Praxis “360 Scan” Drill + CoolFire

One of the big problems that has crept into training over the last few years is the idea of doing a 360 scan.

Being aware of your environment is not a bad thing.

Scanning your environment isn’t a bad thing.

But practicing to quickly turn your head back and forth without purpose creates training scars…and it gives people a false sense of awareness of their environment.

I call it a “silly scan” (You may have heard Tatiana Whitlock call it a “tactical head bob”)

Today’s drill gives you an easy way to practice scanning your environment, identifying threat or no-threat, and engaging the threats.

Here’s how the drill works…

Print 3 columns of letters on an 8.5×11 piece of paper and cut them out so you’ve got 3 columns.

Put one on a wall in front of you…distance doesn’t really matter for this drill, as long as you can extend your pistol and read the letters.

Stand in the middle of the room with your inert training pistol or pistol you’ve temporarily rendered inert, face the column of letters, and see how far you can turn and aim to your right and left without pain and without lifting your feet.  Place the other 2 targets just inside of your range of motion.  (If you want to maximize learning speed, it’s critical that you don’t move into pain while doing this drill.)  If you can excuse my complete lack of drawing ability, this is what it may look like:

If you’ve got less mobility, the “rear” columns of letters may be on the side walls instead of the rear wall.

And here’s the video demonstrating the drill (I skipped most of the setup in the video and went straight to the meat):

Why’s it valuable?

1. It helps your brain scan deliberately instead of simply glancing…helping you go beyond just shooting to thinking and shooting.
2. It hard-wires in the limits of your range of motion so that you know how much of your environment you can see before you need to lift your feet, based on YOUR flexibility and mobility.
3. When you turn your head, resources in the brain shift from vision to balance and there’s a lag in how quickly you can see to shoot.  This drill will make you aware of that lag and help reduce it.
4. When you move your eyes, there’s a lag in how quickly your vision stabilizes.  This drill will help make you aware of that lag and help reduce it.
5. Real-world threats often approach at odd angles.  This drill will help take you from always using a perfect stance and shooting straight ahead to engaging targets at angles that may be awkward.
6. Discernment/thinking while shooting.  There’s a serious gap in current training because of the fact that fundamental shooting skills aren’t combined with basic thinking.  This drill adds a cognitive load to get you used to making shoot/don’t shoot decisions on the fly as well as making the drill more novel to increase learning speed.

Now, of course, once you’ve got this down, you’d want to start lifting your feet, getting off the x, scanning the full 360, and being more dynamic…but it’s good to start flat footed and get the basics nailed down.

This drill is one of the drills from the Praxis Dynamic Gunfighting course, and it’s a quantum leap beyond 99.9% of firearms training being done today.

How’s that possible?

Because the traditional approach to learning how to shoot on the move and at odd angles is to grind out LOTS of reps.  < But that’s just not practical for most shooters…either because of past injuries/physical limitations, time limitations, or money limitations.

The reality is, once you know how to incorporate balance and dynamic vision into your gun training, you’ll make quicker gains in performance with less effort than you thought possible.

Now, this is obviously important for young whippersnappers in the prime of their life, but it’s even more important for people with compromised mobility due to movement related pain.

I’d like to tell you more about it on one of the encore presentations of the Gunfight Training Workshop that I’m holding today.

We’re going to look at some examples of good guys winning gunfights from behind the 8-ball and how to tip the odds in your favor to do the same in an ambush/assault situation.

We’re going to talk about why performance after military, law enforcement, and civilian training drops off INCREDIBLY fast and how to prevent it.

And, for people who attend, we’re going to give you free access to the “Tactical Funhouse” training that will make your dry fire training more fun than you thought possible as well as the “Fixing Low-Left Groups” master mindmap.

Spots are limited, and if you’re serious about having the skills you need to survive a self-defense shooting, you really need to attend.

Learn more and watch now by clicking >HERE< now.

Questions?  Comments?  Fire away below 🙂

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