You find yourself behind a stolen car, begin your pursuit. The driver pulls over quickly and bails out. The foot chase is on. Down this hill...around the back of this garage...through this alley that has puddles...across this stone foot path...and WHAM! Hit that step wrong on a stone that was higher than others and turned your ankle. Suspect gets away. You get injured and embarrassed. You’re on light duty for two weeks after seeing the orthopedist and having your ankle X-rayed. The doctor says to you, “This might have been prevented if you stretched regularly.” You shake your head and keep going.
Same scenario, but halfway through that puddled-up wet alley, you feel a tightness in your chest and it starts getting difficult to breathe. You slow down and eventually stop thinking you’re just winded and need to catch your breath. The pain doesn’t subside but gets worse and before you completely lose your ability to talk, you get on your radio and call for an ambulance. When they arrive they find you on your back unconscious, the victim of a heart attack. You’re transported and survive. The doctor, at some point, counsels you about nutrition and exercise. Since you’re only 42 years old, you actually consider paying heed to what he says. Otherwise, you realize you might not see 52.
It’s no secret that law enforcement professionals often get injured on the job. What too many avoid discussing, admitting or avoiding, is the fact that many of the injuries are completely avoidable. How? Diet and exercise. It’s that simple. Diet and exercise. When we discuss officer injuries, it’s common to focus on those caused by criminal suspects or received during physical conflict. Officers have been shot, stabbed, received blunt trauma injuries and certainly broken bones or received lacerations. As common as any of those injuries might be, how much more common is it to get pulled muscles, sprained joints or cardio injuries?
We all have tools on our gunbelt and in our vehicle storage area. We are tasked with maintaining them, but the one “tool” we often overlook—and that is by far the most important—is our own body. If we invest the time and energy in maintaining our fitness levels, we can help to minimize potential injuries both at work and off duty.
To do so, what do we need to focus on? Any fitness instructor will tell you that a decent fitness program will involve four segments: nutrition, cardio exercise, strength training and flexibility training. Nutrition is a topic that even those who are experts in the field will argue about so we won’t delve deep into it here. At its most basic, nutrition involves tracking what you eat and insuring that your intake is reasonably balanced between carbs, fat and protein. Everybody is different in what they need in each macro and the best way to know what yours are is to have that discussion with a nutritionist. Perhaps the bigger challenge to the nutrition segment is the discipline necessary to gain full value from it. Any good nutritionist would tell you that as well. More weight is lost in the kitchen than in the gym.
Flexibility is the next most neglected part of any good fitness program. Everybody likes to be seen lifting in the gym but too many officers forget to stretch as part of warming up and just as many neglect stretching to relax the hard-worked muscles afterward. As a minimum general rule, whatever amount of time you dedicate to lifting, you should take 25% of that time and spend it stretching. Stretch as part of your warmup and stretch as part of your cool down. Remember that you should stretch the muscle groups you’re going to work out/did work out, but also remember to stretch your back and legs every workout. Since we spend so much of our time sitting—effectively bent at the waist for hours each day—and we regularly rest a gunbelt on our hips, which effects our lower back, our profession often experiences unexpected back injuries and long term back challenges. Stretch at least five days per week and make sure a part of every stretch program includes your lower back and backs of your legs (hamstrings).
Strength training is where most officers like to focus; the idea being that the stronger you are the easier you can manage a physical conflict. While strength certainly plays a role in how well we manage a conflict, it’s not all about how strong you are. That said, strength training should be part of your training regimen. Like other aspects of fitness training, you should balance how much you train each major muscle group and some that are unexpectedly important in conflicts. Muscle groups like your shoulders and your triceps are often neglected and shouldn’t be.
Of all of the above, more important than strength or flexibility, and perhaps on par with nutrition, is cardiovascular fitness. How healthy is your heart, circulatory and respiratory system? Heart disease, heart attacks and other cardio/respiratory challenges are the cause of huge numbers of deaths in the United States’ general population. We in law enforcement aren’t any exception and the only way we can reduce our risk of injury or death due to a cardio failure, even albeit temporary, is to regularly exercise it.
At least four to five days each week you should be training your cardio system via the method of your choice. Some people love to run. Others love to row. Some prefer bicycling. What type of cardio exercise you do doesn’t matter so much as how long you do it. Ten minutes of “spin class” isn’t sufficient to truly train your cardio system. Every fitness expert and doctor we interviewed said that cardio training should span at least 30 minutes with a five minute warm up and a five minute cool down at each end.
There is a formula to figure out what your target heart rate should be during your cardio exercise program. The goal is to reach that target and maintain it throughout. Here is the formula:
220 – your age x 70% = target exercise rate.
The 70% is in the middle of an acceptable range of 55% to 85%. For a 50 year old person, that means 220 – 50 (=170) x 70% = 119. So your target for exercise, in general at the age of 50, would be 119 beats per minute for 20 to 30 minutes minimum, four to six days per week. You can do it every day if you’d like, but even the most dedicated fitness competitors take a day off to rest their bodies.
There are a plethora of wearable watches and heart rate monitors that you can use to measure your heart rate when you exercise and many pieces of exercise equipment—rowing machines, ellipticals and other pieces—have built-in sensors you can hold to measure your heart rate every few minutes or in an on-going fashion. There are also quite a number of data tracking tools you can use to record your nutritional intake, exercise type and time, body weight, blood pressure (a BP cuff at the local drug store is about $30-$50) and more.
While officers are not professional athletes, it behooves us to keep ourselves in the best fitness condition we can. There is enough job-related stress to do us long term and permanent health harm. Exercise is a good stress management tool and the more fit we are, the less impact stress has on us. Further, and the focus of this article, the more fit we are, the less likely we are to be injured on the job. That’s a goal worth investing in, and it’s only your time that you are investing. Make the investment. It pays back in a big way.
