It’s Just Like Riding a Bike
You have probably heard that saying a thousand times. It usually means something is easy to do because you’ve already learned how to do it. It implies that once you learn a skill, you never forget it. When it comes to shooting and self-defense, that may or not be true.
Take the time to watch this 8-minute video called “The Backwards Brain Bicycle“. In it, Destin Sandlin, an engineer with the “Smarter Everyday” series describes all the things your body needs to learn in order to ride a bike. Destin had been literally riding a all of his life. His colleagues thought it would be interesting to change the steering so that the front wheel would move in the opposite direction of the handlebars. It took Destin about 8 months to unlearn how to ride a regular bike and to learn how to ride the “backwards bicycle”. When he first tried to ride a normal bicycle again, he found out that he could no longer ride one. However, after a few minutes of trying you can literally see his brain find the old neural pathway. The brain suddenly remembered what it already knew thanks to the many years and thousands of repetitions.
If you learned to ride a bike as a kid, you may recall all the effort it took to keep from falling over. Once you mastered the the balancing part, you could move on to more advanced tactics like popping a wheeling or riding with no hands. Those who took bike riding beyond the recreational aspect often got into racing or freestyle competition. I grew up both riding bikes and shooting guns, but the first time I entered a race and shot a competition, I realized there was a whole other level of skill needed to win and keep from getting hurt! The same is true in self-defense. If you are ever forced to use a gun to save your life, you are going to pull the trigger as fast as you can. Your body WILL NOT not let you shoot slowly.
Self-defense experts say the most important aspects to increasing your chances of prevailing in a gunfight is to get the gun into the fight and put multiple shots on the bad guy quickly! But most gun owners have never pushed the limits of their skill to find out where the wheels fall off. If you are a lifelong recreational shooter, you may have even developed some bad habits that could be detrimental to your chances. A good drill to test your skill level is the Bill Drill linked HERE. A respectable time is 2 to 3 seconds for you to draw your firearm and fire 6 shots into a 8 inch circle at 7 yards. For an example, watch this 16 second video of the Bill Drill. If your skill level isn’t there yet then you have not built the neural pathway that leads to a level of automaticity needed to efficiently present the pistol and mange the recoil between shots while maintaining a consistent grip and incorporating good trigger control. The good news is that with trial and error and a lot of practice most shooters can obtain this level of skill. However, just like with riding a bike, training wheels and/or a little help from a good instructor can help expedite the process. Even better news is that once you have achieved this level of skill and built that neural pathway and automaticity, it is much easier to maintain with a little practice.
For some more on automaticity and the drills that will let you know if you have reached that level, check out the article from USCARRY.COM called “Walking The Line on Automaticity. It includes a great graph from Karl Rehn’s “Strategies and Standards for Defensive Handgun Training Book” as seen below.
