Hey everybody, this is Chuck from Press Check Training and Consulting. Today I want to take a little bit of time to talk about gun belt, duty belt, battle belt, range belt, belt setup. Specifically, this is going to be talking about wearing an external belt, not a belt that is also the same belt that holds up your pants.

Based on mission and circumstances, there's a big difference. There were a bunch of times that I did not wear any type of traditional two-belt system. I took items that would traditionally be found on a gun belt and I just routed them through the rigger style belt that held up the pants. The reason for that was to reduce bulk and to reduce weight.

If the pants that I'm wearing around every day are not the pants that I'm going to go do my job in, it's more like a firefighter scenario where they've got their utilities on in the firehouse, and then their fireproof pants are pre-staged and they get dressed to go to work. That's the biggest differentiator in my mind about whether or not you should be wearing an external belt system versus pouches directly on your pants belt.

If you don't want to have to carry those heavy items around with you all day long, you want the ability to separate the load carriage from your pants. If you are getting dressed to go to work, you have less versatility, but you can cut some of that weight or bulk down by just using some type of stiffened belt in your pants and then pre-routing the pouches in between your belt loops on the trousers that you're going to wear when you're actually going out and doing your work.

Today's video is focused primarily on an outer belt system that is added to the top of your pants when you're getting dressed to get ready for work. I've got a Blue Force Gear grid belt and two Blue Force Gear CHLK belts here, and I'll kind of be pointing around and talking to these as well during the video. The difference between the grid belt and the CHLK belt is simple: the CHLK belt is a life-saving piece of equipment. It has integrated hard points in it for the use of safety lines designed to keep you from bouncing around inside of an aircraft or to provide a hard point if you're in a really aggressive downslope environment, where you're in a mountainous terrain or something like that, where you can lock in.

Let's say if you're having to belay somebody else, and you need to not be pulled off of the hill. You can use the CHLK belt to attach to a piece of pro behind you or something like that. The CHLK belt has attachment points in the front and in the back. You guys have already seen the CHLK belt, hopefully, because it's not a new piece of gear.

The grid belt reduces that additional life-saving piece of equipment capability from the belt. It brings the price point down, lowers the weight of the belt just a hair as well. I've got a grid belt that I'll use for range stuff and things like that, and then I've got the CHLK belt that I'll use if I'm going to be training an organization or entity that's got aircraft and I need to be able to ride in their craft, or we're shooting from really high places where I want to be kind of hooked in, in case I take a spill.

This is my range belt that I teach with. It's a multi-cam grid belt, and that's what I got—multi-cam. I've got my pistol hanger on the right-hand side. I have no issues. One of the things I like about both the grid and the CHLK is there's enough rigidity in the belt system and it's thick enough that if I slide on a Safariland belt hanger, it doesn't really move back and forth.

The idea of screwing through and hard mounting your hanger in a specific place is actually a tip we got from the competitive shooting world where they want to be able to index that gun in the exact same spot every time. With traditional belt loop styles, if you're grabbing or carrying the gun by the end, your pistol hanger could shift forward or backward on the belt a little bit. Then when you go to put it on the gun, it's not resting in the exact same spot when you go for a fast draw.

Blue Force Gear created an adapter that allows it to screw in and move, so there's no chance that it's ever going to be forward or backward of where I've spaced it when properly placed on my hip. But as I said, I never really had a problem with the Safariland UBL shifting around on this belt either. It's got real good rigidity, so you're definitely not out of the game if you're taking a traditional belt hanger design and putting it on this belt. I want to have some first aid on me.

So I've got the trauma kit now micro, with a tourniquet hanger under that. This comes in a horizontal footprint and it has reduced size dressings for a really small footprint. If I were doing duty stuff, this might not be enough first aid, but this is literally range accident management-level stuff. There's a micro version which slims this down even more to the bare minimum that you would need for bleeding control and it changes the form factor to a vertical profile like this.

The nano takes up a little less real estate horizontally on your belt and trades it for a little bit of vertical and a slimmer footprint. So maybe if I was riding in a car or having this in my lower back seated for long periods of time, I might opt to go to something like the nano and kind of offset it to one side or the other so I can sit more comfortably in a vehicle. That's another option with all these things—what you're using your belt for, the use case, and your requirements for what you're doing with it.

These are more important than anybody's setup that you see on the internet. This is definitely something as personal to the individual user, and you should never mimic another guy's setup just because you saw it on the internet and you think he's a good guy. Apply what they're saying and apply those same principles to your use case, but don't just try to copy somebody else's homework, if you will.

Because this first aid pouch works for me, it might not be the first aid pouch that works for you. We've got the micro plus, which allows you to carry more items than this on your gear as well. I can go smaller than what I'm using for my range belt or larger. These are all just various options that you have. Because the range belt, pretty much the only other thing you need to carry other than the gun and some first aid is the ammo that I'm going to train with.

I've got a set of S-TAC pouches here with the front one cocked over a little bit so that I can get to those reloads easier. It's currently set up for a rifle and pistol class, so I've got two mags up front. I have a Kydex beer can speed reload for the rifle, and then I have an additional Blue Force Gear magazine stackable in the rear, so I can carry a second 30-round mag.

If I need more than 60 rounds of rifle ammo, I'll either move to a chest rig or bring a range bag up and swap out mags. I also have the back pockets on my pants where I normally administratively carry a mag each when I'm on the range training. So with one in the gun, two on the belt, and two in my back pockets, I have five magazines of ammo before I've got to either put on a chest rack or go back to the range bag and get more ammunition.

Again, weight management is always really important for me. I'm getting older, have orthopedic issues, lower back stuff, and a whole career of doing the DOD thing, and there's no reason to carry weight around just for the sake of carrying weight around. Up front, I've got a set of Press Check assault gloves for handling steel, handling targets that have a lot of staples or anything in them.

I've got my gloves on board there. I've got all my zeroing tools for adjusting various optics that I or the students may have, and I have a little bit of liquid chalk or gym chalk on a little carabiner, so if I forget to bring my chalk out of my range bag, I've got a smaller tube right there where I can add some chalk to my hands if it's a hot day and I'm training.

And that's pretty much it. The belt has everything that I need and not a whole lot that I don't need when I'm out on the range, teaching a class, and training. We have two versions of the CHLK belt. These are set up more for duty-style use and not just for range use. My good friend Chris Sizelove, this is his belt. I actually stole it from him today.

So, Sizelove's got his ammunition set up much in the same way that I've got mine. He's using upright Blue Force Gear pouches. These are the ones with the mag to the side, and they've got the ability to have retention over the top and then 10-speed elastic for them to get those magazines out in a very, very fast manner.

He's got the CHLK belt set up with the safety line for aircraft ops, and it looks like he's got a Marco hanging there. So, he's got some baby chem lights of one color and then two other colored chem lights for different marking situations. Back here, Chris has decided to use the dump pouch now, and he keeps it stowed and he's actually running it off of the stackable.
So again, he has the ability to carry 60 rounds of rifle right here on the belt with the stackables, giving him a dump pouch light capability or an admin pouch off to the side around eight o'clock to nine o'clock on his belt. If he's got a pro timer, or a water bottle, or something he just wants to put someplace and he's not wearing cargo pants, he can slip that right down in the dump pouch. He can use that dump pouch for a tactical reload during an actual mission. He could deploy the dump pouch, put partials in there, and then sort them out and reinsert them in his kit later.

He could secure empty mags if he wants to. He can take evidence, secure a pistol off the ground, something like that, and have a place to put it so that the gun is not unsecured on target. On the back of the kit, we've got the hanger point for the other side. This is the aircraft side of the safety line. So hook into the hard point of the aircraft with that.

And then, showing an example of some different ways to carry restraints. This style of restraint has an actual breakaway snap at the top, so you can pop the snap off. This double cuff design is using heavy-duty rubber bands with a girth hitch, and they're placed through the carabiner that way. If you want to get these cuffs out, you can just pull and break them off.

Chris has opted to go with the trauma kit now. Size small, two rows or two columns of PALS wide. He's got a TQ over here on the side, and this holds a pretty good amount. This is, I would say, a duty amount. It allows you to use full-size chest seals in here, a little bit more room, full-size gauze, chitosan dressings, quick clot, whatever, and not the clear med, reduced-size dressings that are needed for those smaller micro or EDC low-signature types of events.

And then we've got the low-profile general-purpose pouch, which is a two-zip pouch that goes from six o'clock around to probably 4:30 on Chris's belt. This allows him to hold a notebook, note-taking material, markers, a power bar, maybe a VS-17 signaling panel, some survival items, waterproof matches, or first-line, second-line, third-line gear essentials. If you had to ditch your ruck and this was the only thing you had on your body, you'd want maybe some fishing line, hooks, or other survival items in this medium pouch here.

Chris is also running a Blue Force Gear belt hanger with his Safariland holster over on the strong side. This is a pretty decent "green side" duty belt configuration. Very, very similar to an "LE jump out boy" configuration where you've got a pistol mag. This is a different pistol mag pouch, and I kind of really dig it for those of you that like those Safarilands that run the double and triple mag carriers where the bullets are facing out instead of towards the belt buckle.

Blue Force Gear has got you. They've got a new pouch now that allows you to go bullets out. It can be used if you wanted to go in a traditional bullets-forward configuration, but it’s definitely designed for bullets out. The skid plate on the front is a little bit narrower to account for that narrower profile, and the elastic goes front to back in relation to the magazine.

The bullets-out configuration is also really good for carrying your utility or work handheld light. Anyone that's taken any type of low-light class understands that a pistol-mounted light is not enough for your illumination needs when you're wearing a duty or patrol belt. You've got to have the ability to throw light at things you wouldn't point a gun at. One or the other of these is essential—you can survive without a gun light and use the handheld for shooting, but you cannot survive without a work light and rely solely on your gun light to shoot. These are complementary capabilities.

If you wanted to run double mags, they have single magazine versions of this. You could run two mags up front, kick the rifle mags back, and then use a single as a flashlight pouch directly behind that, easily accessible with your support-side hand. Again, 60 rounds of rifle on board. You'll notice this is where mission drives the gear train.

If I were going to be wearing a larger assault-style carrier and had items that might impede or block my rifle mag, this Kydex pouch is really fast, but it's optimized for running a very slick kind of armor system. If I had any type of GP pouches or radios, these Kydex belt-mounted pouches sit up too high and push the 30-round magazine up too high. As I started to contort my body in that direction, I’d start getting my gear or side plates crashing into that magazine.

By going to the Blue Force Gear mag pouches, they don't give you as much Gucci purchase on the magazine for that beer can reload—it’s a smaller profile area—but the entire magazine is pushed lower down on the belt. So, a pouch style like this would be something that I’d use if I had a bulkier armor package going on.

Something you don’t have to worry about as much in the field or on the range, but in an LE environment, you’ve got to have a place to carry restraints. We've got a Blue Force Gear cuff pouch in the back, and I've co-opted and used a small boo-boo kit pouch to act as a front cuff spot as well. So, it's easily accessible, cuffs from the front, and then a more traditional off-the-kidney setup on the back.

Again, for this duty gear set up for tactical warrant stuff, larger trauma kit. If this were more of a patrol belt setup, you wouldn’t have two mags and a rifle; you'd have a radio, a taser, and other stuff on there. This trauma kit might get pared down to one of the micro styles. But because this is more of an overt, warrant-service jump-out kit, we're going to go with the larger first aid pouch because why not? You’ve got this bigger belt on. You're potentially planning on employing a rifle and being overt in your approach, so the chances of making contact or getting in a shooting are going up, so I’m going to want more first aid capability on the belt.

That’s kind of the general show and tell of what we've got on the table. But at the end of the day, it all goes back to what you have to carry, how much of it you have to carry for the job you intend the belt to do, can you carry any of this gear someplace else, and what gear you absolutely want to be on your body if you need it. I can carry a handheld light on a plate carrier, but am I always going to have my plate carrier on? If it's a high-use item that I can access easily from that belt line, even in armor, that’s the type of pouch I want to put on the belt line if possible.

I want my first aid with me even if my armor is off. I want my work light with me even if my armor is off. I want my pistol reload with me even if my armor is off. These are the things I think through when I'm building up my belts.

If you are interested in any of the pouches on any of these belt setups, as well as potentially instructional videos or product description videos that might go deeper into the weeds, go to blueforcegear.com. All this stuff is available on their product line in various configurations and colors. Until next time, I'll see you guys later.