Kevin Leavitt

Good Post William.

I think what is important is understanding the realitive value and place of what you are studying and what it is designed to do and keeping it in perspective that is important.

Then understanding the linkages in the teaching/learning chain.

Being a Ranger you understand training methodology.

If you are going to learn CQB live fire, that is shooting and moving through houses with people and live bullets you have to break this down into various subsets/task.

First you teach basic marksmanship...which starts out with weapons familarization, with dry fires, drills moving as a team...then you build up....I will spare everyone all the details.

Alot of this is conceptual at first as you begin to train it and build a base.

However, the average martial artist learns the equivilant of "Dry Fire" and then his buddies ask him to show him how this works in a "CQB Live fire". Holy cow, what a jump in the training gap!

Remember the "band of excellence" William?

Once I began to understand how that applies to martial arts and training progression/sustainment things it made alot of sense!

Wow! However, what I observe in much of Martial arts is that we get stuck in the conceptual stage, or we simply want to stay there and then begin to "loop" without breaking out of it...practicing for the sake of practicing. So in essence, we become "masters of the Dry firing" yet gain very little experience beyond that, so we experience dissonance when we attempt to transfer that outside our training environment.