Practice Makes Permanent, so do yourself a favor and learn how to practice the right way ASAP. I’m a 3 gunner and I was fortunate be able to make the trip to the Tactical Performance Center recently and I had the best time ever. If you compete in 3 Gun, USPSA or something similar and you want to improve your performance, you need to take a class from TPC. One of their students/instructors became the youngest ever female grandmaster in USPSA. That alone should tell you something about the level of quality of their training. If you can’t make the trip to Utah, they do travel to your range. Get some buddies together at your local range to help shoulder the costs. Ken sells the way he wishes he could buy. If you need cancel, you can cancel the day before the class and still get a refund. If you sign up for a class and you’re somehow the only person signed up, they’ll still hold the class. Everyone who works at TPC are great people. My trip out to TPC was to take Handgun Mastery. It is a 3 day class designed to give you the tools to take your handgun game to another level. I was in a group of 12, and we never had less than 3 instructors at any point during the day. I believe we typically had 4 instructors with us. It sounds like this is the norm for TPC, they want to make sure that you are getting your moneys worth of instruction. Having a good instructor to student ratio is part of this. Many of the instructors are high level competitors in their own rights, some examples include Tim Yackley, Brian Nelson, Max Leograndis, and Jalise & Justine Williams. The instructors are there to help make sure you get the most out of the experience. They were willing to spend extra time with me to answer questions and make sure I fully understood everything. The class goes over everything that you would expect of something called handgun mastery. Stance, grip, recoil management, drawing from the holster, sight picture, accuracy, speed, etc. All the shooting I did was stationary and the drills were designed to help me bring everything together by the end of the class. They will break down each element, explain a little bit about the theory and how it all works, and then help you put it all together so that you can work on it when you get home. To get the full benefits of the class, you’re going to have to take what you’ve learned and practice at home. As I said, practice makes permanent. If you don’t take the tools they give you and drill it into your subconscious, you will revert to your old mistakes under pressure. Of my group of 12, I’d say 10 of them were already pretty decent to high level pistol shooters. I was not one of those 10, which is why I was so excited to take a 3 day pistol class. However, all 12 of us improved greatly over the course of the 3 day class. One of my group members remarked to the instructors something to the effect of “I’m working on reprogramming myself to use what I’m learning but I keep reverting to my old programming”. Everyone in our group had a good time and everyone found a way to elevate their pistol game. You’re going to get a lot of stuff thrown at you over the course of 3 days, so pay attention and take notes so that you can work on things when you get home. Your hands will probably get sore, so you may want bring some athletic tape for your hands. A cooler to store sandwiches for lunch will also be helpful. The course description says 1700 rounds, but I think i shot closer to 2200 rounds. This class is 100% worth it and I recommend it to anyone and everyone. The sooner you can take a class from TPC, the sooner you can reap the benefits and start building off what you learn. Practice makes permanent, and the sooner you can break the bad habits or the less than ideal habits, the better off you will be in the long term for your competitive shooting career. I wish I had been able to take this class sooner. I’m sure many of you have been frustrated after a stage, and I firmly believe that many of those frustrations would not have happened if I had taken this class at the start of my 3 gun career. Like I mentioned, if you can’t go to TPC you can always try to bring TPC to you. 3 takeaways: 1: I’m glad I didn’t have my 2011 yet. I feel like using my glock 19 made it harder to hide any potential issues I had. In my opinion, the 2011 weight and trigger would have masked flaws in my skills. All the skills I learned will transfer over to my future 2011 2: regardless of skill level, you will learn something. The sooner you take a class of this level, the better to speed up your learning curve 3: Be ready to practice once you get back, you need to be able to get rid of your old bad habits so you don’t revert to them under stress
We train you to hit at the speed of a gunfight.