Meet the Combat Focus® Shooting Instructor Team at our new website!

The Combat Focus® Shooting program has gone through a lot of evolution over the past couple of decades…. in fact, a decade ago, it didn’t even have a name. It wasn’t much more than a collection of principles and drills that I used when conducting any type of defensive firearms training. In the 90’s, that was usually being done in a backyard range or, as time went on, informally for friends, fellow police officers or those interested in personal defense. By 2001, when I left full time law enforcement work, those principles and drills were becoming more solidified as I gained in experience teaching and started to see certain things work well and other things not achieve as much success.

In 2003, the first official Combat Focus® Shooting courses were held in Colorado at the then new Valhalla Training Center. By 2004, members of my staff were teaching CFS on their own and we had a military client asking for Instructor Development courses. In 2005, I wrote the first CFS Book and by 2008 we had certified instructors in 6 countries and had several agencies and private sector companies successfully using the CFS Method as their primary firearms training approach. Along the way, concepts like Combat Accuracy, The Balance of Speed & Precision and the Warrior Expert Theory were codified and put into standard use. These terms and ideas are now seen regularly across the training industry.

In 2010, we released a Combat Focus iPhone App to help keep counter-ambush training realistic for people on the range by themselves and I discontinued the original CFS Book, replacing it with Combat Focus Shooting: Evolution 2010. I am much prouder of the new book, which is almost twice as long and contains a great deal of additional information that has been developed or identified as important over the years since the first publication. While the drills you would run this weekend in a CFS Course might look like what I was doing in my backyard range in Tennessee in 1995, our understanding of why we teach what we teach and how to help you develop your skills efficiently has increased by truly significant amounts because of the effort, thoughts and dedication of all of our instructors.

Every year, our team has an Instructor Conference where we do continuing education, discuss new developments and instructors certify to teach advanced courses.

This process of evolution has continued to this day, with the recent introduction of the Balance of Speed & Precision Target last month, specifically designed for the drills that we run during a two day course and for our students to use as they continue to develop their skills. Finally developed by CFS Instructor Curtis Dodson, this tool will make our training even more efficient.

On a conference call last month with about 30 CFS Instructors from around the US and Europe, I told them that I thought I was ready to start teaching professionally around 2000, that the CFS Program was really ready to go “public” in 2004 and that, after many years of Instructor Development, Internal Evolution and Experience Teaching an amazingly diverse cross-section of students, our team of instructors is now ready to be seen as the organization that it is. For this reason, we have developed a completely separate website and business outside of my own training company to support, promote and facilitate the Combat Focus® Shooting courses being taught around the world by our Certified Instructors. Starting in January of 2011, all aspects Combat Focus® Shooting courses, including the issuing of certificates and the promotion of training opportunities will be handled by this one central entity.

CFSID is at least as much of a study of Human Reactions when Ambushed as it is a study of the mechanics of defensive shooting.

The CFS Instructor Development program has averaged a less than 50% certification rate since 2004. Candidates must have trained with us as end users and now spend 5 intense days learning the fundamental principles and methods that underly the program in a course that is 85% classroom and does not rest on a shooting test. In CFSID, we test our candidates understanding of the material (with a written test) and their ability to convey the material (in subjective teaching demos). We have taught up to 8  CFSID courses a year and certified less than 100 Instructors. Of those, many are members of law enforcement agencies and military units that do not teach in the private sector. In all, we have a little over 30 Active Instructors listed at the new website, including myself and some of the guys who’ve been with me since the Valhalla days.

If you’re reading this article, you are probably familiar with CFS in some way. We’ve had over 1 million CFS DVDs distributed through the Personal Defense Network and our partnership with the NRA since 2005, we’ve been featured on a many TV shows and covered by most of the major gun magazines. Still, I encourage you to check out the new website, especially the Active Instructor list. I’ll bet one of our team is teaching close to you in 2011. Over the past decade, I have gotten a fair amount of attention as an instructor on my own… the fact is that The Combat Focus® Shooting program as it exists today is a team effort and I am very proud of the team. They are all worth training with. Be part of the evolution of defensive firearms training and join one of them on a range this year!

-RJP