“I think of shooting as an internal martial art. Hung gar is considered an external art but it has both a hard and soft energy. It’s an interesting dichotomy that in gun handling everything, other than the actual shooting process, is mostly a soft art. The great internal struggle of shooting is to relax,” he said. “Drawing the pistol out of the holster is similar to the sword drawing art of iaijutsu. It requires you to be relaxed to have hyper fluidity along with hyper speed. But once you get the gun mounted to your eye line and start the process of actually pulling the trigger and shooting, you need more of that hung gar hard energy because of the tension necessary for your grip.” “You absolutely shouldn’t be married to the idea that self defense equals using a gun,” he said. “Shooting is using deadly force while martial arts provide a non-deadly alternative. And you can’t be one dimensional when it comes to self defense.” That variety in training is something that can certainly be carried over into the larger martial arts world and is the method that the very best martial artists interested in practical self defense already incorporate. White believes martial artists can draw other benefits from learning to shoot, as well, even if they choose to never carry a gun in self defense.White describes himself as a brainy, nerdy kid who wasn’t particularly big, strong or mean. Though he didn’t suffer from a great deal of bullying in school, he was still bothered by this perceived weakness and said most of his life has been an effort to correct it. He started training in taekwondo at age 7 looking for self defense but was observant enough, even at that young age, to see the complete lack of contact in the training wasn’t conducive to his needs. On the other side of the coin, he feels any shooter can benefit from martial arts training, both in terms of the body control it helps develop and the wider array of self defense options it gives you.”I definitely think of shooting as a martial art. My experience is like a lot of people who have come into it from the martial arts world. They get into it for the self defense aspects but then stay for the self-improvement aspects of it. They become what I call an ‘enthusiast.’ They’re no longer there to just check a box and get a certain minimal amount of training but they become dedicated to it because they see what it can do for them as people,” he said.
“You’ll learn what to do with a gun if you ever have to pick one up but the main thing you can get is in the self improvement that focused practice on shooting can give you. It’s very much about mental self control, about seeing tiny details in high speed and recognizing them in real time,” he said.White recognized the high level of skill those shooters possessed and wanted to see if he could wed that with his base in proper defensive tactics to become a holistically superior practitioner of the handgun. He did so by not only throwing himself into a fanatic level of training going to the range 3-4 days a week and doing dry fire practice with an unloaded gun at home every single chance he got, but forcing himself to compete in his everyday carry gear. Working under the assumption if he ever did have to defend himself with a handgun, he’d be using what he normally carried, White wanted to get as good with that equipment as he possibly could.To learn more about Gabe White, you can visit gabewhitetraining.comYou’re then left with the conundrum that when you master the mental aspects of self defense allowing you to avoid real life combat, you’ll lessen your physical self defense skills by the omission of experience. The way around that, White believes, is to delve into all realms of training.He eventually moved on to hung gar kung fu, which, though perhaps not as practical as some other arts, he still readily calls upon in his teaching and explanations of shooting technique.White explored several different arts over the years. He was a nationally ranked fencer as a junior, dabbled in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and practiced kali for a while. His pattern was often to practice something to the point where he went through the steep learning curve of getting the basics down but then, when improvement became about continually training to grind out smaller and smaller gains, he’d quit and move on to something else. He started seriously shooting at age 21 and it became the one “martial art” he stayed with and never lost interest in improving on.Related Articles Around the WebAgain, the commonalities between shooting and martial arts are hard to miss. Just as there have long been debates on the merit of “practical” self defense training versus sport training in martial arts, or traditional versus modern methods, these same debates play out in the shooting world. And just as in martial arts, where it’s hard to deny the evidence of how good elite sporting fighters like Jon Jones are, it’s hard to deny just how good the top practical shooting competitors are in firing a handgun quickly and accurately. The martial arts analogy is particularly apropos when you consider White said his shooting career can only be understood within the context of his being a martial arts enthusiast.The implications for other martial arts should be clear. Rather than thinking about winning a fight or even just landing a punch, focusing your attention on correcting the small parts of the process that give you trouble, such as not telegraphing your punch by pulling your hand back first, is what will ultimately improve your skills and make you successful. “All forms of training are unrealistic. But they’ve all got two or three elements that are worthwhile. It’s a big puzzle and each part of it has a small piece they’re good at. Tactical training with a handgun may teach you how to use cover properly. Competition won’t do that but it will develop your shooting skills to a high degree. But neither of them has an uncooperative opponent. Force-on-force training is done against live opponents but with simulated ammunition, often in a prearranged scenario which is less realistic. The answer is to get facsimile experiences from all those things so if you’re ever in a real situation, you have all those fragments to draw from,” he said.
White, 45, is one of the most highly regarded and sought after firearms trainers out there, a figure universally respected in the shooting community for his ability to merge both the self-defense aspects of shooting with competition-oriented sport shooting, all while demonstrating some pretty incredible feats with his Glock pistol. It’s long been a bone of contention within the martial arts world as to whether shooting guns should be considered a true martial art. Though traditionalists might scoff at the idea firearms training could have the same mental or aesthetic benefits that arts like karate or kung fu possess, kyudo, traditional Japanese archery, which shares many physical characteristics with shooting a gun, is readily accepted as part of the budo family.
“It’s generally recognized, when it comes to real situations, you’re not going to perform as well as you do in training because of stress. So isn’t it better to start from higher up on the mountain so when you fall, you’re still at a higher skill level than your opponent?” he said. “The tactical side has it right that things like awareness are the most important part of self defense. But you also want a deep well of technical skill so when the taxman of reality shows up to drain your account, you still have enough left to pay the bill.”
