Sun Tzu in his work The Art of War famously said that “Every battle is won or lost before it is ever fought.” When your skills are tested, whether in conflict or competition, you won’t somehow magically perform higher than your training baseline. Your training, preparation, and planning are what carry the day. This applies no less to individual gunfights than it does to large scale military engagements.

So then, what are the implications? How do we structure our training to prepare us for the fight? Not in my opinion by trying to replicate the fight in training endlessly. There is absolutely value in the testing phase of training, but it should not be the main component of our training program. No winning football team does nothing but scrimmage. No champion fighter does nothing but spar.

In broad terms, we need to develop attributes, develop skills, and then learn to apply those skills. Attributes are the raw physical and mental properties needed to excel. Speed, strength and endurance are attributes, as are cognition, reaction time, and perceptual speed. Attributes are where GPP, or general physical preparedness, and SPP, or specific physical preparedness fit into our training template. This is also where visualizations and mental exercises come into play. Although these training modalities don’t build skill, they build the foundation for it. The better an athlete you are the better gunfighter you will be, given equal amounts of skill.

Once that foundation is laid, we need to build skill upon it. I strongly believe that skills are best built in isolation, without needless layers of complexity or difficulty that don’t address the target skill of a particular drill. If you come to a class, you’ll find that I put out a system for building skills in isolation as efficiently and productively as possible.

This won’t fully develop our skills though. There is performance degradation when you chain skills together, even without stress. The second phase of skill training as I see it is working on skills in combination, in aggregate. There are considerations here as well that I cover when I teach. The goal of this phase is to minimize skill degradation and build consistent performance with a low incident rate of error. This is important. Fights and contests are won by the individual who makes the fewest mistakes.

The last training phase, and in my opinion the one that should occupy the least amount of training time, is the test. This is where we layer stress on top of running skills in combination in order to find the weak points in our performance. Testing ourselves gives us the data we need to return to the other phases of training and prioritize the areas where we need improvement.

Every battle is won or lost before it is every fought. Battles are won in training. Make sure when you train that every aspect of it has purpose. Every single thing you do in training should be focused and deliberate. Every rep in training, every bullet fired in practice, should be a lesson. learned. Take the effort to learn how to train, and you will improve as rapidly and efficiently as possible. Proper training truly does shortcut the learning curve.