I don't know about you, but we're having an epic winter. I spent more than eight hours last week taking care of snow — and that was only because my wife and sons helped. Today, I spent about 20 minutes digging a "tunnel" through knee-deep snow to get from my truck to my office.

I'm still doing some training and practice outside, but I've moved a majority of it indoors. Today, I'm going to give you a few tips for how to make the most of winter indoor training. They're tricks that you can use year-round, but they're especially valuable during the winter months.

To start off, something that should be obvious is that winter time is perfect dry-fire time. When done correctly, dry-fire will correct flinch, mashing, milking, lookie-loos, and it will even train proper grip and recoil control.

Every time I've had the pleasure of shooting winter indoor matches at Smith & Wesson in Massachusetts, I'm amazed at how solid-performing shooters come up to me at some point and tell me they didn't have a chance to do live-fire practice in the weeks leading up to the match, but that they did as well as they did because of dry-fire training.

These are solid performers who, in some cases, are taking home hardware.

So, indoor range training for self-defense, is it possible?

I was on a podcast recently with Jeff Anderson, and one of the things we were talking about is how to train for self-defense with the crazy restrictions that indoor ranges have. In short, it's frustrating if you try to mimic real-life shooting at an indoor range.

You can only shoot one target at a time, you have to shoot S-L-O-W-L-Y, in most cases, you can't shoot from the holster. You can't move and shoot. Many won't let you shoot humanoid targets, etc.

But there's still a lot of value in indoor shooting.

And if anyone tells you that standing flat-footed and shooting holes in a paper target doesn't prepare you for self-defense, it's probably just because they see everything linearly and don't know how to use lateral thinking to get around a problem and find creative, nonobvious solutions.

In a race to do fast, impressive and "tacticool" shooting, many shooters want to gloss over the basics and focus on speed and movement. They forget that all shooting is built on a foundation of fundamental skills. That foundation can be made of sand or stone.

Those fundamental skills are really basic — stance, grip, sight picture, sight alignment, trigger press, followthrough. In reality, it's more basic than that. All you need to do is line up your sights with your intended target, press the trigger without disturbing sight alignment and repeat.

When you focus on the basics and get passionate about perfecting them, you can add speed, stress and movement with minimal drops in performance. But when shooters pay lip service to the fundamentals in a race to do cool stuff, then speed, stress or movement will all cause their groups to open up like a shotgun blast.

You can look at other physical skills to see the same pattern play out.

Would you teach a kid carpentry by giving him a full-size hammer and start him learning on 16 penny nails? No! You'd start him out with small nails and a small hammer. Eventually, he'd perfect his technique, and that solid foundation will make it effortless to use a full-size hammer to drive a 16 penny nail in 1-2 whacks.

In traditional martial arts, the foundation is forms and katas. You master the basics before moving on to the complex.

But MMA is full of fighters who rushed past the basics to get to the cool stuff. They look good shadow boxing and hitting bags, but their technique falls apart and they fight like a 6-year-old as soon as they get punched in the face. Why? Because they paid lip service to the fundamentals instead of mastering them.

Basketball is another great example. Larry Bird and Michael Jordan were famous for showing up an hour or more before the rest of their teams for practice and games to work on standing jumpshots. Slow, standing jumpshots with no defender is nothing like the reality of an NBA game, so why did they do it?

They did it to master the fundamentals. And with that solid foundation, they were able to add speed, stress, movement and defenders, and perform super-human feats with stunning regularity.

How's that apply to shooting at an indoor range?

Well, I might look at live-fire shooting differently than most people. I want to make the biggest gains possible while investing as little time and money as possible.

So I don't look at the majority of my live-fire time as training or practice. I either look at it as "fun time" or as an opportunity to verify and validate the training and practice I've done with dry fire. Here are some of the things that I test:

• Does the grip and flex I'm practicing in dry fire bring the sights back into fast, perfect alignment after each shot, or do I need to make adjustments?
• When I have all the time in the world, can I deliver rounds exactly where I want them to go? If not, is it a visual issue I can fix by covering one eye?
• Am I anticipating recoil, and do I need to alternate between dry fire and live fire?
• Am I twisting the pistol as I press the trigger, or am I gripping tightly and isolating my trigger finger from the rest of my hand?
• If my thumb is moving as I'm pressing the trigger, is it disturbing sight alignment or is it away from the slide where it won't do any harm?

You can use indoor range time to focus on perfecting and refining the fundamentals without the distractions and complexity of "real life" shooting. Again, get the foundation built solidly and the variables of "real life" shooting won't be as big of a deal.

And when you get home, you can confidently practice self-defense skills like drawing from concealment, using cover, moving and shooting, engaging multiple targets, and more with dry fire — knowing that you've verified and validated the fundamentals with live fire.

It's a loop — train and practice with dry fire, verify, validate and refine with live fire; train and practice and build in defensive skills with dry fire, and test and validate with competition. This method gives you the biggest gains in the least amount of time with the least expense.