Made another post today about a class I took this last weekend and someone said they'd be interested in hearing a review from the S12 I did in November 2020 with CarryTrainer. S12 is a 4 day pistol shooting, medical, and combatives course on a retreat near Nashville, TN. They rent the whole place out and all the students stay on the retreat with food provided by them until the final dinner/awards event at the end of the day Sunday. It costed me $1850 for the class, and that includes all of the lodging and food, but not ammo. I shot 700-800 rounds of ammo. I'll go into detail below the TLDR.TL;DR: It was a really good time for me, personally, because I decided I wanted to get a taste of a lot of different things and this lined up with what I was looking for. It seems like in hindsight I could have just gone to individual classes to get deeper in each subject they cover. I wouldn't go if your main concern is getting better as a shooter. You'll definitely get better as a shooter, but half the instructional time is on medical/combatives. Some of the students really weren't into the medical/combatives/fitness aspect of it and really just wanted to shoot all day. If that's you, I'd just take shooting only classes and it'll be a lot more efficient use of your time and money. You can also watch giant sections of the one from May 2020 on YouTube to see what it's like. They film the whole event.Before class: This would be my first real instruction I ever got on shooting, even though I've had my CCW since 2017. I was an okay shooter due to the amount of dry fire work I did, but had only gotten to run live ammo from a holster a few times. I decided in 2020 that I was going to try to get a lot better because I decided I would carry 100% of the time I could. Taking this class was a part of that process for me.I knew from their YouTube videos that they did what is basically PT every morning after breakfast, so I made a half-hearted effort to get in shape and ended up just giving up on getting in shape before getting there. I'm not a heavy guy, I'm a skinny video game nerd that happens to like shooting a lot, so I've never really done anything really physical since High School. I'd definitely recommend getting in shape cardio-wise before going. You'll be a lot less sore after Day 1.I checked in Wednesday night and the place is beautiful. There's a giant main house that all of the students stayed in with a meeting hall in the middle where we did the lectures, combatives, and eating. Most guys were down in the basement sleeping in bunk beds. There are 2 showers down there for everyone sleeping down there and then there are showers upstairs for everyone that got private rooms. The instructors all stayed in the smaller cabins that are on the property.There were 40-45 shooters in total and somewhere around 8 instructors. I don't remember exactly.Day 1: First thing we did was eat (all meals were buffet style) and then assemble on the basketball court for "PT". We just did body weight exercises and running every morning, but it was all directed by this doctor they brought in that believes that if you breath the right way, it increases your athletic performance and makes you respond to stress better. Here's the video from our day 1 PT session. Make of it what you will, it seemed a little woo woo to me because of all of the jargon he used, but obviously breathing control is important.This class has no pre-requisites other than you've shot guns before, know how to operate your gun in particular, and follow the safety rules at all times. Next thing was going down to the range. We started with dry fire work from our CCW setups from 3-5 yards. . We went over clearing your clothes, establishing grip, presentation, etc. in detail. For me, this was just a chance to validate all the dry fire work I'd been doing for the last several months. If you're already a really experienced shooter, you'd be bored as shit during these really basic periods of instruction. Throughout the day we got into live fire from the holster, did a block of instruction on recoil control, and did a little bit on moving left/right during the draw. Here's the video that covers our Day 1.Day 2: More PT with Dr. Breathing, then down to the range. We did some more basic shooting on the move stuff, shooting/drawing off your back, from a knee, then went deeper on shooting on the move. You can skip around this video to get the idea.After lunch, they broke the class into halves and one half did combatives while the other started the TCCC (medical) part of the class.The medical was good, I hadn't done any medical stuff since the First Aid badge in Boy Scouts. They went over applying tourniquets, wound packing, and applying chest seals, and when to do each. Then we practiced applying TQ's to ourselves and applying chest seals/wound packing on dummies. The combatives was really fun for me, and I've since started training BJJ at my local gym. We started with really basic clinch work, establishing control with underhooks/overhooks, and using that control to make distance or stall the fight while you figure out what to do. Really it was just giving everyone a feel of what it's like to control/support someone else's body weight.Day 3: More PT with Dr. Breathing, then down to the range. We went deeper on shooting on the move and started to incorporate the medical stuff we learned into shooting. If you skip around this video, you'll see how they had us get a simulated wound, stop shooting, apply a TQ to ourselves and then reengage the targets. Not sure what the application of this would ever be for a normal civilian, but it was fun and made you focus on muzzle awareness and fundamentals while you were doing something new. The afternoon was more combatives, mostly focused on getting up from your back safely, which is something that gets taught early on in BJJ classes, it turns out.Day 4: This was where we put a lot of what we learned together on the range. We ran drills where we fought our way up to a dummy that was wounded in some way, and attempted to treat the wounds behind cover with the correct type of care while engaging threats as they were called out by instructors. Again, when would this ever happen to a civilian? Maybe a mass shooting, but how many of us carry TQ's, hemostatic gauze, or chest seals on us all the time? I have a kit in my car with those things but they won't be with me in the grocery store if someone walks in and starts killing people. Regardless, the drills were fun and, again, made you focus on your shooting fundamentals and safety while you were also doing something new. Doing these things felt like it might be unsafe for the newer shooters at the class, but they had everyone do all of this dry first, and instructors were on top of the students the whole time we were doing these complicated-ish drills.We finished up with combatives and did a block of instruction on how you might deal with weapons being involved, like knives. We practiced stuffing peoples draws and creating space, or not, depending on what the other person had. Then we did this 1 on 1 thing in front of the whole class where you went 80% effort, starting in a 50-50 position and did what you needed to do to protect yourself, be it running away, creating space and shooting with a blue gun, or just stalling for time. Again it was really fun but it wasn't very realistic or useful because that's just scratching the surface of the grappling world.Overall Thoughts: It was a fun time and I learned a lot, especially the in the medical part, but in hindsight, I would have been better off taking that money putting it toward taking 1 shooting class, 1 medical class, and buying a membership to my local BJJ gym instead. Doing that would have given me a deeper dive into each topic. I definitely wouldn't recommend it if you're already an experienced shooter; You'll be bored as hell for the first day and there were guys there that felt that whole day was a waste of time for them. It was also a little weird feeling like you were in adult dude bootcamp; I'm not your stereotypical conservative red blooded American man, like most of the guys there were. They seemed to really get into it. via /r/CCW https://ift.tt/2RtLOUF
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