Re-Entering 3-Gun (Fitness)

After a long 3 year break, I plan to re-enter the 3-gun world once again.

I feel it is necessary for me to maintain and prove my skills in order to maintain my legitimacy as a competent ‘advice giver’ on tactical topics.
After all, would you trust an overweight running coach or a Call of Duty champion to lecture you on war?  Or worse yet some self-proclaimed internet firearms journalist with no legitimate firearms experience (there are a lot of those).

I plan to post periodically about my training regimen and events that I enter.

So I have started training for 3 gun about a month ago and I have yet to even head to the range or even pick up a firearm.  A fundamental that is
overlooked is fitness.  That is where I have started.

I have always been fairly good at medium to long distance running but that is not what 3-gun requires.  3-gun requires explosive short term energy
where you are constantly starting and stopping, getting down and up, possibly crawling and bending.  It is less an aerobic exercise and more an
anaerobic exercise.  What I mean is one primarily strengthens your heart so it can work harder longer and the other strengthens your body’s ability
to metabolize and hold oxygen as well as building up Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP).  It is long term power versus short term power.  3-Gun needs the intense, short term power.

3 times per week I do a shuttle run.
I sprint 55 meters stop abruptly turn around and run 50 meters back to the start line.  I stop, turn around and run back 45 meters. Then back to the
start line.  I repeat this at distances 30m, 24m and 16m.  Note how each leg of my trip gets shorter and shorter before I have to reverse direction.  The most difficult part of this exercise is changing direction.  In total this run is only 340m and I can run 2km easily but when I first did this I found myself gasping for air.  I simply could not breathe in enough oxygen.  After only a few sessions I was fine and now I have moved to the next step, you see, this is not about running; it is about improving my body’s ability to hold oxygen.  So my next step is to do this run with my CF gas mask… first without the filter (where I am right now), then with the filter attached.  Finally I will add body armor.

So why is Oxygen so important?  The more my heart pounds and the more Oxygen starved my body becomes, the more my body will tremble with every heart beat and breath, making aiming quickly and accurately harder.

My skill on the 3-gun feild will always be limited by my fitness level; that is why I am starting here.

Running The Lever Action – A Radical Departure from the Conventional

In the gunfighter program we are taught to keep our control hand on the rifle and conduct all our manipulations with the support hand.  To make this easy we will raise the rifle and rest the buttstock on our bicep pointing the barrel up.  The magazine will naturally point to our centerline and allows us to do our manipulations while watching what is ahead of us simultaneously.

From a kinematics standpoint we only rotate joints no more than 90 degrees and along the arc of greatest mobility. The arc of greatest mobility is the wrist rotation that allows you to rotate further away from its natural “zero” position then the other direction.  On your right hand this is clockwise (CCW on the left). 
Your maximum range of motion should be 100 degrees clockwise on the right hand compared to about 90 degrees counter clockwise. (If you rotate your forearm too, these angles increase)
Because one direction has a larger travel range, it is faster and more comfortable to go to 90 degrees in that larger travel range.

In cowboy action shooting, the lever action is the go-to for riflemen.
The typical lever action has a loading gate on the right side. Traditionally, a rifleman employing a lever action will have the rifle in his left hand and twist counter clockwise (short arc) to expose the
loading gate.  He then grips the forend with his support hand and releases his control hand to load more rounds into the loading gate which necessitates a counter clockwise wrist rotation to push the rounds down into the gate.  Once loaded he re-positions his hands and twists the rifle back into a shooting position.  Unless he is super-practiced and has a good means of carrying his rounds, he will need to look down at what he is doing taking his attention away from what is ahead of him.

What I propose for the lever action manual of arms is aimed at people who are right handed but cross eye dominant, someone who is left handed or ambidextrous*.  All sets of people will quickly come to appreciate this new method of employing the lever rifle.

The rifle is held in the left hand.  Upon needing to reload, the user puts the buttstock onto his bicep.  This has his rifle pointing up and in his view while he watches the terrain in front of him (ideally to move safely to cover). 
His support hand loads the rounds into the exposed loading gate which naturally sits facing the user.  When finished reloading, the rifle drops naturally back into position and because the all-important control hand has never been moved, it does not need to be re-positioned.  Situational awareness and speed are vastly improved.

For those who have run the lever for years, this will be a difficult transition but one that I feel will be worth it in the evolution of firearms as a martial art.




* All gun fighters should practice with both hands to be gun-ambidextrous.