Video Transcript
Why to Use a Two-Piece Belt (00:00)
Something that I've been saying for a while is if you are buying your first rifle, the first piece of kit you should get is a chest rig to complement that rifle. But if you're someone who wants to do a lot of pistol training, doing it from concealment, from your carry holster is awesome, but also getting a—people call them range belts—but getting a range belt that you can put a bunch of pistol mags on can really help make the training a little bit more efficient on the range than constantly doing stuff from concealment and not being able to carry a whole lot of mags on you.
So what a lot of people do is they go out and they get what is called a two-piece belt. It is similar to the competition belts that have been around for a long time. You have a stiff outer belt with Velcro, typically a loop or hook, I should say, on the inside. And then you will wear a belt that usually comes with them that has soft loop on the inside that goes through your belt loops. What this means is when this belt is on you, it doesn't really move. It is there. It is stuck to you—especially once it's buckled, especially if it's cinched tight—it's not going anywhere. You can shoot all around, you can prone, around stuff, and it's not gonna ride up in the back like some traditional war belts. It's just a really slick, awesome setup. The only downside to them is sometimes when you layer 'em up with, you know, tons of mags, like tons of rifle mags, and weight and stuff, they can start to sag, peel away from the Velcro, and they're not as sturdy or load-bearing as some of those larger belts.
MARS Carriers (01:18)
So the MARS carrier, this is where the MARS carriers really shine. If you have a belt like this one, this is the AWS—I don't know the model number, shooter belt, or something like that. It is just scuba webbing with a stiffener on the inside—one and three quarter—which means if I take one of these Tek-Loks for the MARS carrier, all I'm going to do is place my little bridge piece to size one and three quarter on the inside. And that is going to go firmly on the belt itself.
The other little thing that I do is I take adhesive Velcro—you can buy this from anywhere, you don't need to ask where we buy it—and I clip it to size and I stick a piece of hook Velcro. So when I layer these pouches on this belt, especially if I have a bunch close together, I'm still getting Velcro adherence to my inner belt. What you don't want is, you know, hard plastic. And so you have no, you know, Velcro attachment here. And then that whole part of the belt can move around and shift freely. So having the Velcro loop, I have two different kinds here, actually, I can layer up all my pistol mags. And as you can see on this belt, they still move pretty freely, which isn't great. But once this is actually on my waist, I'll be good to go.
Other Accessories (02:25)
The other accessories that I have on a belt at a minimum for training at the range, a tourniquet holder, which again, this is our tourniquet holder—Velcros to the belt—and then I slap a CAT tourniquet in there. So I have that. I could always add a dump pouch if I want. I can also rip off one of these pistol mags, add a rifle mag with a Tek-Lok. And once again, Velcro on the inside. And now I can go do rifle stuff and I'm good to go. If I'm just focusing on pistol though, I usually have three pistol carriers, you know, carry optics, you know, kind of a production setup, whatever you wanna call it. You could even run more than that, four or five. It also depends on how large you are as far as how much real estate you have. One of the benefits to being a little bigger than someone like me.
Belt-Positioning (03:08)
So putting the belt on what I'm gonna do, first off, is I'm going to place the pistol side parallel where I like to have it. You know I don't run with my pistol here in the front. I don't run with it in the back. I run with it right on the side. So that goes first and I wrap the belt around and this is where I'm gonna start shifting my mag carriers a little bit to kind of get them into position. I have one, this canted one in the front. They start to get straighter gradually as I move back for, you know, natural body mechanics and all those fancy words. Clip the belt in, and now this isn't going anywhere. I'm good to go.
I have my mags, got my pistol. I have a QLS. So if I need to swap this out for another gun, or maybe I wanna take, you know, my light off or something like that and run no light, I can do that. And then shot timer, run that on the belt back here. And I'm set. Super efficient setup. The MARS carriers are nice and fast, easy to move around. Very modular if I want to add extra rifle mags or pistol mags. And this is essentially what most of our belts here at the range look like when we're just working on our pistol stuff or we just wanna have a little bit of kit, not a lot. I have Orion belts to have med kits and all sorts of other pouches. But this is sort of a minimalist range training belt setup. And this is how MARS carriers are used.