Resisted Conditioning: A Low Impact, Practical, and Intense Alternative to Traditional "Cardio"
Intense conditioning does not have to break your joints down. Adding resistance may be the best choice for most Law Enforcement and Tactical professionals (or anyone).
Below contains excerpts from the book: Answering the Call: Proper Physical Training for Police and Military in the 21st Century.
Resisted Conditioning (Threshold Variation)
This article will discuss a joint friendly training method that will break the traditional modalities of what is typically viewed as “cardio." In this context it’s used to train anaerobic threshold. During each interval, at the beginning of every minute, you are going to do a “sprint” for 5-10 seconds. When I say sprint, think 90% of your hardest pace. I will note I believe I originally read about these parameters from Joel Jamieson, I however could not locate the article.
Why are we doing this? Training wise it is for variation. By now you have built some fitness and require a bit more of a “same but different” stimulus to keep improving. There is also a mental conditioning component to these. If you start to panic, your heart rate is going to keep going up and you’ll be way outside the zone we want you in. Now let's think...where else would losing our mental faculties potentially lead to catastrophic failure?
I want to be clear, there is no substitute for realistic scenario based training. Or martial arts/self defense training. It’s awesome, needed, and could be used on a day like this during sparring or live training sessions. However, I would argue before you start getting punched, I would recommend training the mental quality I am going to do my best to describe below.
This method will have a 5 minute interval where up to 50 seconds of those 5 minutes you will be pushing as hard as you can. The idea here is when the sprint is over and you still have to continue...can you calm yourself down to get back to that hard but maintainable pace? Can you slow your breathing, bring your heart rate down, and remain in the moment?
Envision a traffic stop late at night. A guy with a stack of warrants and a gun decides you aren’t taking him to jail. He pulls over then runs into the darkness. You give chase. The adrenaline hits as you exit your vehicle. The red and blue lights from your car disorient you a bit as you slam your door and make sure it’s locked before entering this unofficial track meet.
As you enter the darkness, before your eyes adjust, you still see the flashing red and blue lights. While running at a near sprint you report on the radio your location and heading.
Are you present and calm enough to know what cardinal direction you’re on? I ask this as someone who on his first foot pursuit did not know his cardinal direction.
Do you know your closest cross streets? I ask this as someone who had to veer off for a moment while keeping the suspect in my vision to check a couple street signs. I honestly didn’t know.
Are you also scanning his hands to make sure he didn’t reach into the front of his waistband or pockets? I wasn’t when I checked those street signs.
Now we all know this is a typical first foot pursuit debacle. If you have been an active cop for even just a short period we all did something like this. What saved me was the fact that I was in shape. I basically just ran the guy down because he ran out of gas and I was just somewhat tired.
Now imagine if during my conditioning, prior to that mess, I played a similar scenario like that in my head? While under fatigue I mentally did all the things I should have done. Or even thought about the worst case scenario where that guy fights me or pulls a weapon. After blitzing through a hard 10 seconds of the sled, but then kept pushing…I reminded myself to stay calm, breathe, and assess the situation as a professional.
At that time in my career I didn’t know what I didn’t know. In fact it was the first Friday night I was alone without a training officer. Reviewing a map of the area would have been an intelligent as well. It all comes back to preparation and rehearsals.
Mental drills and visualizations are some of the best free training you can do for yourself, and I would argue will enhance other realistic training you should be doing. Start in the weight room and introduce a stress stimulus and then work through calming yourself down. Is it a perfect substitution? Absolutely not. You will have to relearn through deeper stress inoculation for other applicable scenarios on the street.
Remember we are also using this to train anaerobic threshold. If we have a heart rate monitor, this should be around 160-170 bpm zone for most, or you can talk in broken sentences. If you can’t talk and are starting to see black, or you wake up on the floor, you went too hard. If you get a little over that after the EMOM interval give yourself some time to keep moving and to work on your breathing. If 2 minutes go by and you are still way over, stop for a bit just to get your wit's about you. Give yourself time to adapt. We are nudging ourselves along.
Entire round is 4-5 minutes
A1) EMOM- KB Swings- 10 Seconds (or 10ish reps)
A2) Sled Push or Pull the rest of the time
Entire round is 4-5 minutes
A1) EMOM- Hill Sprint- 10ish Seconds
A2) Carries- Lighter and farther. Start with a harder variation like a double racked carry and then work your way to easier variations as you fatigue. You could break it up by doing a different variation every 30 seconds or a minute. Just keep moving.
Entire round is 4-5 minutes
A1) Heavy Bag- 5-10 seconds of hard combinations.
A2) Continue hitting the bag but with much less intensity and work on movement/foot work or Sled/Assault Bike, or a combination of everything.
Week 1: 3 Rounds
Week 2: 4 Rounds
Week 3: 5 Rounds
If you have the equipment and the space, you could do each of these circuit's every workout. In the end the set up is up to you. Just stick with the principles and remember what the goal is for the day. Threshold (not blast yourself for 30 seconds and just try and survive for 4-5 minutes) beginning with a harder EMOM intervals.
All of the circuits above are low impact, have the trainee moving under load, and still achieve the desired intensity without distance running or other traditional “cardio” modalities. Not that any of these activities are inherently bad, but as officers age circuits like these are joint friendly and still reach our training goals.
Training, mental toughness, and conditioning are not an excuse to make an officer (or anyone) prematurely visit the orthopedic surgeon. You need to train, train hard, and train often…it is not any one session that makes or breaks you. It is the long term planning that allows you to properly survive a 20 year career.
