The usual objection to taking a really good shooting class is that good classes cost money. Sometimes, a lot of money. So with the economy the way it is right now, how can anyone afford to take a class?

The reality is exactly the opposite. Given the cost of ammo right now and the bad economy we’re experiencing, I’m amazed that everyone in the entire shooting community does not immediately jump into every available professional training class they can find.

Why? Because math. Even though every specific complex motor skill is a little different, and so is every human body, we know that for most people learning most skills, it takes at least ten times as many repetitions to erase a previously-learned bad habit than it does to ingrain a good, new habit from the beginning. Sometimes it takes even more than that, especially if it’s something you’ve been doing your whole life or at least for a number of years. But “ten times more repetitions” is a good baseline rule of thumb, according to human performance experts such as Richard Schmidt in his classic reference book, Motor Learning and Performance.

Ten times more work. Ten times as much ammunition…!

In other words, if it would ordinarily take you around three hundred shots to perfect your excellent trigger control when you start from scratch and work on the right things from the beginning, it would take you at least three thousand shots to erase the incorrect trigger pull you’d learned and practiced on your own.

If it would take you six hundred repetitions to create a safe and efficient drawstroke once you know what to do, it would take you six thousand repetitions for you to erase an unsafe or inefficient draw you’d developed on your own without good training.

Simply put, the more you practice bad or simply inefficient habits, the more ammunition and time and work – and money! – it ends up costing when you finally decide to truly study the subject and learn better skills. Better skills, of course, are skills that are more likely to save the lives of people you love.

That being the case, how can anyone afford not to invest in good training?