Over the years I have primarily competed in Dynamic / IPSC pistol shooting, but also in the more traditional pistol shooting disciplines, plus rifle, skeet, trap and sporting clays.

 

Early on in process, two things became very clear:

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1. Being a good shooter does not automatically make you a good instructor. 

 

At the time I was the reigning IPSC European Champion, which should mean that I was a pretty good shot. However, on the very first day / first class for a priority unit, when the guys started asking specific, but very basic questions: What do you see? – How tight do you hold the gun? – How do you manipulate the trigger on hard vs easier targets etc… I was lost! - as I did not know. Almost everything I had learned about shooting and basically all my skills, were stored in my subconsciousness. I could show the class how to shoot, but I was unable to verbally explain what I was doing.

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2. Competition techniques needed to be carefully evaluated before implementation.

 

Competition shooters play a game. That’s all we do and that’s what we want. There are lots of reasons why many of the techniques we use in traditional or IPSC shooting have no place in the real world, which is probably the way it should be.

Suffice to say that as a shooting instructor you need to listen to what your customer wants and you adapt to their requirements and not the other way around. The by-product may well be, that as shooting skills improve, tactics and procedures may change, because other options become available. This is where the real work began. First of all, I had to go through a long process of actually identifying the various techniques in my “arsenal”, but also try to turn this “realization” into words and a language that would be understood on a cold and windy Norwegian shooting range. Secondly, I had to figure out how to approach the whole thing in order of priority: where do you start and in which order do you proceed. What comes first: vision or trigger? – Stance or grip?

 

Over the following 5-6 years this was a running process and we worked closely with both Police and Military, trying to adapt our training to their needs and filter out anything that was not relevant. (Training is expensive and most units are unable train as much as they need or would like. You have to make it count). We ended up with a program that was effective and eventually had almost all Scandinavian LE/MIL units as our customers.

 

Classes would often be refresher-classes after an unvoluntary break from shooting.
My job was to bring the class “back on track” and ready to get back to work.
In these cases, the instructor will need to prioritize and focus on basic skills. However, I was often amazed by how much a class of dedicated students were able to improve over just a few days.
 

 

Basic techniques are, very briefly, defined as:
 

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Gun-handling: safe, effective and repeatable.

Grip: Thumbs forward, wrists locked and engage your weak hand!

Stance: (no I don’t care much where you put your feet, as long as you are stable and able to move if you have to). For most people this is a slight boxing-stance, with the strong side hip rotated in to square up the chest with the target.

 Don’t break the triangle (imagine: chest- left- right arm as seen from above).

 

Trigger: Two ways to pull the trigger – and two only: with prep. or straight through. When the gun goes bang, get off the trigger and back on it. Norwegian shooting ranges will teach you not to feel for the re-set as your fingers are blue and numb. Get off and get back on. That’s it.

 

Vision: Making the gun stop on target often solves most problems. The “hard front sight focus” is not the solution for everything in this context and you’ll need to learn how to read your sights and how much – or little – you’ll need to see in order to make the required shot. Unfortunately, this takes range time.

 

​Don’t get me started on point shooting. Any instructor teaching their students to base their results on “pointing” - should be “dipped in tar, rolled in feathers and chased out of town”. I’d be happy to explain why.

 

 

Jeff Cooper once asked me how long I thought I would take me to teach somebody to shoot. I replied “one week provided that the person is dedicated”. Cooper’s response was: “I always thought so too”. 

 

 

These days, my ears no longer allow me to run a lot of regular classes. However, I’ll still do “train the trainers” classes and enjoy it very much.

Other classes are run by good friend and colleague Jörgen Andersson who is a great instructor, a great shooter and one of the nicest and most reliable people I know.

 

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References:

 

Rogers Schooting School
I acquired the Norwegian Distribution for Safariland in 1999 and as a result I was invited to visit Rogers’ Shooting School in Ellijay Georgia. This turned out to be a most interesting experience and there is no question that Rogers Pneumatic Target system is a great training tool. I have the greatest respect for Bill Rogers and I recommend his school highly. If you need to get your ego adjusted, just sign up for a class and your scales will quickly be calibrated. However, if you do not have good basic skills, you might want to think twice.

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I was invited to shoot as part of a class Bill was running at the time and I borrowed a G17 and a Safariland 560 holster. I went on to shoot a score of 117 on the test, without trying to memorize the order of target appearance too much. I just shot the targets the same way I would shoot in a Steel Challenge Competition and saw no reason why not. However, the school doctrine was a hard front sight focus, even in target transitions and pinning the trigger after each shot, which was very different from what I taught.
A few years later I returned with a group of Scandinavian LE/MIL and we hold the School-record to this day.

Taking the Rogers classes did make us better shooters and certainly revealed some weaknesses that needed to be addressed, but more than anything it confirmed that our way of shooting proved itself in that context as well.

I have my two Rogers’ Gold pins and they are no easy to come by.

 

 

Rob Leatham
This one is easy. There is no better instructor on the planet. Rob is able to spot problems that others will not and he has all the tools to correct fix said problems. I have spent weeks on the range with Rob and its always an eye-opener. More than anything, I was pleased to see that there was very little conflict between Robs teachings and what we were doing already.
A truly great guy and a magnificent instructor.

 

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Michael Voigt
Mike taught us more about carbine shooting in 3 days than we had learned over almost a lifetime. He was also one of the nicest and most intelligent people I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. Sadly Mike passed not too long ago.