Explore every episode of the podcast The Everyday Marksman

I've got a bit of a confession to make, and it's embarrassing. I'm not all that great with pistols. I'm not a bad pistol shooter, per se. But on balance, my pistol shooting lags way behind my rifle shooting. I think that's a problem, so let's talk about why I'm going to fix it.

Let's talk long term. Too many people think that success is just a few weeks or months away, when that is far from the truth. In reality, success is a culmination of long term effort often years in the making. In this piece, I take a little known two day challenge and show you how I would break it down into a series of seasons and blocks that could be repeated over and over again, always driving closer and closer to success.

This is a philosophical one. For the last month or so, I've been obsessed with an Ancient Greek concept of excellence and how to apply it. Today's post is about presenting the core concepts and how I think it works within the construct of The Everyday Marksman. At a broader scale, this will weave throughout my work and form the bedrock what I want you to achieve.

A while back, while talking about the latest revision to his sniper marksmanship book, John Simpson let me know that he had another book on the way- this one focused on patrol rifle marksmanship. Well it recently hit the shelves and we got together again to talk more about rifle marksmanship, training philosophies, and competition. Let's dig in.

This is both my review of a new book on strength training as well as an interview with the author. Over the last year, I've built up a library of strength and conditioning books, and I think I've settled on the one to suggest to just about everyone who wants to get started. Let's dig in.

Months of prep time, new gear configurations, and a lot of articles. I finally ran the West Virginia Gun Run this past Saturday. Here's some notes on how it went and what I'd do differently in the future.

Today I'm discussing a concept that's been brewing in the the back of my brain. While working on the book, I've needed a way to illustrate how different things we do relate to improving the whole and take use to new levels of performance. I think I've figured it out, and this is my first go at explaining it.

People often think old weapons are automatically obsolete, and don't have much place in your safe as anything other than a collectors item. In today's episode, which is admittedly a little bit of a rant, I'm going to make the case why "obsolete" weapons might still have a real world role to play.

Too many people are looking for the easy out, as if finding the one perfect piece of gear, or just the right training technique, will take them to the next level of capability. But that's not true. Success and failure are lagging indicators of our choice to make deposits or take withdrawals from our internal investment account.

I sat down with a few of our community members who recently competed in events put on by Waco Tactical Fitness. I'll be doing a similar tactical biathlon event later next month, and I was curious about equipment, training, and lessons learned from the events.

While reading through some of Coach Dan John's work, I came across a philosophy for breaking your annual training cycles. It's impossible to do everything well all of the time- something must give. Instead, we should think of our training, all of our training, from two perspectives: the bus bench, and the park bench.

Like many enthusiast topics, we've got a problem with flex culture. What is that? Today we're talking about it, how it manifests, why its a problem, and what you can do to combat it.

I've got a little bit of a bone to pick with how a lot of the shooting culture talks about drills. Much like weight lifting and gym bro culture, it seems a lot of shooters are more interested in flexing their egos than actually using drills as a way to improve. But how, exactly, should we approach that?

Everyone loves talking about optimization. Entire industries spend huge amounts of money convincing you that their new whiz bang gadget or service will take you to the next level with no additional skill required. Today I'm putting a stake in the ground to tell you that optimum is a myth, and our constant pursuit of it only detracts us from focusing on what's actually important for our success.

To start of 2023, I wanted to take a moment to look over where we've been over the last eight years, some of the impactful decisions I've made along the way, and how that's affecting where were going next in 2023 and beyond. Thanks for being a part of it!

In this episode, I once again talk to my very first guest: John Simpson. We dig deeper into the fundamentals of learning good marksmanship, past Army programs, the importance of learning the right lessons in training, and more.

The first handgun purchase is usually a daunting decision, because there's a lot of technicality mixed in with personal preferences of the individual giving the advice. This is my attempt to simplify it down a bit and focus on the most important things.

This week I sat down again with Ilya, the Dark Lord of Optics, to answer some lingering questions I've got about prism optics. I wanted to understand how they work relative to traditional rifle scopes, and some of the tradeoffs required when designing them. During the conversation, we also wandered over how rifle scopes work in general, reticle color selection, durability, engineering tradeoffs, and more. I'm also posting the audio-only version of this as well.

Today we're defining the Everyday Marksman minimum rifle standards. This is a two-part test of both speed and marksmanship fundamentals. I want to outline the test itself, why I defined this requirements, but also what I left out.

In this episode, we build on the concept of the minimum capable citizen caught in Scenario X by talking about medical. Both what you need to know, and what you should always expect to carry. I also discuss some of my favorite first aid kit pouches for good measure.

A series of recent events reminded me of the importance of actually checking your gear for fit, function, and purpose. It doesn't have to take long, and it pays dividends when you actually have to use your stuff for competition, personal defense, or worse. Unfortunately, many people just don't know where to start, so they begin and end with mounting pouches on their kit, snapping a few photos, and saying "Good enough!"

Today we continue on our Scenario-X series by touching on fitness. It's a core pillar of The Everyday Marksman philosophy, and in this episode I'm giving three domains where it really makes a difference. Only one of them actually has to do with accomplishing the mission at hand.

Gear articles are among the most popular on the site, so it shouldn't surprise you that I get a lot of questions about what chest rig to buy, how to set up belts, or whether or not someone really needs a set of plates and night vision. When just starting out, an aspiring prepared citizen is easily overwhelmed by the myriad of choices out there, not to mention the cost of actually acquiring it all. To many, the simple answer is defaulting to how the military does it. That means dividing up your equipment into first line, second line, third line, and so on. While that makes sense for a military unit who has a primary mission of seeking, fixing, and destroying enemy combatants- it might not actually work for the average citizen just trying to protect their neighborhood during difficult times.

There's been a question floating around the web that I wanted to take a poke at. If you were advising someone on how to start their own "serious" arsenal, what would be your suggestions? In what priority order? HEre's my answer.

When we start talking about bad situations and what we think we're going to do, most people in the shooting world immediately think of firefights and raids. But that's not reality. There are far more mundane concerns that we're going to spend our time worrying about. Int his post, I'm proposing a system for quickly communicating defensive posture to yourself and the world.

I've been having a lot of conversations lately about the right mixture of skills, equipment, communications, and other elements of a theoretical emergency situation. With that, it's time to revisit Scenario-X, our fictional disaster first introduced in the load carriage series. In this post, I want to build out my thoughts a bit more and discuss some of the nuances and reasoning behind it. Why? Well, because it's going underpin a lot of things coming up soon.

I dislike the whole New Year's resolution ritual, but that doesn't mean I don't do some self evaluation and pick some new things to focus on. In this episode, Allison and I discuss my primary focus areas for 2022, how they will affect the site, and why you should probably consider focusing on these things too.

The Tactical Games are part of a growing trend with combining physical fitness with marksmanship in competition. I've seen them talked about quite a bit over time, and I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Mike Green and his wife Pascale to talk about how the games started and what to look out four while you prepare.

In this podcast episode, I'm posted the edited down audio from my stream with Jeff Gurwitch and Ilya Koshkin. We focus on the best uses for BDC reticles against MRAD-based reticles at less than 500 yards.

There's been an idea rolling around in my head for a long time: fun is allowed. You see, in today's short episode, I'm discussing what I hope becomes a recurring theme on the site for a while. Have you ever gotten the sense that we, the people of the gun, take things just a little too seriously?

In this episode, I'm reposting the audio from the first half of my livestream session with Ilya Koshkin last week. In it, we discussed the utility of LPVO optics with offset red dot sights. Jacob, the Pro-Gun Millennial, also joins us for the fun.

In this episode I'm talking to Jeff Gurwitch again. He recently put up a video on his YouTube channel that caught my attention. Why? Well, because on the surface it contradicts my own advice of, "Let the mission dictate the configuration."

I recently competed in my first PRS Rimfire match, and it was a great time. I also came away with several observations and lessons learned. Let's dig into what I would do different for next time and what you might consider for your first match.

This episode expands on my last post about the future of The Everyday Marksman. I'm ready to talk a bit more about where we've been, where we're going, and the role you can play in it.

My recent post on establishing a fitness hierarchy made me realize that I need to do the same thing for marksmanship training. So here we are. Today I'm discussing my breakdown for prioritizing training distances and my reasoning for them.

In this episode of the Everyday Marksman, I’m talking to Alex Sansone, better known as The Suited Shootist and operator of the blog and YouTube channel under the same name. Alex is a bit different than most of the other guests I’ve had on the show because he doesn’t have the same military or high-level competition background as others. He’s a regular citizen who happens to care about protecting himself and his family while looking good doing it.

This episode is an off-the-cuff ask me anything (AMA). I gathered questions from social media as well as the discord server and opened the flood gates. Allison also joins me again to help dig into questions abut gear, shooting, and some fun stuff.

I don't do musings posts very often, especially with the podcast. Current events this week have been a little wild with the stock market, and I've been watching from the sides. While I didn't partake in the Gamestop madness, I've certainly been entertained with the news articles and chatter on Reddit. During all of this, I realized that there is a common thread between the politics of gun control and what's been happening all week with retail investors.

I've got a bit of experience between training and competition, though not as much as I'd like. Still, I've learned a few things along the way and today we're talking about some of the key lessons I wish I could go back and make sure I knew back at the beginning.

This is just a quick unedited rant about why I decided to launch a physical fitness test for The Everyday Marksman. In short, 2020 sucked, and 2021 might be worse: maybe it's time to hold ourselves to some objective standards.

This is a short episode touching on an observation I've had lately. Since the biggest rush of gun-buying stuff, this year is new shooters, they haven't quite learned about all the other stuff they should be aware of. And that leaves an opportunity for enthusiasts like you and me.

This episode is a bit of an audio guide version of my article on selecting AR-15 optics. It’s a bit more off the cuff than usual, and you can probably tell that I get a bit excited about nerding out with this topic. The principles I outline apply to just about any kind of optic regardless of the rifle, or handgun, that it mounts to. At the core, it’s about understanding the role you are trying to fill and then selecting an appropriate solution within the bounds of your budget.

2020 has been a rough year, and things may only get worse from here. So what, exactly, can we do about that? First, take a breath. Now let's talk.

Today I'm talking about my concept of the Minimum Capable Carbine. If you've been reading for a while, you might recognize this as my suggestion for your first AR-15. In truth, this episode is a chance for me to say things out loud that didn't come across very well in written format.

Mike Green is a 15 year veteran of Special Operations who began a training company in Northern Virginia as a bit of a side gig. His school has since grown into quite the training operation spanning multiple states and categories of students. One of the things that stood out to me about Green Ops is their motto, “Why Should Your Training Be Less Special?”

In the last episode, I mentioned something called the homeostasis problem. It's a way of viewing why big changes in life are so difficult to make. It was going to be a large aside in that article, so much so that I decided it was worth its own post. So here we are: the homeostasis problem.

The theme of the month is all about balance, so here’s another one to think about. I thought about the elements that should go into decision making regarding everything we do, and I categorized everything into these three: safety, capability, and security. As gun owners and firearms enthusiasts, we should always be mindful of keeping these things in balance.

Today's episode has to do with the theme of the month within our community over at The Marksman's Quarter: finding balance. I thought this was an appropriate topic because I just came off of a month-long break from writing or recording, and wanted to talk a little bit about what led to that hiatus and the things that have been on my mind.

I don't know why this question has been on my mind lately, but I've felt compelled to try and put words to my answer. Why is good marksmanship important? What do we get from learning and practicing it? I think there's an assumption within the gun world that everyone already knows that marksmanship is important. But I don't think most people actually care.

Today we're sitting down with NC Scout of Brushbeater and American Partisan to talk about radio communications. Scout comes from an Army Infantry scout background, with time served in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He teaches a variety of martial skills to everyday folks, including radio communications.