Rick Hogg: Just because you’ve graduated from whatever training course academy or course you’re training should never stop! Your training should consist of a daily dry fire regiment with whatever equipment you usually use or carry.

About the author

Rick Hogg is the owner of North Carolina based War HOGG Tactical, Inc. and is a 29 year US Army Special Operations Combat Veteran and Special Operations Forces (SOF) K9 Handler that has taken his 13 combat deployment, both Iraq and Afghanistan, and teaching experience as a Special Forces Advanced Urban Combat instructor and harnessed them into a proven training methodology service company, War HOGG Tactical, Inc.

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The Article

Place yourself in this scenario, late evening traffic stop on a desolate section of road.

Unbeknownst to you, the individual in the vehicle is a combat veteran with the mindset and the experience of killing another human being.

Hypothetically if this man decided to cause you ill intent, do you think your training allows you to come home this night?

Just because you’ve graduated from whatever training course academy or course you’re training should never stop!

Your training should consist of a daily dry fire regiment with whatever equipment you usually use or carry.

At a minimum of 3 days a week for at least 5 minutes.

Your dry fire session must be planned out.

I use a notebook to plan my dry fire session.

One of the tools I use is my phone to video the session.

It allows me to see if I’m adding any unneeded movement or being inefficient in my task.

The other tool is a pro timer.

The timer allows me to see my improvement, with time being the tangible.

When you go to the range, you must have a solid plan that should emulate what you did during your dry fire training to ensure your marksmanship skills are there and recoil mitigation.

I still bring my notebook, which has my live-fire training plan, my phone to record my live-fire training, and my pro time to the range.

The last part is: are you adding realism to your training? I do this by using an old t-shirt I can shoot. This is a drill I do in all of my War HOGG Tactical courses. I have the students place an old t-shirt over their targets by stapling only the neck and shoulder area of the t-shirt.

I let the student shoot part of the drill with no instructions. Then, about halfway through, I stop the students and let them look at their group on the paper target verse the t-shirt. Then I give them some instructions on using the shirt’s collar as a reference point. What you see are two distinct shoot groups. One where they perceive as “center mass.” And the other in the vitals to stop a lethal encounter.

Make sure you are adding realism to your range training so that, God forbid, if you are ever in a deadly force encounter, you come home to your family.

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Photos by Rick Hogg