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Peak Performance in Policing The Need for Physical Preparedness By Devin Reynolds RKC One of the greatest ironies of police work is that it is one of the few jobs where the performance of your daily duties does nothing to improve your ability to act under circumstances which will demand a flawless execution of your most critical skills. The typical duties of a police officer i.e. report taking, directing traffic, and general patrolling, do nothing to enhance your physical condition, your shooting ability or your fighting skills. Furthermore, you rarely have more time to prepare yourself to utilize these skills than the time it takes you to get to the scene. While elite athletes and military units may have days, weeks, or months to prepare, you must be ready to act in an instant. While most officers recognize the problem, few are sure what to do about the difficulties at hand. If you take any average person and give them a job digging ditches for 2 months, they will return with stronger shoulders, calloused hands, and a very efficient shoveling ability. You put an Olympic caliber athlete behind the wheel of a Crown Victoria, have him rotate shifts a few times, work an 8 hour day (if he’s lucky), sit in court for a few hours a week, and let them eat whatever is available, and 2 months later you’ll see a shadow of a champion. The core physical skills of flexibility, stamina, strength and agility will have deteriorated. As these physical attributes have the greatest impact on your ability to successfully operate under a wide variety of dynamic and stressful circumstances, several key areas must be considered. First, we must focus on increasing general work capacity. This is the key ingredient for any successful training progression, as it allows for the total body development of core physical skills, and can act as a foundation for a specific improvement in overall combative fitness. The first thing to accept, regardless of your current fitness regimen, is that you will never be in a position for peak physical performance when your skills are needed most. This is why you must train to exceed your perceived needs. The combination of you normal work stress, schedule changes, sleep deprivation, and inclement weather, in addition to the need for immediate action and the accompanying uncertainty that goes with it, will sap both your strength and your motor skills. Furthermore, the repetitive stimulation of your sympathetic nervous system, and it’s hormonal effects, can leave you feeling exhausted when you still need to perform. Consider the typical SWAT callout. Even if you are fortunate enough to be on a full time team, after an 8+ hour workday, time with the family, and the typical late bedtime, sometime after 0 dark thirty, the pager will go off. Springing into action, you’ll get your first rush of adrenaline as you gear up and deploy. You haul ass to the scene, lights flashing and siren blaring only to don 45 pounds of gear and rush to your deployment area, where you now get to stand, crouch or squat for anywhere from 5 minutes to 10 hours, but must remain mentally vigilant and ready to go in an instant Complicating matters further is our typical fitness mentality. Countless pushups, timed mile runs, and one rep max bench presses, do nothing to help you spring from your car after a fleeing felon, fight a man on PCP, or climb through a window. I have witnessed all of this first hand and have drawn the following conclusion after watching several SWAT tryouts and fitness evaluations. · People train for idealism, which is simply unrealistic. Street fights are not subject to timed rounds yet candidates are given minute breaks and resting positions while doing pushups, sit-ups, and runs. This minimal standard is a disservice to officer survival. Constructive evaluations of fitness do not work, as while they claim to be a realistic simulation of job duties, this has proven to be a fallacy. Furthermore, this does nothing to illustrate the nonstop, win at all cost mindset necessary for survival. · Just because you go to the gym and do 20 minutes of cardio three times a week does not make you fit to operate nor will it prevent the common injuries to the ankles, knees, backs and shoulders suffered by a majority of officers during the course of their duties. · Distance running is a very poor tool for evaluating physical performance in police work: unless you wear 40 lbs, boots, and climb, duck and crawl while yelling at the top of your lungs. If the worst you do in training is the best you’ll do in an altercation, structure your training to be as inefficient and taxing as possible. As the Spartans said, “Their training was bloodless battle and their battles were bloody training”. The following list is my recommendation to overcome the problems of job related physical deterioration. Additionally, by reducing injury potential and keeping workouts brief and intense, more time can be dedicated to other necessary job related training, like firearms drills and defensive tactics. Training Musts: Optimize yourself for neural efficiency: the average person only recruits a small percentage of their total physical strength (50-60%). Increasing neural facilitation gives an immediate strength gain with no increase in girth, which only makes you a bigger target. We all want to have the buff look, but typical bodybuilding only promotes sarcoplasmic hypertrophy, leaving you bigger but not any stronger. Acclimatize yourself to adrenaline. Learn to be fearless and expose yourself to as much intensive stimuli as possible to minimize the effects of SNS stimulation. The harder it becomes for you to receive the adrenaline rush, the more in control you will be. This equates to calmness under fire and leads to better recall. Furthermore, you can learn to keep your heart rate under 145 beats per minute, which is generally accepted as the threshold for accuracy with firearms. Train with the idea of developing a maximal AND repeatable effort. Breaching doors may require more then one hit and subduing a violent suspect demands that you fight until victory is attained and you have exhausted their will to fight. If you can only do your absolute best once, it may be the last thing you ever do. Build core strength and stability. Slouching behind a steering wheel does nothing to help your back, your abdominal muscles, or your hip flexors, which are the key to both performance enhancement and injury prevention. A Plan for Action The Components of Improvement 1. Dynamic An example program would include: Neck Circles Shoulder Shrugs Shoulder Circles & Figure 8’s Scare Crow The Egyptian Roll Bob and weave x 2 Hip Circles x 2 Knee Circles Hip Figure 8’s Leg Swings front / back, side to side Shoulder high and shoulder low Shoulders Closed, Open, Extended 2. Building Work Capacity through mastering body weight – Doing this sort of cycle prior to normal PT, not only increases your overall training effect, you also enhance agility, coordination and proprioception in addition to increased cardiovascular enhancement. Studies have shown that agility is training specific and conventional lifts and sprinting have almost no carryover. An example program would include: Interval training: Start with 15 seconds per drill and attempt to cycle through the list 3 times. That will give you a total of 6 minutes of total body conditioning that is far more relevant than the mile run. Should you feel extreme fatigue or get heavily winded, adjust the time and number of rounds accordingly. This is attribute development first, conditioning second. Jumping Jacks Ali shuffle Boot Strappers Alternate rotation jumps Mountain Climbers Slalom Jumps Bowing Pushing 3. Familiarize yourself with neural fatigue. Utilizing high-tension training along with full body, high repetition ballistic movements to build the strength and endurance, which is so crucial to success in physical confrontations. The enhancement of physical conditioning and coordination is accomplished with two types of training. High repetition Kettlebell movements like swings, snatches, and cleans and presses promote explosive, full body coordination. Secondly, unbalanced or odd object lifts, like one arm dead lifts and bent presses, along with barrel or sandbag lifting will develop real world applicable strength. Few things in the world are as stable and well balanced as a barbell or dumbbell. Accept that in law enforcement, you will never be in an optimal position for anything and that the man from OSHA won’t be in the scene to safely show you how to pickup that bad guy and carry him to the back of your car. 4. Develop your core: The trunk is the conduit through which the power from your upper and lower body flows together. If this is your weak link, your total output will be greatly reduced. Practice the following drills for stabilization and strength, focusing on endurance at the peak position. Bridges- Front / Back / Side V holds Tablemakers Dands – one leg / arm and twists Shoulder stand hyper extensions Superman holds The standards for Law enforcement are rarely where they need to be. Academies train officers with the goal of getting as many badges onto the streets as possible. Survival is a secondary priority to the machine. While our job environment has become increasingly hostile, and we have been forced to adopt a more paramilitary outlook, adopting body armor, BDU’s and automatic weapons, we have not adopted what the military considers most important – basic combative fitness.
You can find out more about Devin and his training here: http://www.legionprotectiveservices.com/ | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
