Why physical stress is critical to firearms training
Being unprepared physiologically and mentally to cope with an intense high stress event like a gunfight or home invasion will likely lead to panic and mistakes. Mistakes that could cost you your life or the life of loved ones. It’s critical to recognize your body’s natural stress responses and learn how to control them while remaining focused on the mission at hand.
So it’s necessary to prepare yourself to perform and function effectively under stress. I believe it’s foundational to a good firearms training program.
I base my firearms training on four core components, which I define as: (1) Proficiency in fundamentals, (2) Solid gun handling, (3) On-demand performance running your gun in different positions at various distances with speed, accuracy, movement and efficiency, and (4) Operating under stress.
One, two and three are well established hard skills. Noticeably absent from many students’ training and personal practice, however, is operating under stress.
If self-preservation is one of your training goals, if you’re trying to best prepare for a fight, then I’d argue learning to function and operate effectively under some level of stress is a necessary part of your training.
The addition of physical stress can be a tool to prepare your body and mind to perform better and make you more capable. Once your fundamental hard skills operate on a sub conscious level, it’s time to add this component to your training.
Unfortunately, because there is generally no true threat during training and practice, you will never be able to fully replicate the stress of a real fight when shooting at a range. It’s impossible to induce that fight-flight-freeze response of massive, almost instantaneous physiological changes coupled with the emotional stress of the moment of a real gunfight.
So how can you introduce stress in your firearms training in a meaningful way to help prepare you for a gunfight? We can introduce physical exercise to induce some level of stress and help condition our minds and bodies to deal with the physiological changes that occur, for exposure and management.
Jeremy Hsu provides an excellent breakdown of those physiological changes and how exercise can induce stress for training purposes in an article from SCIENCELINE titled: “Does elevating your heart rate during exercise have the same effect on you as a fight or flight response?”
Hsu states, “During exercise, the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems gradually change your heart rate through the release of hormones and other chemical messengers. Body changes during a fight or flight response, however, are anything but gradual. That’s because fight or flight is the body’s on-the-spot answer to high stress situations, such as those experienced by emergency responders or soldiers in combat. In these instances, the sympathetic nervous system readies the body for action with a massive dose of hormones, such as adrenaline, boosting heart rate within a few seconds to a level that would take minutes to reach during exercise. People whose duties put them in high-stress situations often train themselves to manage high-intensity stress, so that the fight or flight response doesn’t completely hijack their actions.”
I include cardio and sandbags in segments of my firearm training and my students’ classes to induce changes in the nervous system to prepare them so that stress “doesn’t completely hijack” performance when confronted with danger. The goal is to try and best condition the mind and body for something that can’t be replicated and can, if completely unprepared, result in catastrophic failure. This helps students recognize and learn to control their own natural stress responses in a controlled environment.
As a former fireman, I’ve witnessed firsthand on the fireground the difference between conditioning for stress and just conditioning. Some thought the gym was enough. It wasn’t. Absent from their preparation was sufficient time spent on training scenarios that induced stress both mentally and physically while working in full bunker gear and with the required tools and equipment. The result for those unprepared individuals was exhaustion to the point of essentially being out of the fight, leaving others to carry their weight. At times a far worse result was the panic that set in because of the emotional stress of the moment coupled with the lack of conditioning.
Once fear, tunnel vision, hyper ventilation and increased heart rate begin to take hold on someone, it is very difficult in the moment to pull them out of it. This immediately changes and directs focus away from whatever the mission is. While it is not exclusive, your physical conditioning has a direct effect on how well you handle emotional stress.
There are many pieces to this puzzle, and no one answer fits all. Try mixing in a consistent component of physicality to your training and practice. Sprints, burpees, navy seals work well to condition you to performing when out of breath. I use sandbags to help simulate lifting and carrying the dead uneven weight of a person or to pre exhaust my arms a bit before shooting a drill. This will help develop stamina and fortitude in the gear you plan on using at the worst moment. Again, this is only to help condition, expose and teach management, not to replicate.
Think about why you train and prepare accordingly because if push comes to shove it may be you alone answering the call.
Prioritize your training.
Build on-demand performance through drills that develop and pressure test speed, accuracy, distance, and movement with your gun.