Giving some thought recently to what it means to train, to practice, and to just go to the range and play.
In the Tacticool world you often hear people talk about going to the range to "train" and I think it's both a little misleading and a little intellectually dishonest to one's self to call a trip to the range "training."
I think what I and most other serious shooters do when we take a defensive or competition rig to the range and run through a series of drills is actually practi e, and not technically training.
Training involves some level of formalized instruction. In martial arts (Aikido, Judo, and Karate per my personal experience) we always were led by a sensei or at least one of the black belts.
At the range, we're typically on our own or with friends. We work on drills from known instructors or those we've developed ourselves, but we're working to reinforce skills we obtained through training we've taken elsewhere.
Practice, therefore, is essential. It's the mechanism by which we integrate training into our lives, our defensive routines, or our competitive skill set. We will apart certainly learn while we train - we discover efficiencies, program complex operations into our "reptile brain" and make room for more learning.
I think it's important for those of us who instruct others to acknowledge and address the importance of both training and practice as one is only marginally effective without the other.
...and it helps us justify the request (begging) for funding to take more training classes!!!
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