The Academy and Beyond series addresses basic academy preparation. But once the baseline is built, what comes next?
First Foot Pursuit
I will never forget my first foot pursuit. It was my first Friday shift alone. I was on a car stop when another vehicle drove by blaring music loud enough to clearly violate the noise ordinance. As the driver saw me, he turned off the music, snapped his head forward, and pretended like he didn’t exist. To make things more interesting, the car didn’t have a license plate.
I quickly gave the driver from my original stop a warning and ran back to my patrol vehicle to catch up to the other car. Even as a new police officer, I could recognize from the driver’s body language that there would be more to this traffic stop than just loud music.
As I got behind the vehicle, he immediately turned into a residential neighborhood. I turned on my lights to initiate the stop. He quickly pulled into a driveway and stepped out of the car. I got out and told him to get back in the vehicle, and he started pulling up his pants and tightening his belt. New officers: let that be a visual indicator for you.
Before I could even get out my location, he was already running and I was chasing him. I had no idea where I was. During the chase, I had to backtrack slightly to read street signs in the dark with the aid of my flashlight so I could give out my location.
Thankfully, despite my terrible use of cardinal directions, poor radio traffic, and what was really just an overall mess of a situation, I was able to catch up to him. He ran out of gas, and I was able to tackle him.
He was exhausted, while I was just a little tired. That made taking him into custody thankfully quite easy, especially considering we were probably 100 meters from the street signs where I gave my last location. If anything had gone south, it would have taken some time for other officers to find me.
Thankfully, fitness was what allowed me to catch that guy without incident. There was certainly some luck involved too, considering just how bad my communication was during the event. Putting aside experience, training, and tactics—which of course support performance in a situation like this—what were the physical qualities required for this event to go the way it did, and what training methods can we use to improve them?
Raising the Bar
Our last series of articles looked at foundational programming and where someone preparing for the police academy can and should start. This follow-on series is for the recruit who has spent a few weeks building foundational fitness and is ready for the next phase—one that raises the bar a bit.
This is also for the officer who is looking to take strength and conditioning to another level while still being able to perform on the job.
On The Brink- Strength + Aerobic
The framework were going to use from Week 1 of 4 of On The Brink, which is the phase that follows The Foundation.
See below:
Key Focus
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Strength progression
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Maintain aerobic base
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Nudge up anaerobic threshold
Results
During your hypothetical foot pursuit—or any similar incident—you have the endurance and training to move at a hard but sustainable pace for several minutes. At the end of that effort, you still have enough gas left to fight a suspect into custody, defend yourself, and display the strength you’ve developed over the past several weeks.
Zone 2 and Performance
We will get more into this next week, but as the graph above shows, the idea here isn’t to jump straight into the most intense conditioning methods just because it feels good to push ourselves.
In the first phase, we prioritized Zone 2 to build the base. That helps develop local muscular endurance and condition the cardiovascular system. In this phase, we begin working on the ability to stay aerobic while performing at higher intensities.
This is where the threshold method comes in. We push right to the edge of the aerobic system with that hard-but-sustainable pace. You can still maintain power while speaking a sentence or two at a time. You are not blacking out, but you are also not just cruising along.
The temptation here will be to jump right into max-effort intervals for short duration and short rest. Please don’t. Not yet. You’ll cap yourself off quickly instead of making progress for several weeks to come.
Next Week
Next week, we will take a deeper dive into the maintaining our aerobic base, and then later the use of the threshold method in this program.
