One of the most interesting things I've discovered about writing these articles is that, every so often, something I write almost in passing ends up becoming the foundation for an entirely new discussion. It is rarely intentional, and sometimes a sentence or observation that was meant to support a larger argument takes on a life of its own, prompting additional questions, challenging an assumption, or sending me down another research rabbit hole. Before long, what began as a relatively minor observation becomes a subject deserving considerably more attention than I originally intended to give it. That is precisely what happened while writing last week's article, when I made the following observation: "Making a shooter run until exhausted and then ordering the shooter to fire may elevate heart rate, but physiological exertion is not equivalent to threat appraisal, uncertainty, perceptual ambiguity, and the possibility of consequential harm, all of which can be encompassed within a genuine threat mindset. Real police encounters combine physical and psychological variables in ways that cannot be reproduced by fatigue alone." At the time, those two sentences were simply intended to reinforce a broader discussion about instructional relevance and the limitations of simplistic training solutions. But the more I considered their implications, particularly in light of the scientific research surrounding stress, physiological arousal, and human performance, the more convinced I became that they exposed one of the most persistent misunderstandings in modern police firearms training. 

How many times have you seen a situation similar to this?  A firearms instructor orders a group of officers to sprint downrange and back, perhaps adds a generous helping of push-ups, burpees or other physically demanding activities, and then immediately directs them to draw their weapons and engage a target. By the time the shooting begins, everyone is breathing heavily, heart rates are elevated, muscles are fatigued and the ability to maintain mechanical precision may be compromised. The instructor announces that the officers have just completed a shooting drill under stress, presumably approximating the physiological demands of a violent encounter. Everyone is exhausted, everyone is sweating, and the exercise looks sufficiently difficult to qualify as realistic training. Unfortunately, what the instructor has demonstrated may have considerably less to do with surviving a gunfight than anyone participating in the exercise realizes. 

Before someone accuses me of suggesting that physical fitness has no place in firearms training, I want to establish an important distinction. There is absolutely nothing wrong with challenging officers to operate their equipment, maintain mechanical proficiency and perform demanding tasks while physically fatigued. Police officers must be capable of functioning after running, climbing, struggling with resisting subjects or engaging in other strenuous activities. Those are legitimate operational demands, and training should account for them. My objection is not to the exercise itself, but to the assumption that inducing physical exhaustion somehow reproduces the physiological, psychological and cognitive experience of confronting a genuine threat to human life. That assumption confuses an observable cardiovascular response with the considerably more complicated neurological and behavioral processes associated with perceived danger, and the distinction has significant implications for how we design and evaluate high-liability training. 

Where 'Condition Black' Came From

This misunderstanding becomes especially problematic when instructors invoke physiological thresholds and scientific models to explain why officers supposedly lose their capabilities under extreme stress. For decades, firearms-training presentations and instructional literature have circulated claims that fine motor skills begin deteriorating at approximately 115 beats per minute, complex motor skills become compromised around 145 beats per minute, and cognitive processing deteriorates significantly as heart rate approaches or exceeds 175 beats per minute. Somewhere beyond that final threshold, we are told, the officer enters the dreaded Condition Black, a state supposedly characterized by catastrophic performance degradation, irrational behavior, perceptual disturbances, freezing and a generalized loss of complex motor capabilities beyond those that have been, as stated to me by one recent instructor I encountered, “…explicitly committed to muscle memory.” Within this same instructional tradition, extensively rehearsed behaviors, frequently described as having been committed to "muscle memory," are presented as potentially remaining accessible when more deliberate cognitive processing becomes compromised. These numerical boundaries are often presented with remarkable certainty, as though the human brain operates according to a universally calibrated cardiovascular switch that determines which capabilities remain available at any given heart rate. 

The history behind these claims is considerably more complicated than many instructors realize, beginning with a distinction that has become obscured through decades of repetition. Long before Bruce Siddle and Dave Grossman associated color-coded conditions with cardiovascular thresholds and presumed changes in human performance, the late Col. Jeff Cooper had developed his now-familiar Color Code as a framework for describing an individual's mental preparedness to recognize and respond to danger. Cooper's original system consisted of four conditions: White, Yellow, Orange and Red. These represented progressive states of psychological awareness and readiness, from being unaware and unprepared to recognizing a potential threat and being mentally prepared to respond appropriately if circumstances warranted. Importantly, Cooper's system was not designed to measure physiological arousal, establish heart-rate thresholds or predict the deterioration of cognitive and motor capabilities. It concerned the individual's mindset and readiness to take appropriate action when confronted with danger, rather than a biological progression toward incapacitation (Cooper, 1999). 

That distinction becomes especially revealing when we examine how Cooper's terminology was subsequently incorporated into instructional materials addressing survival stress. The cardiovascular thresholds themselves can be traced to the work of Bruce Siddle, particularly his 1995 book Sharpening the Warrior's Edge, and were later popularized through the writings and instructional materials of Dave Grossman (Siddle, 1995; Grossman & Christensen, 2004). A widely distributed 1997 chart copyrighted by Siddle and Grossman associated specific heart-rate ranges with progressively deteriorating motor and cognitive performance, ultimately identifying Condition Black as a state of severe physiological and behavioral disruption. Interestingly, the chart retained the familiar White, Yellow and Red designations, omitted Cooper's original Orange, and introduced Black as its highest condition. Subsequent versions of the expanded framework also incorporated Condition Gray, further separating the newer physiological interpretation from Cooper's original mental-readiness system. 

Cooper was apparently less than enthusiastic about modifications to his doctrine. In the October 1999 edition of Jeff Cooper's Commentaries, he explicitly objected to others attributing unauthorized changes to his framework and stated, "There is no such thing as 'Condition Black.'" He went on to reaffirm that his original system consisted of four colors, ending with Condition Red, and that adding or subtracting conditions undermined the purpose of the exercise (Cooper, 1999). Cooper's objection does not, by itself, disprove the physiological claims subsequently associated with Condition Black, nor should his disagreement be mistaken for a scientific evaluation of stress-related performance. Its significance is historical and conceptual. The individual who developed the original color-coded system expressly rejected the additional condition, and his framework addressed a fundamentally different aspect of human behavior from the cardiovascular thresholds later associated with similar terminology. 

What makes the 1997 Siddle-Grossman chart even more interesting is a qualification appearing at the bottom of the document. The authors expressly distinguish hormonally or fear-induced cardiovascular activation from increases produced by physical exercise, acknowledging that exercise-induced increases will not produce the same effects (Siddle & Grossman, 1997). Even the instructional material frequently invoked to support these heart-rate thresholds recognizes a distinction between exercise-induced activation and physiological responses associated with perceived threats. That should give pause to anyone who believes a sufficiently strenuous sprint reproduces the neurological experience of a gunfight. The more troubling question is how a framework that expressly recognized this distinction eventually became associated with training exercises that frequently ignore it. 

We need look no further than an official firearms instructor manual made available by the North Carolina Department of Public Safety. The state's Private Protective Services Firearms Training Instructor Manual, with revisions extending through 2025, presents Cooper's original four-color mental-conditioning system and then separately introduces Siddle's cardiovascular performance claims. It teaches that fine motor skills begin deteriorating around 115 beats per minute, complex motor skills around 145 beats per minute, and that substantial perceptual and cognitive impairments emerge at approximately 175 beats per minute. The manual goes so far as to describe the ability to focus on the front sight as physically impossible at the highest threshold because of the presumed loss of near vision. Yet shortly afterward, it recommends incorporating light physical exercise to elevate heart rate and simulate increases induced by stress (North Carolina Department of Public Safety, 2025). 

To be fair, the North Carolina curriculum does not rely exclusively on physical exertion as a training method. It also recommends decision-making exercises, shoot-or-don't-shoot scenarios, movement and the use of cover, all of which can contribute to more representative training. Nevertheless, the juxtaposition is revealing. Within the same instructional module, a distinction originally recognized in the Siddle-Grossman material is effectively blurred when physical exercise is recommended as a means of simulating stress-related cardiovascular activation. The manual provides a tangible example of how concepts originating in different theoretical traditions can become incorporated into established instructional doctrine without the qualifications necessary to preserve their original meaning. It also illustrates how easily the physiological appearance of stress can become confused with the psychological experience of danger. 

The Science Starts to Crumble

What I find particularly remarkable is that the scientific weaknesses in these generalized cardiovascular thresholds are hardly a recent discovery. Nearly two decades ago, Kathleen Vonk, a Michigan police officer with a background in exercise science and law enforcement training, published Police Performance Under Stress, an examination of the relationship between heart rate, psychological arousal and police performance. Her 2007 publication challenged the assumption that a universal cardiovascular range could reliably predict when officers would perform optimally or begin experiencing skill deterioration. Vonk noted that research used to establish generalized heart-rate performance zones had involved physical exertion rather than psychological or emotional stress, making the extrapolation from one physiological condition to the other scientifically questionable. She also emphasized that individual differences, task complexity, anxiety, experience and skill proficiency could substantially influence performance, variables frequently overlooked when these concepts were incorporated into defensive tactics and firearms instruction (Vonk, 2007). 

Vonk's observations were not merely theoretical. Drawing upon approximately six years of heart-rate monitoring during police academy training, firearms instruction, reality-based exercises and actual police encounters, she reported considerable variability in the relationship between cardiovascular activation and observed performance. Her observations included officers who retained fine and complex motor capabilities at elevated heart rates, as well as individuals who experienced substantial performance problems under comparatively modest physiological demands. She found no single optimal cardiovascular range that could reasonably be generalized across all officers. Although her work was observational rather than a controlled experimental investigation, it challenged the prevailing assumption that cardiovascular measurements alone could reliably predict cognitive or motor competence. Vonk instead encouraged consideration of individualized performance zones, recognizing that psychological characteristics, experience, proficiency and task demands influence how effectively individuals function under stress (Vonk, 2007). 

The significance of Vonk's critique extends well beyond the specific physiological claims she questioned. By 2007, knowledgeable law enforcement training professionals were already identifying serious weaknesses in the practice of converting complex human-performance models into absolute instructional rules. Two years later, Michael Asken, Vonk and exercise physiologist Tricia Sterland revisited these concerns in an article examining heart-rate variability and police performance. They acknowledged that the relationships between heart rate and performance were considerably less consistent than originally believed, emphasizing that training, experience and other factors could allow officers to function effectively despite substantial cardiovascular activation (Asken et al., 2009). The limitations of the generalized heart-rate doctrine were therefore being discussed within the law enforcement training community long before the more recent research examined in this article became available. Yet many instructors continue repeating the same numerical thresholds as established scientific facts, frequently without acknowledging that the underlying assumptions had been challenged years earlier. 

That persistence illustrates a broader instructional problem I have addressed repeatedly in my writing. Once an appealing concept becomes embedded within an established training curriculum, it can acquire an authority that bears little relationship to the strength of its scientific foundation. An instructor learns the concept from a respected mentor, repeats it to another generation of students, and eventually incorporates it into a certification program or instructional presentation. Over time, repetition creates familiarity, familiarity creates confidence, and confidence can become indistinguishable from proof. Scientific qualifications disappear, contradictory findings receive little attention, and a conceptual framework gradually becomes accepted as an operational certainty. The troubling implication is that the law enforcement training profession has had ample opportunity to reconsider the generalized heart-rate doctrine, yet portions of the industry continue teaching it as though decades of subsequent research and professional criticism never occurred. 

The Problem With Magic Numbers

To understand why this oversimplification is so problematic, we need to examine two frequently cited psychological models: the Yerkes-Dodson Law and the Hardy-Fazey Catastrophe Model. Both offer useful insights into human performance, but neither establishes the absolute cardiovascular thresholds frequently attributed to stress-related skill failure. The Yerkes-Dodson Law originated in 1908, when psychologists Robert Yerkes and John Dodson investigated how the intensity of an electrical stimulus influenced learning in mice. Their experiments examined the relationship between stimulus strength and the acquisition of a visual discrimination task, producing evidence that intermediate stimulus intensities could facilitate learning more effectively than either weak or strong stimulation, particularly when the discrimination task was difficult. Over time, these observations became associated with the familiar inverted-U curve, suggesting that performance improves as arousal increases, reaches an optimum and subsequently deteriorates as arousal continues rising (Yerkes & Dodson, 1908). 

The difficulty is that the popular interpretation became considerably broader than the original research justified. Yerkes and Dodson did not study police officers, deadly force encounters or cardiovascular responses to mortal danger, nor did they establish heart-rate thresholds governing human performance. Psychologist Karl Halvor Teigen later documented how their findings had been repeatedly generalized into claims about anxiety, motivation, stress, cognition and performance, frequently without acknowledging the substantial conceptual changes involved (Teigen, 1994). The inverted-U curve remains a useful illustration of how activation and performance may interact under certain conditions, but it is not a universal physiological law, and its theoretical peak cannot be assigned a single cardiovascular measurement. The optimal level of arousal depends on numerous variables, including task difficulty, individual characteristics, prior experience and the specific demands being imposed upon the performer. 

Decades later, sports psychologists John Fazey and Lew Hardy proposed a more complicated explanation through what became known as the Catastrophe Model. Their framework challenged the assumption that increasing arousal necessarily produces a smooth and predictable deterioration in performance. Instead, it proposed that physiological arousal and cognitive anxiety interact, creating circumstances in which performance may change in substantially different ways depending on the individual's psychological state. When cognitive anxiety is comparatively low, the relationship between physiological activation and performance may resemble the traditional inverted-U curve. Under conditions of substantial cognitive anxiety, however, increasing physiological arousal can contribute to a sudden and dramatic deterioration in performance rather than a gradual decline (Fazey & Hardy, 1988). 

An important feature of the model is hysteresis, meaning that the relationship between arousal and performance may differ depending on whether arousal is increasing or decreasing. Once a substantial performance collapse occurs, simply reducing arousal slightly may not restore the previous level of functioning. The model therefore offers a more sophisticated explanation of performance instability than the familiar inverted-U curve, but it also demands consideration of multiple interacting variables. Unfortunately, the distinction between physiological arousal and cognitive anxiety is frequently overlooked when the model is invoked to support claims about heart-rate thresholds in police training. The very psychological variable that gives the model much of its explanatory value is often treated as though it were interchangeable with cardiovascular activity. 

In a 1991 investigation, Hardy and Parfitt tested eight experienced basketball players under conditions of high and low cognitive anxiety while manipulating physiological arousal through physical exercise. Their findings supported important predictions of the Catastrophe Model, particularly the possibility that performance might change differently as arousal increased or decreased under conditions of elevated anxiety (Hardy & Parfitt, 1991). The researchers deliberately manipulated physiological activation and cognitive anxiety as distinguishable variables because the interaction between them was central to the hypothesis being tested. They did not assume that producing one automatically reproduced the other, and they certainly did not conclude that reaching 180 beats per minute caused previously acquired motor skills to disappear. 

The distinction is essential because the Catastrophe Model does not establish that elevated heart rate independently produces inevitable performance failure. It proposes that physiological arousal and cognitive anxiety can interact under particular circumstances to produce nonlinear changes in performance. Even Hardy's subsequent review concluded that the available evidence supported some predictions more strongly than others. He also discussed how anxiety could increase the effort a performer invested in maintaining performance, potentially preserving outward effectiveness at greater physiological cost (Hardy, 1999). The relationship between arousal, anxiety and performance is therefore neither universally negative nor reducible to a numerical cardiovascular threshold. And this is where research from a completely different performance environment becomes particularly revealing. 

What Rally Drivers Reveal About Stress

Few competitive disciplines demand the continuous integration of visual perception, anticipatory processing, complex motor coordination and rapid decision-making quite like international rally racing. A professional rally driver must interpret rapidly approaching terrain, integrate instructions from a co-driver, assess available traction, anticipate changes in vehicle behavior and make continuous control adjustments while traveling at speeds where even relatively minor errors can have catastrophic consequences. Conditions change rapidly, environmental information must be processed continuously, and the driver must integrate that information with highly developed motor capabilities. There is no opportunity to suspend complex cognitive processing simply because cardiovascular activity becomes elevated, nor does the driver have the luxury of waiting until the vehicle slows down before making another consequential decision. 

Researchers have measured these physiological demands during actual competition. In 2015, Anthony Turner and Hugh Richards published an investigation involving drivers and co-drivers participating in a World Rally Championship event. They monitored heart rate, temperature, hydration and selective attention during competition and reconnaissance activities. Among the four drivers with competition-day cardiovascular measurements, the average peak heart rate reached 177 beats per minute, with a standard deviation of 18 beats per minute. Despite the substantial physiological demands, measures of selective attention were generally maintained during the competition day (Turner & Richards, 2015). An important qualification is that the attention assessments were conducted at designated testing periods, rather than continuously at the precise moments when individual heart rates peaked. Nevertheless, the findings demonstrate that elite performers can sustain demanding operational activities while experiencing cardiovascular activation approaching the very thresholds sometimes described as incompatible with complex performance. 

Other motorsports research makes the comparison even more interesting. In 2016, Yanagida and colleagues reported cardiovascular measurements from 15 professional automobile racing drivers across official competitions. The average racing heart rate was approximately 165 beats per minute, sustained over an average driving period of 54 minutes, while roughly half the drivers recorded peak heart rates reaching or exceeding 190 beats per minute (Yanagida et al., 2016). These were not inexperienced individuals attempting unfamiliar movements during a brief period of artificially induced stress. They were professional drivers operating sophisticated vehicles in highly demanding competitive environments, continuously processing visual information and executing coordinated motor responses. Their cardiovascular systems were operating at levels frequently associated in police-training presentations with severe cognitive impairment, yet they continued competing. 

That observation does not establish that elevated arousal was harmless, that every decision remained optimal or that an individual driver experienced no performance degradation. The researchers did not directly evaluate decision quality at the precise instant of maximum heart rate, and it would be scientifically irresponsible to suggest otherwise. What the findings demonstrate is that heart rates approaching or exceeding 190 beats per minute can coexist with sustained professional performance. This observation is difficult to reconcile with claims that crossing a particular cardiovascular threshold necessarily produces an immediate and generalized loss of complex motor capability. It also suggests that the relationship between physiological activation and skilled performance is influenced by variables that cannot be meaningfully understood through heart-rate measurements alone. 

Neuroscience provides another perspective. In 2020, Ines Rito Lima and colleagues published a case study examining the brain activity of Formula E champion Lucas di Grassi while he drove a high-performance automobile under demanding track conditions. Using mobile electroencephalography, or EEG, alongside eye tracking and movement sensors, researchers recorded neural activity and physical behavior during high-speed driving. They identified relationships between electrical brain activity in several frequency bands and the driver's motor actions, demonstrating that sophisticated neural and motor processes could be studied while an expert performed a highly demanding real-world task (Rito Lima et al., 2020). Rather than simply measuring cardiovascular activity and inferring what was happening cognitively, the investigators examined neural processes directly. 

A separate 2022 investigation led by neuroscientist Elias Mouchlianitis at the University of East London examined EEG activity in World Rally Championship drivers Gus Greensmith and Adrien Fourmaux. Researchers reported that lower alpha-band activity was associated with higher speeds and better driving performance. This was a small, documentary-associated investigation rather than a large peer-reviewed experimental study, and its findings should be interpreted accordingly. Nevertheless, it illustrated the potential to examine neural activity during competitive motorsports rather than attempting to infer cognitive performance from cardiovascular measurements alone (University of East London, 2022). These investigations did not constitute one synchronized experiment in which the same individuals were continuously evaluated using electrocardiography, EEG and validated cognitive-performance assessments. Their collective significance lies in demonstrating that cardiovascular activation, neural activity and skilled performance are distinguishable variables requiring independent examination. 

Of course, a rally driver is not a police officer confronting an armed assailant. Competitive driving and violent interpersonal conflict involve different psychological demands, expectations and perceived threats. Motorsports participants may experience substantial danger, but that does not mean their threat appraisal or emotional responses are identical to those of someone facing deliberate lethal violence. Suggesting otherwise would simply replace one inappropriate generalization with another. The comparison is valuable because it challenges universal claims about human performance, not because the two environments are psychologically interchangeable. Elite drivers demonstrate that substantial cardiovascular activation does not automatically preclude complex perceptual-motor activity, while their specialized training and experience also remind us that performance capabilities develop in relation to the environments in which they are repeatedly exercised. 

Police research provides a more direct examination of the problem. Baldwin and colleagues monitored 64 officers during general-duty calls for service, using cardiovascular measurements, GPS information, physical movement data and operational records to examine physiological responses during actual police encounters. Their findings demonstrated that heart-rate responses varied according to the phase and circumstances of a call, including the presence of weapons, arrests and use-of-force activity. Importantly, the investigators accounted for physical movement, helping distinguish cardiovascular responses associated with operational circumstances from those attributable to physical exertion (Baldwin et al., 2019). The findings reinforce the distinction between cardiovascular activation resulting from physical activity and activation influenced by the psychological significance of an encounter. 

The Difference Between Effort and Threat

Consider an officer seated in a patrol vehicle who receives information that a potentially armed suspect has threatened to shoot responding officers. Although the officer has not sprinted or performed any meaningful physical activity, the information may change the perceived significance of the impending encounter, producing anticipatory anxiety and physiological responses before the officer even exits the vehicle. Compare that situation with a physically exhausted officer standing before a familiar paper target, waiting for an instructor to give the command to fire. Both may display similarly elevated heart rates, but the psychological and cognitive demands associated with those circumstances are fundamentally different. One is preparing to resolve an uncertain and potentially consequential problem, while the other already knows the task, the target and the response expected by the instructor. 

In another investigation, Baldwin and colleagues assessed 122 active-duty officers participating in a realistic lethal-force scenario. The average heart rate during the critical phase was approximately 150 beats per minute, yet the officers demonstrated substantial variability in performance. The average overall performance rating was 59%, and approximately 28% committed at least one lethal-force error. Elevated stress reactivity was associated with poorer performance and increased lethal-force errors, while training and experience demonstrated more complicated relationships with outcomes (Baldwin et al., 2022). These findings are particularly significant because the observed performance problems occurred at cardiovascular levels substantially below the commonly cited Condition Black threshold. The research does not establish that heart rate caused every error, nor does it suggest that officers would necessarily perform better at lower cardiovascular readings. It demonstrates that meaningful performance impairment can occur without approaching an allegedly catastrophic physiological boundary. 

Research by Arble, Daugherty and Arnetz (2019) provides additional evidence of this complexity. In a study involving 17 Swedish police cadets participating in a simulated critical incident, researchers measured cardiovascular activation, cortisol and other physiological indicators while evaluating performance across verbal communication, nonverbal communication and tactical skills. Although the simulation increased heart rate, heart-rate elevation alone did not predict differences in overall performance. Different physiological measures demonstrated different relationships with specific performance domains, reinforcing the conclusion that acute stress does not affect every capability uniformly. An officer may experience degraded communication while maintaining comparatively resilient tactical behaviors, illustrating why simplistic predictions of generalized skill failure are inadequate. 

The distinction between physical exertion and psychological stress becomes even clearer when examining firearms-specific research. In a 2022 review of 23 studies addressing police marksmanship, Simas and colleagues found that physical exertion generally did not appear to degrade shooting performance, particularly at relatively short distances. By comparison, anxiety induced through high-stress scenarios was more consistently associated with reductions in shooting performance, although appropriately structured training under pressure showed the potential to mitigate those effects (Simas et al., 2022). This does not mean physical exertion is irrelevant or that an exhausted officer will always shoot effectively. It means that the relationship between physiological activation and marksmanship is influenced by the source of that activation, the specific task being performed and the conditions under which performance is evaluated. 

There is another problem with reducing firearms performance to shooting accuracy, however, and it is arguably more consequential than the question of whether physical exertion makes an officer's shot groups larger. An officer may maintain excellent mechanical precision and still make a disastrously inappropriate decision to fire. In a 2012 study involving 36 police officers, Nieuwenhuys, Savelsbergh and Oudejans manipulated anxiety during a shooting decision task involving armed suspects and individuals who surrendered. Under elevated anxiety, officers demonstrated an increased tendency to shoot, including mistakenly firing at subjects who had surrendered, while shooting accuracy also declined (Nieuwenhuys et al., 2012). The central problem was not simply whether officers could place bullets accurately, but whether they could correctly determine that firing was appropriate in the first place. No amount of sprinting automatically develops the perceptual discrimination, response inhibition, threat assessment or contextual decision-making necessary to resolve that problem. 

I addressed this deficiency in Unlocking the Brain Code, observing, "In static drill environments, the problem has already been solved before the first round is fired" (Hanson, 2026). The target is known, the engagement decision has effectively been made, and the shooter's remaining responsibility is largely mechanical execution. Adding physical exhaustion may increase difficulty, but it does not necessarily change the underlying cognitive architecture of the exercise. The officer is still solving a problem whose answer was provided before the exercise began, and the resulting performance tells us comparatively little about the ability to recognize an evolving threat, interpret ambiguous behavior or inhibit an inappropriate response when circumstances suddenly change. 

When the Answer Is Already Known

None of this is an argument against exposing officers to stress. Quite the contrary. Research demonstrates that appropriately designed anxiety-based training can improve performance under psychologically demanding conditions. In a 2011 investigation, Nieuwenhuys and Oudejans compared officers who trained under elevated anxiety with those who practiced under lower-anxiety conditions. Officers exposed to anxiety during training demonstrated improvements in shooting performance under pressure, with benefits remaining evident during a retention test conducted four months later (Nieuwenhuys & Oudejans, 2011). The lesson is not that instructors should frighten students indiscriminately or subject them to progressively greater discomfort without regard for learning. It is that training demands must be meaningfully related to the capabilities being developed, with psychological pressure introduced deliberately and supported by appropriate instruction, feedback and opportunities for adaptation. 

This principle sits near the center of the NeuralTac framework, which emphasizes the interaction between the learner, the task and the environment while deliberately manipulating relevant constraints to promote durable, transferable performance. A student who has only recently acquired the fundamentals of trigger manipulation may require a comparatively predictable environment to develop mechanical consistency. A more experienced officer, however, should progressively encounter changing information, uncertainty, competing demands and decisions that require recognizing when force is appropriate and when it is not. The level of challenge should be calibrated to the learner's capability rather than imposed indiscriminately, consistent with the challenge-point framework developed by Guadagnoli and Lee (2004). Increasing difficulty without considering the learner's developmental stage, existing competencies or instructional objectives may create impressive demonstrations of hardship without producing meaningful improvements in performance. 

Consider two firearms exercises involving officers whose heart rates reach 175 beats per minute. In the first, an officer sprints repeatedly, completes a series of strenuous exercises and then engages a known target on command. In the second, an officer participates in a carefully controlled scenario involving an uncertain encounter, ambiguous behavioral cues, changing environmental information and consequential decisions about whether force is justified. Both may produce substantial cardiovascular activation, but they assess different capabilities. The first examines aspects of performance following physical exertion, while the second examines perception, judgment, response selection and motor execution under situationally meaningful psychological demands. Neither exercise is automatically superior for every instructional objective, and neither should be evaluated solely by how elevated the participant's heart rate becomes. Their educational value depends on the capabilities the instructor is attempting to develop and whether the exercise actually engages the processes necessary to acquire those capabilities. 

Training the Brain, Not Just the Body

Within NeuralTac, I emphasize that realistic training should not be confused with theatrical training. Making an exercise louder, faster, more exhausting or more intimidating does not necessarily make it more representative of the operational environment. An instructor who introduces an arbitrary physical challenge without understanding its relationship to the intended learning objective may increase apparent realism while contributing little educational value. Representative training requires identifying the informational, environmental and behavioral demands that define successful performance and systematically developing the learner's ability to manage them. It also requires evaluating capabilities beyond immediate drill completion, including whether the officer can recognize when a previously threatening individual no longer presents an imminent danger, distinguish an ambiguous object from a weapon, communicate while managing competing demands and inhibit a previously prepared response when new information changes the appropriate course of action. 

There is a further distinction between temporarily degraded performance and the permanent loss of a learned skill. The Catastrophe Model describes possible nonlinear changes in performance under interacting conditions of arousal and anxiety, but it does not establish that the underlying motor memory disappears or that a particular heart rate renders established skills neurologically inaccessible. An officer who performs poorly during a stressful encounter may be experiencing disrupted attention, altered perception, inappropriate response selection or difficulty coordinating action under changing constraints. Treating all such failures as evidence that fine or complex motor skills simply vanish above a predetermined heart rate offers an inadequate explanation of a considerably more complicated human-performance problem. More importantly, it can distract instructors from identifying the actual causes of performance degradation and selecting interventions capable of addressing them. 

I return repeatedly to a principle articulated in Unlocking the Brain Code: "Skills do not exist independently of context. They are shaped by it" (Hanson, 2026). The environments in which officers practice influence what they learn to recognize, how they interpret information and which responses become accessible when similar conditions arise. If training consistently eliminates uncertainty, removes consequential decisions and rewards predetermined responses, the learner may become highly proficient under precisely those conditions without developing the broader adaptability required during actual police encounters. The performance may look impressive, the training records may demonstrate successful completion, and everyone involved may leave believing that meaningful stress adaptation has occurred. Whether that confidence is justified, however, depends on the extent to which the exercise actually developed the perceptual, cognitive and behavioral capabilities demanded by the operational environment. 

The comparison with professional motorsports reinforces this distinction. Elite rally drivers do not succeed merely because they can tolerate elevated cardiovascular activity. They develop specialized capabilities through extensive experience, refined perceptual strategies, predictive processing and repeated exposure to the demands of their discipline. Their expertise allows them to manage complex information while maintaining sufficiently effective motor performance under conditions that would overwhelm many inexperienced drivers. Those capabilities are not guaranteed by heart rate, nor are they automatically eliminated by it. Similarly, effective police firearms instruction must develop the perceptual, cognitive and behavioral capabilities that allow officers to function appropriately in their own operational environments, rather than simply conditioning them to tolerate elevated physiological activation. 

None of this means that stress physiology is irrelevant. Acute stress can profoundly influence attention, perception, decision-making and neuromuscular performance, and researchers have documented complex relationships among autonomic activation, endocrine responses, motor control and skilled police performance (Anderson et al., 2019). The scientific evidence gives us every reason to take stress seriously, but it does not justify reducing that evidence to a universal cardiovascular number or assuming that any exercise capable of producing an elevated heart rate reproduces the demands of a lethal encounter. The quality of stress training should therefore be evaluated according to the relevance of the stressor, the demands placed upon the learner and the durability of the capabilities being developed, rather than the degree of visible exhaustion produced during the exercise. 

The real instructional challenge is not finding increasingly creative ways to make officers exhausted. It is developing training that connects physical capability with perceptual accuracy, sound judgment, adaptable movement, appropriate response inhibition and performance under meaningful psychological pressure. Physical exertion has a legitimate place in that process, but it should serve a defined instructional purpose rather than function as a convenient substitute for understanding human performance. A firearms instructor can elevate a student's heart rate in less than a minute, but developing the cognitive, perceptual and behavioral capabilities necessary to function when that racing heart accompanies a genuine threat requires considerably more sophistication. It demands an understanding of learning science, stress physiology, task specificity and the limitations of the very performance models we so frequently invoke. 

A sprint can make an officer tired, test the ability to shoot while breathing heavily, challenge equipment manipulation under fatigue and reveal limitations in motor control following strenuous exertion. Those are valuable capabilities when operational circumstances demand them. But a sprint cannot, by itself, teach an officer to recognize a threat, interpret ambiguous behavior, make a lawful use-of-force decision or inhibit an inappropriate response under genuine psychological pressure. The distinction has enormous implications for how we design and evaluate police firearms training because heart rate is a measurement of cardiovascular activity, not a direct measurement of cognitive competence, threat appraisal or operational readiness. The number displayed on a monitor cannot independently tell an instructor whether a student is prepared to make a consequential decision under pressure. 

Until we stop confusing the physiological appearance of stress with the psychological and cognitive demands of actual danger, we will continue designing exercises that make officers work harder without necessarily preparing them to perform better when the consequences become real. Effective training must accomplish considerably more than producing discomfort, elevated heart rates or impressive displays of physical endurance. It must develop the ability to perceive accurately, decide appropriately and perform effectively under the conditions in which those capabilities will ultimately be required. A sprint is not a gunfight, and making the heart race is not the same thing as preparing the brain. 

References 

Anderson, G. S., Di Nota, P. M., Metz, G. A. S., & Andersen, J. P. (2019). The impact of acute stress physiology on skilled motor performance: Implications for policing. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, Article 2501. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02501 

Arble, E., Daugherty, A. M., & Arnetz, B. (2019). Differential effects of physiological arousal following acute stress on police officer performance in a simulated critical incident. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, Article 759. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00759 

Asken, M. J., Vonk, K., & Sterland, T. (2009, March 5). Heart rate variability and police performance: The next evolution in training? Police1. https://www.police1.com/health-fitness/articles/heart-rate-variability-and-police-performance-the-next-evolution-in-training-CIVGzcsNwRqXc1Id/ 

Baldwin, S., Bennell, C., Andersen, J. P., Semple, T., & Jenkins, B. (2019). Stress-activity mapping: Physiological responses during general duty police encounters. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, Article 2216. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02216 

Baldwin, S., Bennell, C., Blaskovits, B., Brown, A., Jenkins, B., Lawrence, C., McGale, H., Semple, T., & Andersen, J. P. (2022). A reasonable officer: Examining the relationships among stress, training, and performance in a highly realistic lethal force scenario. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, Article 759132. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.759132 

Cooper, J. (1999, October). Hunting season. Jeff Cooper's Commentaries, 7(11), 51–55. https://www.billstclair.com/cooper/jeff7.pdf 

Fazey, J., & Hardy, L. (1988). The inverted-U hypothesis: A catastrophe for sport psychology. British Association of Sports Sciences and the National Coaching Foundation. 

Grossman, D., & Christensen, L. W. (2004). On combat: The psychology and physiology of deadly conflict in war and in peace. PPCT Research Publications. 

Guadagnoli, M. A., & Lee, T. D. (2004). Challenge point: A framework for conceptualizing the effects of various practice conditions in motor learning. Journal of Motor Behavior, 36(2), 212–224. https://doi.org/10.3200/JMBR.36.2.212-224 

Hanson, K. A. (2026). Unlocking the brain code: Exposing the limits of traditional firearms instruction and high-liability training through neuroscience, psychology, and human performance research. Applied Threat Science Publications. 

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