Use the following as a guideline to structure each of your practices!
Set-Up
There are a number of things you might want to do before you actually begin practicing and you’ll want to make sure you have time established for them. Here is a list of some items to consider in no particular order:
- Lay Out a Drill Area in Advance
- Draw Rifles and/or Necessary Gear
- Change Into Practice Uniform
- Take Roll
- Move to Drill Area
Warm-Up
This is the least-executed portion of any drill practice. The purpose of the warm up is to both physically and mentally prepare each cadet to execute drill at the highest level possible. Whether your practice lasts 10 minutes or 10 hours, this is a step you do NOT want to skip if improving your abilities is the goal (and it should be!)
Review
Use this time to go over items from your previous practice. This helps connect your current practice to the ones before it to create continuity.
Isolate & Apply
In this step, you’ll spend time working on individual skills with a “deep-dive” approach. This is where the bulk of your practice will occur since you’ll be spending time breaking down movements and focusing on the individual techniques associated with each skill.
Examples of Skills:
Application means that you’ll work the portion of the drill card or sequence in which the skill appears. For example, if you were working on pivoting, you might then choose a portion of the Regulation Drill Card that features multiple pivot-based movements (i.e. Column Movements or Flanking Movements) and work through that specific portion to make sure your work shows up while executing part of your drill card! For Exhibition Drill, you might consider starting your routine with the sequence BEFORE and performing through the sequence AFTER the one you isolated.
You will likely work through several repetitions of this portion at each practice. You can repeat as needed for any number of skills!
Run-Through
At the conclusion of the Isolation & Application phase, you should do a SINGLE full run-through of the event from which those skills were drawn. For example, if you were working on Regulation Drill, you should do a single run-through of the full drill sequence. If you don’t have an entire drill card/sequence on the floor, don’t worry! You can run everything you have to date in its place!
It is VERY important you only do ONE run-through of each event. This helps train you to execute to your best level as in competition. Doing more than one run-through actually works against your ability to nail your routine the first time around. Because of this, there are some guidelines:
- You should FILM this run-through so you can use it as a gauge of what to work on next!
- DO NOT STOP at any point – even if mistakes are made!
- If applicable, do full report-in/outs as you would in performance or competition!