Elbows Up or Elbows Down

I am truly not trying to start the argument again. Reality is that for those of you who have been shooting for a while, this will be a futile attempt in changing old engrained muscle memory. That said, if you are interested in learning why it is that I teach shooting the way I do, you may want to continue reading. Who knows, you may learn something new that you were not aware of, it may make sense to you, and possibly even get you to reconsider some aspects of your own tactics.

This article is directed at those who do not have twenty plus years of shooting and want to understand how, and more importantly: why, under stress, in a true combat environment, from military front lines to defending your own home, you can make your body work with you instead of against you.

Now, before we start, please understand that every shooting style has merit. At the end of the day if you hit the intended target then keep doing what you are doing! This is just one way of accomplishing the same goal.

I never claimed, nor ever will, that the way I shoot will help you in three gun competitions, getting bullseyes when target shooting, or passing your qualification courses with perfect scores. Nope. None of those. The way I shoot, and the way I teach, is geared at one goal and one goal only: to stop a threat. In order to do so I must account for a few given truths: under stress my body will lose its fine motor skills; My body will be unable to complete multiple complex tasks; my brain will be overwhelmed with information that needs to be analyzed; and, I will fall, not rise, to my level of training. 

What do I mean by all of those? The body is amazing machine, it is designed to keep you safe. As a result, there are a few physiological responses to stress that go back to pre-historic times when it meant putting dinner in the cave or getting eaten by a saber-tooth tiger. Knowing that, I want to work with my body and not against it. For example, the whole process of aiming, i.e., lining up two sights and a target will be almost impossible under stress. As matter of fact, during times of extreme stress, as in when in a true firefight, your body will dump adrenaline into the bloodstream. One of the side effects of this hormonal change is pupil dilation. Ever went to the eye doctor and have drops put in your eyes to force dilation? What was the result? Blurry sight and inability to focus I bet. Now, try to line up front sight with rear sight, and then with a moving target under those conditions! Not as simple, is it?

In 1951 William Edmund Hick, an American Psychologist conducted various researches, and proved that reaction time slows down based on the number of options. For example, if you know 10 ways to defend a strike your reaction time will be longer/slower than if you only knew one. Essentially your brain is like a rolodex of cards (if you were born after 1990 and don’t know what a rolodex is, look it up). The more cards in the rolodex the longer it takes to find the right card. We’ll get back to Hick’s Law soon enough and how it applies to shooting.

So…elbows up or elbows down? The question refers to the presentation of a handgun towards a target. Most western shooters are used to drawing their handgun close to their body’s side, keep their elbows tucked in and down, and extend their hand from their hip upwards and forward. The way I present the handgun is by drawing it upwards towards my chest, flaring my elbows, and then pressing it forward towards a target. Now let’s go over the various reasons why.

Indexing

If you want to point at an object you can do so without sights on your fingers, correct? It is a skill you acquired over years of repetition. But even so, try raising your arm from a dead hang next to your body towards an object you want to point at, and then try pressing forward towards the object you want to point at. Chances are that pressing forward allowed for two benefits: prevented raising your hand too high, thus over extending (due to deceleration), and increased accuracy. When I shoot the handgun is simply an extension of my hand. By pressing it forward from my chest I am more likely to hit my target without using sights…which we now know will be close to impossible under stress anyways.

Spiral

Everything that moves in a spiral has better accuracy rates. Think of a quarterback throwing a football, or fletching on an arrow designed to put the spin on it. Even the rifling in the barrel of your handgun is there to put a spiral on the projectile to increase accuracy. Spiral means a straighter motion. When my elbows come up and flare out I am forced to spiral my wrist, and therefore the handgun as well, towards my target, hence increasing even more the accuracy rate.

Absence of Arch

You never thought your high school physics will come back to hunt you in your adult shooting endeavors, did you? Well, here it is: levers. Your arm has three joints that affect the handgun’s extension towards the target: shoulder, elbow, and wrist. When moving those joints from the waist-side an arch is introduced into the motion. That arch may affect point of impact depending on when the trigger is depressed along the movement. We would like to think that we will only fire when arms are locked and muzzle is on threat, but reality is that movement is introduced during true combat, and we may fire too early or too late, at which point the arch is of extreme importance.   

By bringing elbows up, the arch is avoided.  

Recoil Management

When extending the arms forward from the waist we are dependent on a fairly small muscle group: the deltoids. Think of doing a front dumbbell raise: pretty limited in the weight you can move. However, when pressing the gun forward you are using a larger, and more stable muscle group: the pectorals. This becomes a crucial element when considering the energy we need to battle upon recoil. If elbows are tucked in chances are the handgun will move up and down with excess and require realignment fo sights. However, when pressing forward my arms and pecs act as shock absorbers. There is obviously still handgun movement, but likelihood is that it will be less pronounce than if elbows were down. End result is better recoil management and continuous hits on target. 

One Handed Shooting

This all becomes even more important when we shoot one handed. By default our handgun handling, sighting, and recoil management are even harder. Elbow up allows up to assure we index and spiral towards a target, avoid an arch, and control recoil more effectively. As matter of fact, so much so that even firearm instructors who teach the elbow down presentation instruct their students to turn their wrist inwards a tad to manage the recoil, and by doing so, force them to elevate their elbow! 

Visual Stimuli and Brain Processing

Continuing with physiology: we are all familiar with the OODA Loop, a term coined by Col. John Boyd and stands for: Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. In essence, this is the way our brain works. It receives information, processes it, comes up with a course of action, and executes. When we are engaged in combat our focus is, as it should be, on the threat. Our eyes should be locked on potential risks and maintain situational awareness. Now think of your field of view as a box, framing what your area of responsibility is. Once a handgun is presented into that box, your field of view, even if we are the ones who introduced it, it is a new piece of information our brain needs to process and account for. This in turn shifts our OODA loop and forces a delayed response: shooting the threat. By bringing the handgun to our chest we keep it inside that frame, and thus in our field of view throughout the presentation, thus minimizing introduction of NEW visual stimuli and affecting brain processes.

Physiology Affecting Psychology

Did you ever consider why during basketball matches, when a player has free throws, the opposing fans wave towels or hands in front of him? We know statistically that this visual interruptions affect the success rate of those throws. Since we already discussed the physiological affects of visual stimuli, lest not forget the psychological affect. Every time a new piece of information is introduced our brain goes into its own dark places of self doubt. By virtue of having to reanalyze a situation it believed to already have a solution for, the brain essentially “psyches itself out”. So much so that sport psychologists believe this is even more of an issue than the mere visual stimuli effect alone.

Consistency Under Stress

Last, but most certainly not least, we come back to Hick’s Law. As mentioned, Hick’s Law refers to the fact that the more skills one knows the longer his/her response time. We often times train in a square range when the target is at a known distance, lacks motion, and we are standing erect across from it. But real world doesn’t work like that. We may be seated, prone, moving, and shooting over/under/through various objects. Tactics must change. Most instructors then either develop (the good ones) or steal something they saw on YouTube (the bad ones) as their solution. A perfect example is shooting from inside a car. If you never did, you should. There are a lot of lessons to learn from this specific situation, but that is for another article. One key element is that there are various objects in the way of the presentation: dashboard, steering wheel, consoles, etc. Arm extension from the waist will not work. So most instructors do teach to raise arms high above those obstacles and press forward. Now, if you would that in a car, why not outside the car? Why have two different skills when one would have sufficed? Will you be able to remember the various different tactics when inside a car, outside of it, under it, or around it? Or should you master one skill that works on all….something as simple as raising elbows up and pressing forward?!

Conclusion

I am often times asked why I teach such an exaggerated “chicken wing” motion. Reality is that I am a big proponent of raising elbows to account for all of the above mentioned reasons. I teach an exaggerated motion during training knowing the skill will deteriorate under stress thus causing shooters to only partially raise their elbows, which will STILL WORK! If I taught them to only raise a little bit they may not raise at all when under stress. So haters will hate, but everything has a reason, nothing its random! 

I will conclude with one last thought: not everybody likes the way I shoot. I am okay with it. All I try to do is pass along a method that works for me, makes sense, and has been battle proven. In my decades of teaching I worked with tier one operators and first time shooters, and without exception, I am certain without a doubt, that given one day I can provide the student with the skills to protect him/herself under extreme stress. And if I am able to save one life by teaching a realistic skill, then I am okay with it all.

Stay safe and watch your six!

BK Blankchtein

MasadaTactical.com

MasadaProtection.com

MasadaICS.comMy reasoning for the