“I am always doing that which I cannot do in order that I may learn how to do it.” — Pablo Picasso

I’ve been having some very interesting conversations about training lately with some good friends of mine. I’ve never trained with the legendary French shooter Eric Grauffel, but two of my good friends have, and their recent experiences training with him sparked some interesting discourse about randomizing training. For those unfamiliar with IPSC competition, Eric Grauffel is arguably the greatest action pistol shooter who has ever lived.

For a while now I have used two related concepts in my personal training. I have tried to devote a sufficient percentage of my training to more complex drills, what I call combination work. The idea here is to work a variety of skills in combination in order to build consistent performance in complex series of tasks. This differs from isolation work, where you grind away on one isolated skill or component of skill with high repetitions. 

The other related concept I’ve tried to incorporate into my training is interleaving training. The common prescription for practice is block training, where I finish one drill prior to beginning another. In interleaving training, the drills for a particular session are mixed together so that the trainee goes from one to another to another and eventually returns to the first again. If skills are designated with letters, block training would be AAABBBCCC and so on, while interleaving training would be something like ABCBCABACCAB and so on.

I’ve found significant value from these two concepts, and made improvements through incorporating them. I’ve now come to believe though after talking with my friends about what they learned from Grauffel that I haven’t utilized these training concepts enough. I used to believe that I wasn’t ready yet to move on from including a large percentage of high repetition grinding on technical work in my training. 

I’m beginning to think that this is an example of a trap that I’ve fallen into before. Hanging on to something because it got us to a certain skill level even though it has since become a limiting factor is so easy to do, and so difficult to avoid. I’m going to try a higher percentage of combination work in my sessions moving forward, and I’m going to do the majority of my practice in an interleaving fashion. I have a feeling that this training shift will give me new improvements in skill, especially on demand. 

The other change I’m going to make is to randomize my combination work more. This has always been something I’ve done some of, through combination drills and especially my friend Les’ Calvinball drill, but I think it’ll be the bulk of my practice now, even in dry fire. And especially in the ACE VR simulator I use for the bulk of my dry practice. I plan on doing almost exclusively complex drills, no two repetitions in a row of the same sequence, and attempt to build complexity on each repetition in a set.

I have a feeling that this training prescription is just what I need to build consistency and on-demand performance. There’s certainly a time and place for grinding away on technique in isolation, but I don’t think it’s what serves me best right now. Time will tell, but I’m excited to see the results.