Episode
What High-Level Training Really Gives You (ft. Farewell Firearms)
- Podcast
- State of the Second
- Published
- Apr 29, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2569
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Summary
Joe Farewell joins John and Kaylee for a conversation about what high-level firearms training actually delivers, and why the answer is rarely what new students expect. Joe is a former law enforcement officer and SWAT sniper team leader who spent seven years in policing in Florida before leaving toward the end of 2018 to teach full time. He's also a competitive shooter who represented Team USA at the IPSC Rifle World Shoot, taking silver in 2019 and gold in 2024. He walks through how competition shooting is structured, from local matches up to nationals and the World Shoot, which he calls the Olympics of practical shooting, and what it takes to travel overseas with guns and ammo through the paperwork each country requires. A through-line of the episode is Joe's training philosophy. He measures everything against three goals: the desired level of accuracy, speed, and consistency. He argues shooting is shooting whether the purpose is competition, self defense, or military use, so the fundamentals stay the same even as the application changes. He built the Dry Fire Mastery programs in 2020 during COVID after learning to improve on roughly 50 to 100 rounds a week by doing millions of dry fire repetitions for free. He explains why isolating a skill in dry fire and fixing it raises performance, and why understanding the why behind a drill matters more than burning a thousand rounds a day on flashy work. Joe is direct about the biggest misconception students bring to advanced classes: they expect to walk away a far better shooter after two days. He compares it to taking a gym class for two days in a row and expecting to be ripped. The real value of a class is the homework and the understanding of what to train and why. The conversation moves to his move from Florida…