with him outside of class, trying to get him squared away without success.
I was his last shot.
So, we met at the coffee shop and went into a storage room to see what we could figure out with a SIRT.
They had given him a SIRT to use in his dorm and he’d been doing hundreds of reps per night…but nothing was changing.
He tried shutting his non-dominant eye, but his dominant eye shut so much when he did that it didn’t work.
None of the easy solutions were working.
I had him aim the SIRT at a target and shoot a few times, and then at a camera a few times. It was rough and he was frustrated.
He couldn’t figure out which eye to use.
Within the first minute or two, I could see that he was having issues with eye dominance, suppression, and alignment.
Not “cross-dominance” but his brain was confused about which eye was dominant and how to present the pistol so that it would be between his dominant eye and the target.
We did vision drills for a few minutes and when he presented the pistol again, he wasn’t confused for the first time and nailed the shot!
When he went back to the academy, he went from bottom of the class to one of the top shooters, and stayed there until graduation.
It has gotten to the point where I hear back from instructors I’ve taught several times a month with similar stories of careers saved with just a few minutes of the right drills.
Why does this matter?
For two big reasons…
First, in the past, there might be 1000-2000 applicants fighting for 100 slots at police academies each year. They could afford solid shooting instruction that didn’t include how the brain and vision works because there were 10 people fighting to fill every slot.
Today, we’ve got departments that are 30% under-staffed and it’s a struggle to get qualified applicants.
If someone is a good officer or has the potential to be a good officer and an easy-to-work-with visual challenge is all that’s keeping them from the job, then we might need to go beyond the old simple teaching methods to help them.
Second, when an individual decides to take responsibility for their security, get a firearm, and get training, we can’t let visual issues get in their way. After all, if they can’t learn to shoot well because of challenges with shooting with both eyes open, flinch, or other struggles, there’s nobody lining up to apply to do it for them.
If this is you, then I want you to watch a video that I recorded where I walk a room full of shooters through the drills that I’ve used to help hundreds of shooters shoot dramatically better with both eyes open in just a few minutes >HERE<
If you don’t struggle with both-eyes-open shooting, but want to know how to prime your brain to get more value out of every rep you take when practicing, you can watch the same video >HERE<
If you’re an instructor, this video will show you how you can set your students up for success and help them learn what you teach them better than ever. With some students, spending 5-10 minutes on these drills in the morning and then again after lunch can increase the amount that they learn by up to 2x…or even 10x. It’s the same video, and you can watch it >HERE< now.
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