Defensive Tactics Instructor Training

Train-the-Trainer: Defensive Tactics Excellence

This 32-hour, hands-on program prepares law enforcement and corrections professionals to confidently teach defensive tactics. Blending legal foundations, proven control techniques, scenario-based drills, and instructor teach-backs, this course ensures you’re ready to deliver safe, consistent, and compliant instruction.

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What This Course Is About:

Master the Skills. Teach with Confidence.

The Defensive Tactics Instructor Course is an intensive, reality-based program designed for experienced law enforcement, correctional, and security professionals who want to lead defensive tactics training within their agencies.

This 32-hour course combines legal instruction, physical skills development, scenario-based drills, and proven instructor methodology to ensure you can teach, demonstrate, and evaluate defensive tactics in full compliance with Minnesota statutes, case law, and POST standards.

You’ll gain expertise in:

  • Use-of-force decision-making
  • Levels of resistance and control
  • Survival stress responses
  • Physical control techniques
  • Ground survival and weapon retention
  • Edged weapon defense and handcuffing

Instructor development is a core focus. Through structured teach-backs and critique, you’ll learn how to:

  • Communicate techniques clearly
  • Deliver legally sound instruction
  • Use authoritative verbal commands
  • Manage high-stress training environments safely

Training includes lectures, demonstrations, role-playing, and practical drills. Students must be physically capable of participating as both instructors and role players. No firearms or live ammunition are permitted.

Upon successful completion, graduates will be equipped to deliver legally defensible, tactically sound, and professionally effective defensive tactics training within their organizations.

What You’ll Learn:

What You’ll Be Able to Do After This Course

Legal & Decision-Making

  • Explain the relationship between defensive tactics, physical control techniques, and the use-of-force continuum, including Minnesota statutes and case law.
  • Demonstrate proper use-of-force decision-making based on crime severity, threat level, resistance, and rapidly evolving circumstances.

Control Techniques

  • Apply and instruct pressure point control tactics and pain compliance techniques safely and legally.
  • Teach proper handcuffing and searching techniques for cooperative and resistant subjects in standing, kneeling, prone, and multi-officer scenarios.
  • Perform and instruct escort holds, takedowns, motion defense techniques, and empty-hand control options.

Edged Weapon & Ground Survival

  • Demonstrate and teach edged-weapon defense principles against common attack angles.
  • Apply ground survival skills and defensive responses to takedowns, mounting situations, and ground assaults.

Weapon Retention

  • Demonstrate effective retention techniques for holstered and unholstered firearms, including hostage scenarios.

Communication & Stress Management

  • Use loud, clear, and authoritative verbal commands during instruction and scenarios.
  • Identify and manage survival stress responses, applying combat motor skills under pressure.

Instructor Competence

  • Demonstrate proper instructional techniques: clear demonstrations, effective coaching, safety management, and student evaluation.
  • Successfully teach assigned topics during instructor teach-backs, showing technical knowledge, legal understanding, and professional communication.