Interesting article by Dave Spaulding. Like some in the industry, Spaulding defines “training” to mean taking a class, and “practice” as activity done on your own to build and reinforce skill. Yes, we’re quibbling over semantics and various dictionaries do us a disservice by sometimes interchanging meanings. This leads to stupid assessments that “competition isn’t training” despite this being a literal dictionary definition of the word.
The important point here is that taking more and more instruction (what Spaulding calls training) is useless, possibly detrimental, if the student never reinforces what they were taught by building skill on their own. Most of that skill building is best done by the student on their own and/or with a local peer group. That is why regular attendance at local shooting events is so useful. It is better to receive an overview of pertinent ideas and then build skill rather than rush off to a bunch of classes and forever remain a low-skilled novice.
Training is not Practice!
by Dave Spaulding
Firearm User Network 