How much time do you spend on your shooting skills? How many skills do you need? Unless you are an uber-enthusiast, you probably have to decide which skills are worth spending time on and which are not. Most professionals certainly have to make decisions about how to spend their training time and budget, and if they don’t, their employer does.
On the other hand, there is almost no excuse to not at least learn some skills beyond your bread and butter. An example might make this easier to understand. If you have a small amount of time and ammo for training each month, you might focus on your speed and accuracy from a ready position or from the draw. You will likely be within 10 yards for most of your training. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t learn how to reload or draw with your support hand. It just means that you don’t need to focus on them, but if you ever need one of those skills, you will at least have learned them at some point. Much better to try and reproduce a technique that you have learned previously but not mastered, vs. a technique you have not learned at all. I consider that to be a technique you have been taught, vs. a technique you have effectively trained.
If you have to think your way through something you have been taught, it might take you a second or two. If you have nothing to think about because you’ve never seen the skill needed for the situation you are in, it will take you much longer, perhaps too long.
So, while you may only regularly train on a few high-priority skills, you should at least know as many others as possible. If you can work on those other skills every once in a while, you will be much better off than if you simply ignore them. Obviously, there are situations where you will simply not have time or the ability to think your way out. That is where we hope that our core, deeply ingrained techniques will carry the day. The more of those you have, the more situations you can hope to succeed in. But, since we can’t have everything, it is still better to have some exposure to something, rather than no exposure.
Enjoyed, thoughtful article