Tactical Athlete Priorities

U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Elizabeth Merriam

Building a body that is built to endure and hard to break is simple, but not easy.  It requires constand reevaluation of your program to ensure that you are prioritizing what you should.  Most tactical athletes prioritize wrong.  They emphasize what is a lower priority and leave the highest priority items completely off the table.  This is common.  You may be able to get away with this in the short term when you are young, but it will eventually catch up with you and drag down your performance or worse, end your tactical career.  Here is my take on prioritization, from most to  least important:

1.  Rehabilitating injuries:  This must be #1.  No compromises.  In the tactical professions you are only as strong as your weakest link.  Due to the unpredictable nature of the job, you simply cannot count on being able to compensate for an injury.  An injury can compromise the mission and put you and your teammates in jeapordy.  You must make this your top priority.  Your entire conditioning program should be organized around rehabilitating any existing injuries.  When NFL great Adrian Peterson tore his ACL, he made rehabilitation the #1 priority in his conditioning program (and perhaps #1 life goal as well).  As a result, his recovery was phenomenal. How do you think he would have fared had he just continued his usual conditioning program?

2.  Injury prevention:  To use another football analogy.....NFL players have a saying, "built like Tarzan but plays like Jane."  They know that football performance is not built primarily in the weight room.  It is built primarily on the field, doing football stuff.  The same is true for tactical athletes.  As a result, the primary focus of your conditioning program should be injury prevention, with performance coming from practicing your tactical trade.  Strength and conditioning coaches who work with athletes in collision or fight sports focus on injury prevention first, and performance second.  The focus should be on spine stability (strength) and mobility, strong shoulders, hips and core.  Take a look at your tactical profession and see where most injuries happen on the job.  I'll bet you $1 that most injuries do not occur from horizontal pushing (i.e., bench press) movements.  Build your program around preventing those injuries.

3.  Strength:  Strength is the quality that takes longest to achieve.  Initial strength gains come quickly in novice lifters due to neurological adaptations.  Beyond that, gains come more slowly, especially in experienced athletes.  Because of this, strength training should be a constant, long term focus.  The best strength training programs focus on the fundamental human movements, push, pull, squat, hip hinge, and carry/core.

4.  Endurance/stamina:  When we use the term "endurance" we are generally talking about sustaining an activity for an extended period of time.  Stamina generally refers to the ability to recover from intermittent work over an extended time.  A long ruck is endurance.  Fire and maneuver is stamina.  Endurance is generally built with endurance training.  Stamina can be built with a combination of endurance training and work capacity (metabolic conditioning - METCON) training.

5.  Work capacity:  Work capacity, or the ability to perform high intensity work, is most often trained using METCON.  METCON ability is built quickly.  You can just about max out your METCON fitness with 4-6 weeks of METCON training.  Additionally, too much METCON interferes with building strength and hypertrophy.  Because of this interference, and the ability to ramp up quickly, it is a much lower priority.  Also, METCON is potent medicine.  A little bit goes a long way.  It should be thought of as a "side dish" in a training program and not a "main course."