Tactical Fitness Training: Four Criteria to Judge the Effectiveness of a Program
Not all programs are created equal. How to tell how your program stacks up.
Everyone has had the experience of being completely crushed by a workout. Crushed in a way that you’re sore and can barely walk up one flight of stairs for a week. Crushed in a way that you walk funny and it hurts when you sneeze. Crushed in a way that you can’t work out for a week.
For me, it happened recently when I dropped in at a CrossFit gym while traveling. The WOD (workout of the day) was 100 front squats followed by 100 toes-to-bar. I was in shape and had been working out four to five days a week, and squats and core work were a regular part of my training. But, my core work was focused more on stabilizing movements like planks rather than flexion movements like sit-ups or toes-to-bar. The workout left me sweaty and exhausted, as most CrossFit WODs dol, but it wasn’t until the next day that I started to feel the real effects.
My hip flexors were so sore that whenever I sat for more than 10 minutes, I’d have to stretch for a minute or two before I could stand completely upright. The soreness and tightness got progressively worse for two or three days before it finally started to subside. I applied some recovery best practices: foam rolling, walking, and slow biking. A week later I felt normal again.
Does that mean this workout was effective? Or that it’s part of a larger, effective training program?
For anyone who trains hard, pushes their limits, and explores new training methods, an experience like the one described above is inevitable at some point. For the tactical athlete looking to find and patch any gaps in their fitness, experiences like this can happen. I guess my hip flexors have gotten a little soft, I thought. Something to work on. But how important was that “gap” in my fitness? And how much time should I spend working to patch it?
In a previous article, I explored the concept of tactical fitness with the goal of developing a definition. Combining the work CrossFit has done around GPP (general physical preparedness), and layering on some mission-specific factors, I arrived at the following working definition:
Tactical fitness is a state of high GPP for a variety of unknown challenges complemented by the capacity to perform a variety of mission-related tasks such as rucking, running, climbing, swimming, and equipment and buddy carries. Tactical fitness is performance-oriented, focused on building foundational physical skills and capacity to execute mission-related tasks well.
So just how do you train for tactical fitness? Today I want to use that definition as a guide to develop some criteria of an effective tactical fitness program. Then maybe I can answer whether that program should include 100 toes-to-bar.
The following four criteria represent my suggested scorecard against which a program can be judged.
Criteria 1: Produce a high state of GPP
If a tactical fitness program focuses only on known, mission-specific tasks, it will leave the trainee unprepared for the inevitable unknown tasks that they will face. As explored in the previous article, GPP also produces a ready-state from which advanced or sport-specific training becomes very efficient (Mark Twight).
A few key markers of a program that produces a high state of GPP are listed below:
1a. Include functional (ie, transferable) movements.
Squats, deadlifts, presses, cleans, snatches, pull-ups, KB exercises, push-ups, pull-ups, and weighted carries, are good examples of functional movements. These should form the majority of movements for a solid tactical fitness program. Note that this doesn’t preclude the inclusion of non-functional movements which might be used to supplement the main movements, reduce injury, or help with mission-specific preparation.
1b. Include a variety of movements and movement combinations
There should be a variety and balance of pushing and pulling, running and jumping, weighted and bodyweight movements for upper-body, lower-body, and total-body. There should also be a variety of double-arm, double-leg and single-arm, single-leg movements. This is especially helpful for reducing asymmetry and preventing injury (see criteria 3: improve resilience).
1c. Provide development across all 10 components of fitness
The exercises, combinations, and time-durations should provide for relatively even development of endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility, power, speed, coordination, agility, balance, and accuracy.
1d. Provide development across the 3 major metabolic pathways
The exercises, combinations, and time-durations should provide for relatively even development across the phosphagen (anaerobic), glycolytic, and oxidative (aerobic) pathways.
Criteria 2: Produce capacity in known, mission-specific tasks
This is the “sport-specific” aspect of tactical fitness training. There are certain tasks that the tactical athlete knows they will have to perform and training should ensure a high state of capacity in those tasks. This includes rucking, running (both distance and sprinting), swimming, climbing, and equipment and buddy carries.
Some of the adaptations produced by this mission-specific training are measurable within the 10 components of fitness.
Some of the adaptations produced by mission-specific training are beyond the typical metrics used to measure fitness, yet are essential to mission success. One example would be increased bone density and calluses on the feet produced by long-distance rucking. While most fitness programs wouldn’t consider this a goal of training, it’s indispensable for most tactical athletes. In fact, the most common reason that candidates fail to pass the Army’s Special Forces Assessment and Selection (SFAS) is due to stress fractures in the feet which develop from walking 20+ miles, day after day, under heavy load.
As Rob Shaul of Mountain Tactical Institute says, “Military athletes must always be able to ruck. Mountain athletes must always be able to hike uphill under load, and climb. First Responders need upper body mass and strength, and have to be able to sprint. We can never get too far from these.”
An effective tactical fitness program trains these mission-specific requirements on top of a strong GPP base.
Criteria 3: Improves Physical Resilience
We can define physical resilience as the body’s capacity to adapt to challenges, maintain stamina and strength in the face of demands, and recover efficiently and effectively when degraded or damaged. Put simply, this means that an effective program should reduce the likelihood of both training and mission-related injuries in the short and long-term.
Some training programs can produce effective, short-term results, but often lead to long-term overuse injuries. Programs which are heavily focussed on long-distance rucking and running alone are an example of this type of program. There is a risk-reward trade-off for any training; both acute and long-term overuse injuries are always a possibility. A good training program seeks to reduce these risks while maximizing returns
Risk can never be eliminated completely, but a well-structured program can lower risk without sacrificing returns in a variety of ways:
- Pre-hab training: to develop the muscles and connective tissues of injury-prone areas such as shoulders, hips, and shins
- Balance: lower and upper, push and pull, squat and hinge, bi-pedal and mono-pedal, etc. This reduces asymmetry, which has been shown to be a leading cause of injury.
- Progression: gradually increasing load and reps, especially when introducing new movements
- Mobility: ability to move through a range of motion, with and without load
- Choice of movements: snatches and kipping muscle-ups in large volume may provide for effective metabolic conditioning, but they require a high degree of skill specific to those movements. Those without that level of advanced skill may find themselves at increased risk for shoulder injury. A conditioning workout using sled pushes, goblet squats, and KB swings might produce similar metabolic returns with much less risk.
- Diet and recovery: Training produces minor damage at the cellular level. Diet and recovery are essential to ensure the cells can be repaired and become stronger.
Criteria 4: Produces results efficiently
All else being equal between two programs, a program that produces results in 5 weeks with 5 hours a week of training is better than a program that takes 10 weeks of training 10 hours a week.
So it could be said that efficiency has two components: hours of training per unit of time (ie, number of hours a day or week), and time to achieve results. Consider the graph below which posits a theoretical relationship between hours per week of training and number of weeks required to produce results.
There are a few features of this graphic representation that are worth writing out in words.
- The graph is a version of the “inverted-u”. This means a happy medium exists between too little and too much. If you train too little, it will take a long time to achieve results. That point is probably obvious to most people. Less obvious is the concept that training too much will also increase the time it takes to achieve results. (For more on the inverted U, check out Too Much of a Good Thing: The Challenge and Opportunity of the Inverted U by Barry Schwartz and Adam Grant).
- There is a minimum number of hours per week you must train to achieve results. In other words, if you only train for 10 minutes a week, you’ll never get results, not even in 10 years. This concept is represented by the vertical dashed line.
- There is a minimum amount of time it takes to achieve results, regardless of the number of hours per week you train. This is because the body needs nutrition, rest, and time to adapt to training demands. This concept is represented by the vertical dashed line.
- There is an inflection point, beyond which training more produces diminishing (though still increasing) returns in terms of speed to achieve results
- There is a plateau, where training more produces no additional returns in terms of time to results
- There is an upward-sloping tail, a point at which training more actually increases the time to results.
While this concept should hold across all individuals and training goals, the specific size and slope of the graph will vary from person to person, and from training goal to training goal.
The efficiency criteria may also lead to a correlate: simpler is better. A good program will focus primarily on a few key exercises that produce maximal results.
Where do concepts like periodization and progressive overload fit in?
Periodization is the concept of deploying different training phases across a longer training cycle. It is especially common in sports which have an on- and off-season, or training for a specific event like the Olympics, to ensure the athlete reaches their sport-specific peak at the right time. Other training programs deploy “mesocycles”, which are mini-cycles designed to focus on a particular skill or component of fitness, like stamina or explosive power, as part of a larger cycle.
Progressive overload is the gradual increase in stress placed on the body, through gradually increasing weight, repetitions, time, or frequency in training.
Both periodization and progressive overload are techniques that are commonly deployed within training programs. These concepts transcend a few of the above categories — meaning, they can be used to increase GPP, to increase mission-specific capacity, to improve resilience, and to increase efficiency.
Effective programs are likely to deploy periodization and progressive overload, though they aren’t specific criteria by which to judge a program.
Conclusion
Unlike other fitness programing, where results are measured in the gym, tactical training focuses on preparation for challenges outside of the gym. The gym is a tool, and the numbers in the gym are correlates, but they are not the primary, end-goal
It’s worth noting that this 4-criteria framework might be adapted to any sport-specific training, where you can substitute the items listed in #2 with the requirements for your sport. CrossFit Football and Crossfit Endurance are two examples of applying this methodology to football and endurance sports (marathons, triathlons, etc), respectively. They focus on both GPP, with an emphasis on the sport-specific aspects of GPP that will help them perform best in competition.
100 toes-to-bar for time? It seems a bit random. Training to take on any random task is not the same as training randomly to take on any task. Use the above criteria to judge which category your program fits into.
