Overview
Many years ago, a common adage when it came to armed exhibition was, “You can’t do exhibition until you can do perfect regulation.”
In a time with fewer distractions and less oversight, this was easily accomplished: new members to the team would spend perhaps up to their entire first year “perfecting” regulation drill before being allowed to spin a rifle.
While this practice may still work for some groups with unique, isolated circumstances, it’s become far more the exception and less the rule.
Still, the fundamentals of drill are important: the Position of Attention, military bearing, complete control of one’s body and rifle.
Knowing this, the question becomes how do we balance cadet engagement (i.e. the degree to which cadets find practice interesting and therefore are motivated to return) vs. the need for great fundamentals (which can oftentimes be more “boring”) when jumping into armed exhibition.
A Bit of Both While Learning
After proper safety briefings and basic rifle handling protocol, we recommend pairing regulation and exhibition. This is especially true in the teaching process. Examples of this might look like:
- Learn the position of Port Arms in regulation, practice Port Arms. Take the last 15 minutes of practice and teach the exhibition version of Port Arms.
- Learn the position of Right Shoulder Arms in regulation, practice Right Shoulder Arms & Port Arms. Take the last 20 minutes of practice and learn a single right-handed spin.
- Take the majority of practice to learn a single left-handed spin. Take the last 20 minutes of practice to learn the 15-Count Manual of Arms once all the rifle manual movements have been learned.
You get the idea here. Each time we learn a piece of regulation drill, we learn a piece of exhibition drill. The benefits here are numerous:
- Exhibition drill is nothing more than extremely-specialized regulation drill. By pairing the two in the learning process, we normalize the fundamentals of drill: you ALWAYS need great bearing, you ALWAYS need great posture, etc.
- Exhibition drill is widely considered to be “fun” to learn. The definition of “fun” varies by cadet, of course, since some will prefer regulation to exhibition. But leaving practice having learned a box, for example, is a much more tangible motivator that each cadet can go home and show off when compared to learning something in regulation.
- By changing pace and subjects during a single practice, we keep engagement high throughout and practice feels more productive because we’ve touched more than one subject.
Moves vs. Execution
Another debate as old as exhibition drill itself is the one between learning new movements vs. perfecting existing movements.
There is a fundamental problem with this debate, however. Moves vs. execution fails to take into account the learning curve of the team, the momentum generated by feelings of accomplishment, and the perception of what armed exhibition drill “is” to begin with.
It goes a little like this:
Learning drill is like acquiring language. The earlier you start, the more you’ll learn. However, the more time you spend learning, the less time you necessarily have for improving the movements you do know.
If we think critically for just a moment, we can use this to our advantage.
Firstly, new drillers should learn as much as they are physically capable of without injury. They should absorb as much as they possibly can because this window of expanded learning does close eventually. Take too much time away from that learning process and you’ll wind up with great drillers who can only do exactly what you teach them and oftentimes take a long while to learn.
Secondly, experienced drillers should still engage in learning new material. It challenges their reflexes, expands their understanding of how they relate to the rifle and its motion, etc.
HOWEVER, this should occur outside of regularly-scheduled practice times.
Because practice takes time from multiple individuals, the best use of the time is that which benefits the majority of the group. In this case, improving the execution of each movement should be a key priority especially as it pertains to synchronization and uniformity of technique.
We should make additional time in every driller’s schedule to learn more movements: consider weekend BBQ practices where the emphasis is on learning or start a voluntary “Spin Club” on a day when regular practice isn’t normally scheduled. This allows open time to continue to learn without sacrificing execution of movements relevant to the team as a whole!
Good Teaching Means Teaching Great Execution
The problem above is also a bit of a falsehood because it implies you must teach something first then critique it to excellence after the teaching process has concluded.
This is a traditional mindset in military drill but much that mindset is born of basic training scenarios in which young ADULTS are a captive audience for WEEKS at a time and wherein the mastery of drill is not the sole reason they are in training.
When it comes to drill, drill is the outcome of drill team training. And cadets go home each evening and return each day. The scenarios aren’t terribly comparable and because of that, we should challenge the notion of, “learn first, correct later.”
Great teaching identifies not only how to correct perform a movement, it also addresses:
- Common errors and how to avoid them – the teacher should be aware of the tendencies like to appear later on down the road and actively encourage those they are teaching to learn how to perform those errors INTENTIONALLY so they can avoid them in the future!
- Fundamental mechanics and how they relate to how a move feels to perform – pinning your arm swiftly during a spin changes how much pressure your hand puts on a rifle and therefore how fast the rifle spins. A good teacher should be helping everyone understand how great execution impacts what the rifle is doing during the move.
You’d never consider a facing movement taught if you only learned Count 1. That would be silly. In the same way, you shouldn’t consider an exhibition move taught until your drillers can at least articulate how to perform certain mistakes. For example…
- A single left-handed spin shouldn’t be considered fully taught UNTIL drillers can articulate that allowing the elbow to extend away from the body will cause the rifle’s level to lower.
- A six-count box shouldn’t be considered fully taught UNTIL drillers can articulate that releasing and “tossing” the rifle means that it’s harder to clean the positioning of each count as compared to holding onto the rifle as long as possible.
- Exhibition Port Arms shouldn’t be considered fully taught UNTIL drillers can articulate that squeezing with all the fingers in their right hand will cause the rifle to angle slightly as they raise it into position.
Teaching these key points does NOT take much time. It does, however, take much planning and thought to make sure that it gets covered in the process!
The Balance
Every team should evaluate where they fall when balancing regulation vs. exhibition and choose a balance that makes sense for their goals.
In Alaska, for example, the majority of competitions treat exhibition similarly to the way many competitions treat solo exhibition: as a stand-alone event that does not count towards an overall placement. Therefore, it may make sense to balance more (or all) time towards regulation drill since it’s the core of the competition.
When exhibition is a required component of a high-level competition, it may make more sense to balance a great deal of time early on to exhibition drill knowing that it will play a major role in the team’s goals by the end of the season.
However, no matter the balance, the key points above remain true: we should ALWAYS be learning and great learning MEANS learning great execution at the SAME TIME as learning proper mechanics!