“Reps” – The True Essence of Skill Mastery

What’s good, Partisans?? Today’s post is just a short piece about the indispensable value of REPETITION in training and skill mastery.

While participating last weekend in the most excellent Team Leader Course (offered by Von Steuben Training and Consulting LLC), Mike mentioned that the small class of four would allow for doing more “reps” of the field exercises/training drills, and that got me thinking about just how critical it really is to put in the “reps”. It made me ponder for a moment my 26+ years in the “iron game”, and how many TENS OF THOUSANDS of reps of different key exercises I’ve done over that period, such as the Squat, the Deadlift, Chin-Ups, etc. So many reps of executing these movements, in fact, that I know exactly what’s happening at every millimeter of movement as I perform them. I can watch a person working out and spot errors immediately, and I’ve also learned how to adjust and tweak workouts to a point of mastery due to this intimate knowledge of lifting. It can’t be bought or achieved overnight.

In another example, when I took the Fighting Carbine course, I remember NC Scout talking about how he could more or less tell how many rounds were left in the AR magazine just by the way the buffer tube spring sounded as he shot it. How? Through REPS! How else? Just imagine how many 10,000’s (or more?) rounds NC Scout had to have shot in order to achieve this level of “feel” for shooting the AR. There is no other way!

As probably all Partisans already understand, getting good at… well, just about anything worth getting good at… requires repetition. And not just one or two times. No, getting good at anything worthwhile requires nothing less than a solid commitment to the boring and tedious process of drilling over, and over, and over again…. and then drilling more. Literally thousands of times, in many cases! And, this concept is true whether you’re mastering an academic subject, learning a new skill of any type (manual or theoretical), or just performing plain old exercise. It’s universal – reps are the life’s blood of mastery. Mastery is developed carefully and diligently over time, putting layer upon layer of boring repetition time in to achieve not just a “pretty good” understanding of something, but to achieve near perfection, to know that skill inside and out. If we think of any masters of any type we may know, whether it’s a martial arts master, a master carpenter, a really sharp engineer, or whatever, we can but imagine all the time spent in their “game” to get to that point, and imagine all the hours and training they did. In other words, REPS. Nobody gave it to them.

Now, the primacy of boring, tedious repetition is especially apparent when it comes to building any sort of physical skill to the point of true proficiency or beyond that, mastery. Coming from a rather nerdy, unathletic background myself, I’d say that I personally still have to work much harder on physical skill acquisition than average; I truly look on with envy when I see people get a new physical skill down in one or two tries, while I need 100. But that don’t bother me! I have already learned through my decades of lifting weights that this is just how it goes for me, and for anyone really; I then readily apply this outlook to any new training I take on.

For example, when it comes to shooting and martial arts, two other important areas of physical skill that I (and likely all of us) place very high value on, I’m a relative latecomer. I only started shooting seriously well into my 30’s (what do you want? I grew up in New York City and only fled when I was 38; I am in my mid-40’s now), and I only started practicing martial arts seriously in 2019 – a mere 3 years ago. I had to wait that long to take martial arts because I needed to make sure I had time in my schedule to cement the training into the lifestyle, which meant that I needed to make time for at least 2 – 3 martial arts training sessions per week (I currently do 3 – 4). I already knew by then that I needed to make time in my lifestyle for… tedious repetition towards success. I only mention all this to illustrate the point: training here and there in token fashion just won’t cut it if you want to get awesome at something important; getting into the weeds of a skill through boring-ass repetition – with much time, diligence, and commitment – is absolutely necessary to achieve excellence. It’s just a fact.

And so, in conclusion, we Partisans are in the business of skill-building. In fact, we LIVE for it, right? There’s just so much to learn that it’s dizzying: radio and antennas; small unit tactics; medical skills; intelligence gathering; leadership… the list is very long, it’s all important, and it all takes time to learn. And it’s easy to get spread thin as we quest to improve our capabilities. But we should never forget… getting proficient (not just “good”) at or especially mastering key skills is vital, and getting to that point requires putting the boring time in to get good at that which is worth getting good at.

It’s very important to have fun too but, at the end of the day, our orientation to building our skills should be one of accepting that it needs to be done, it needs to be done right, and doing it right is tedious and boring in pretty much all cases. The fun and reward then come when you execute a skill perfectly, and get a desired outcome at a level of quality that is untouchable by most others who didn’t put the time in, or when you accomplish your training mission. But, it’s all worth it! Mastery and success await you.

Now go out and train to perfection!!