Barbell Shrugged - 858 - Training Police Officers

Episode Date: August 5, 2026

In this episode, Doug Larson joins Coach Travis Mash and Dr. Mike Lane to break down what it takes to build a scalable strength and conditioning program for police officers. Mash shares his new partnership with the Winston-Salem Police Department, beginning with a six-week, 15-person pilot designed to refine onboarding, testing, training, and ongoing monitoring before expanding to roughly 600 officers and support staff. The team explains why tactical fitness must be built around a job-task analysis: officers may spend hours sitting in a patrol vehicle, then suddenly need to sprint, grapple, drag a person, or make a high-stakes decision while wearing a vest and duty gear. The conversation covers how to assess reactive strength, tissue readiness, total-body power, relative strength, aerobic capacity, and repeat-effort conditioning without injuring or overwhelming the people being tested. They examine why generic standards like a mile-and-a-half run or 175-pound dummy drag may not fully reflect real-world demands, how a larger fitness reserve protects situational awareness under stress, and why cardiovascular conditioning can be a survival skill, not just a performance metric. They also discuss the mobility problems created by long hours in a patrol car, including restricted hips, shoulders, and lower backs, and how loaded mobility and heavy isometrics can help tactical professionals, and aging athletes, stay capable, resilient, and ready when the stakes are highest.

Shrug family. Doug Larsen here. And this week, I'm Barb Bell Strug. Coach Travis Mast, Dr. Mike Lane, and myself are talking about what it really takes to be a physically prepared police officer. This is a cool opportunity because Travis right now is building a new training and athlete monitoring program for the Winston-Salem Police Department. And we dig into exactly how he is looking to assess and train those officers for strength, power, aerobic capacity, mobility, as well as the many other unique demands of a very difficult job. So if you train police officers or you simply want to stay strong, capable, and be harder to, to kill yourself. This episode is for you. Enjoy the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrug. I'm Doug

Larsen here with coach Travis Mash and Dr. Mike Lane. You know about six or so episodes ago. We did a training tactical athletes episode and Mass, you just signed a deal with a police department, excuse me, many hundreds of police officers that you're looking to train here in the near future. You were talking about that and you're all excited about us. We decided to shoot a show. You know, what's that deal look like and what are you looking to do specifically with these police officers. Well, I was, um, I was at the Winston-Salem police department. They were doing like a typical wellness week. And while I was there, I met, they have one girl right now who's their wellness coordinator. But while we're there, it wasn't very busy. So I asked her to show me her room.

And she did. And it was small. And like, she's amazing. She'll be a part of this whole thing. And so her name's Kendra. By the way, shout out to Kendra. And then so after that, I said, why don't you come by rides and our sports. We're on the head of sports science. I feel like we would be a great fit, you know, for a facility for all these people. Anyway, long story short, like several months later, we finally have come to terms that we're going to do it. And we're going to host them. We're going to, you know, we're going to train them.

We're going to test. And we're going to do ongoing monitoring. I said, my goal is for it to be the best, you know, I guess, tactical program for, especially police department, policeman. And it's not just the police officers. It's also the support crew to, you know, office staff and all the above. I guess 9-1-1, the whole thing. So I'm super, I'm super pumped.

We just got the email today. You know, we're going to start. The first step is a six-week. We're going to take 15 people. And just to make sure we have our processes down pat. So, like, onboarding and make sure that we can scale this thing to 600 people. But then six weeks, but we got to figure it out in six weeks because Kendra, their lady right now is pregnant. And so she's about going maternity.

So we got until September to like, you know, knocked it down. So I was super excited about this show because I know Mike Lane is like, is really versed in this area. Yeah, he's decidedly mediocre. It's all good. Well, I know who were those people we were talking to? Unfortunately, we were in New Orleans. that I might have had one or two drinks, one that I should have, but they were, you know, the people who do the research for the tactical divisions. Remember sitting with those folks? They're telling me all kinds of things, but I can't remember.

Oh, first off, we only hydrated. I have no idea what you're talking about, MASH. Maybe we're going to a little hyponatremic. And second of all, there's a huge list of folks. So like when you get a chance to go to NSA, which shameless plug for the National Straight Finishing Association, Jim Weir had a booth, aka MASH, was that. And Doug was there as well, so it was awesome to have everyone in one spot. Oh, grew there. Yeah. When we say tactical, that's when you can get real individual. So you can look fire research.

And when you're going there, you've got folks like Jacob Moda down at Texas Tech and all of his students. You've got my friend literally up the road at the University of Kentucky. And, of course, he's good enough of my friend that I'm forgetting. Well, Ryan Mason is the gentleman that he and I played rugby together briefly. And but the head guy, of course, the name will come, but we'll give it a second. Jay Dawes is out of Oklahoma State and he's now going to be the incoming president of the NSA. And he does a lot of research on police. Then you've got people like Brandon Robertson that are over in like Natick and otherwise doing the hardcore like army and, you know, military research.

It was like you're you're looking at a who's who of everybody in the space. And so like, and because it gets so compartmental. And actually just a quick to the side is I got to speak for a little bit and thank you for reminding me. I got to follow up with this person where this researcher, she specifically is working on physiological constraints of pilots because the problem that they have is they've made the planes faster. And not only are they faster, but they can maneuver faster, which means you pull more Gs. And once you get to a certain G force, humans tend to take a spontaneous nap. taking a spontaneous happening going beyond the speed of sound

in a multi-million dollar vehicle thousands feet off the ground, not great. So learning about literal human factors. And so that's part of what she's doing is kind of developing up even more physical fitness standards, equipment, and otherwise. I mean, obviously the different types of pilots already wear certain suits to help modulate that

blood pressure because it's momentum. At a certain point, you pull up fast. All your blood is being ripped down and going into pooling in your legs and otherwise. And again, spontaneous nap, it's essentially being choked out by the forces of gravity. That's insane. Jiu-Jitsu choked by plane.

Yeah, exactly. Only it's self-inflicted. So, you know what? I don't king shame. Now, at the same time, sorry, bad joke, bad joke. But at the end of the day, everyone has these different demands

that are obviously very task specific. So we're talking about police officers. Right. You know, we are talking about you might have to obviously do jujitsu and other types of combatives. You might look at things like you've got to do a foot pursuit. And, you know, all of this, you're encumbered. You're wearing some type of vest. You might be wearing a duty belt.

You might have actually all of your equipment on said vest. And you typically are going from literally sitting in your patrol vehicle to now you've got to go 100%. And how many of you guys would not trust a 40-year-old dude to play beer league softball? and not blow a hamstring running to first base. And so you've got some interesting considerations of it referred to as a job task analysis. So you can see all the different demands of the sport might have, the profession might have and making sure that you're prepared because the thing I both love about tactical and Mark Abel, that's the faculty at the University of Kentucky, that they're doing all of these different things.

And I love working with sports. That was my first, you know, job, so to speak, as far as being a collegiate strength condition coach. But worst case scenario, our team gets blown out and we feel bad. Right. Those got to die. Bingo. You fail as a police officer.

You fail as a firefighter. Not only can you die, but then the people you were trying to save, you know, the other types of collateral damage, like you are playing for NASA stakes. Right. And on the other side, and this is for anyone that's also, you got to think about the ancillary effects, which is. every cop that gets hurt, every firefighter that gets hurt on the job, they now have to pay overtime to other firefighters and cops to fill in that role that they have, which then costs more money, plus the workman comp, which costs them more money, and you're overtaxing those other first responders because now they have to work more. Which doesn't have to work more. Their bank account probably likes it, but, you know, the job is stressful.

Right, right. Well, and just if you have a force that is overstressed and under recovered, we know from athletics that team's usually not successful. Yeah. So do you want to know that all of your is not going to be a sharp officer? Bingo. And a delayed reaction time. Yeah. Yeah.

Wait, Matt, Mass. How do you deal with a call it the cold start problem? Like sitting in your vehicle to all of a sudden running full speed sprint after somebody. Like I've never really thought too much about sprinting with with police officers as far as like a. training program where they're sprinting regularly given they might actually be in a foot race with someone who might be half their age like how do you how do you deal with that do you have a plan for sprint training with police officers specifically well this is my thought is like is first testing like a reactive strength index because it's going to give you

an idea of their connective tissue so like you know if they go to do an rSI and you can see that there's no stability there at the joints and I'm probably not going to sprint them you know that you're going to start preparing so like start jump doing jump or probably start doing some basic strength work, you know, at the ankle, at the knee, at the hip. Meanwhile, starting to get that tissue ready for more dynamic work with even just basic hops and skips. And then slowly work the way to like, you know, two full sprinting because, yeah, like if they can't sprint, then how are they going to chase after somebody? But I feel like a solid RSI test, along with, you know, anaerobic, aerobic, all the, you know,

the upper lower body strength you know strength endurance relative strength but that's really i'm curious what um mike lane you know like what he would do as far as testing a quick break in the action here to let you know that i've just recently chosen to get back into coaching and i specifically am looking to coach masters jujitsu athletes just like myself i've been doing jiu jihitsu for 22 years and strength and conditioning for 30 years i'm a black belt of course and i live that life i understand exactly what goes into it i understand what's like to run a family, do Jiu-Jitsu, try to tie strength and conditioning into it all and all of the ups and downs that come with it from joint pain to busy schedules to travel

and all the things. So if you are a master's jiu-jitsu athlete and you're looking for some support, I'm happy to give it. You can DM me on Instagram at Douglas E. Larson or you can email me, Doug at barbell shrug.com. Happy to help. Back to the show. First, I'm always, as much as I hate teaching to the test, I want to know what testing they have to do. So North Carolina where you're at, it's a foot pursuit with an agility test. That's effectively the right. Where I'm at here in Kentucky, it's a mile and a half run, a 300 meter sprint,

a bench press, and you just got to get over a certain percentage of body weight, a push-up endurance and a sit-up endurance. This wasn't almost pops testing. And so that's still what they have to do to pass and graduate from cadet training. Now, of course, once again a field, a bunch of states have their own criteria. Some of them, they never have to test again. We can easily talk about some potential flaws there. And at the end of the day, what we're talking about from like the 10,000 foot view that MASH is putting out there is let's just make sure that we feel safe enough to have them go full speed and not have some drop off. That's what I want to do with RSI is just, I don't want to hurt somebody. Literally on Monday morning, I was over there

testing at the DOCJT, we're going through the cadets. Our youngest cadet, and this is somebody that's going to be a police officer somewhere in my state, I think they were like 21, 22, and our oldest was 48. Wow. And like they're about, yeah, exactly. Like one of them will be retired from policing if they choose to go and do their 20 year career. Yeah.

And still be younger than one of those people who just graduated. Mind you, they graduated. So like they obviously are physically fit enough to do it. But as you guys know, you give me. me an 18 to 20 something year old and say, I'm not, I'm just like, do you have like diabetes or high blood? Like, is there anything like everybody your family drops that at 40? Is anything I should worry about? Like, we can probably just go. Yeah. But you give me a 40 year old. Like, first we're looking, we're doing the T-shirt test. We're like looking at them like, oh, I don't

think we're doing much. And or like, then you're going to go through and do all that risk assessment stuff because plain and simple. It's not worth the injuries because that's not where they're at. Now, they got a decent reactive strength index. You know, maybe it's like, yeah, their absolute strength isn't that great, but they do have good tissue quality. And now we know we need to program towards. Now, the other piece, and I know I don't look it, but I'm a big proponent of just that good old cardiovascular metabolic development. Right. So they basically VOTMX.

Yeah. They lift weights, but they take five minutes between each set. They try like a power lifter in like the most cliched way. So they're like they're strong, but like they do that 300 meter and they can barely recover enough to then do the mile and a half run because they just don't have the recuperative capacity. And so, you know, don't can be wrong. I hope every, you know, first responder doesn't literally finish a call, go right into the next call, right into the next call, right into the next call. But those shifts might happen. Yeah.

So if we don't have the metabolic capacity to recover, then that's we're going to put into. And so we can't be cookie cutter. instead we have our decision tree. And like straight up, if you are so poor of tissue quality, you're going to get hurt, that's what we hit first. Then it's like, okay, are you strong enough to at least give me one good effort, powerful enough to give me one good effort? And then like, okay, let's see how we can repeat the effort. Because bad jokes, we don't follow them. And this is when like the CrossFit snobbery was at its high point, like when everybody wanted to know what your friend time was and everything.

And we were wrong. every high level crossfitter that I've met, I've had a great conversation with their awesome dudes and yel- but when they're like, yeah, what's your, like guys, who cares? Like, just be happy and be fit. Like, you know what? We'll do a cross-foot workout. You pick the first exercise.

The second exercise can be deadlifting 600 pounds for one. And then you pick the third exercise. And half the time I look at them and I go, I'll give you a two-year head start. Yeah. Yeah. You know, like if they're not strong enough and that was a really cool conversation with a gentleman who is in. charge of the strength conditioning for the Fort Worth fire department is he uses a

250 pound dummy they have to drag so in a lot of others for this for the CPAT and that's firefighting standard in a lot of states is a 175 pound um dummy which don't be wrong so twice that basically well it's the girth is big as well because it's now it's like trying to get like around a guy or gal that's got a bigger dimensions than you or I mash. And so like you got to like you got to get in wide. You can't cinch it in easy. And the simple thing is is like this dummy right here weighs about 210. And if they could barely move the 175, you might as well glue me to the floor so they can

identify the ashes afterwards. No doubt. Because that firefighter's not going to be able to move me. And like honestly, how many 175 grown men are there? There's just not. I mean, we're a country filled with obesity. So like, you know, the odds are they're going to be too. or plus. So really that's what they should be testing. Hence functionality. Exactly. Right.

So I think that's a brilliant. Not the same thing at all, but a fun story, but related to what you're saying, I've only given the Heimlich maneuver to one person in my life. I was at a cracker barrel in Mississippi. Oh, God. I already know where this is going. Yeah. I was driving. I was like driving from Memphis down to Florida to go to the coast. And and this guy starts choking and it's right right next to I was there with my wife and it's like a table of six people and this guy starts choking and we look over and none of the other people at his table are doing anything about this and it is clear this guy is like actually choking where like no air is going in and out and he's like he's like yeah he's grabbing his throat and he's not

it's like barely barely able to make any watching oh yeah it's like a table of kind of older people and I go over there and I reach around him and he was so big that like it was just like my fingertips that could that could touch and I kind of like barely was able to pull into like an S grip like which like I'm very comfortable at doing from you know I basically put him in a rear body lock like from wrestling but like just like with just my fingertips and I have fairly long arms I was barely able to get my arms around this guy like almost to the point where I wasn't able to actually do it which if I wasn't able to lock my fingers I would not have been able to like give him a couple of hard hard pumps so to speak but straight out of the movies big piece of

steak just like out of his throat and landed on the table and he was like But if that guy had like passed out and been on the ground and or if they're, you know, if the building was burning or whatever, and he'd like drag that out of there. It's a real. Like that dude, even for like a trained person, that's probably deadlifted 500 pounds at the time. Like it's not like crazy strong, but strong enough to be like normal strong. That would have been a rough go dragging that dude out of there. Oh, plus 500 pounds is on a bar that's designed to be lifted.

This is a human that's not. You know, it's like there's a big difference. Some messy 300-pound dude. Yeah, man. There's no, there's no, like, small diameter metal bar to grab. It's like, you know, with perfect and early to help you hang on. Just a human, slipper clothes and sweat and all the other stuff. But as far as testing, like, if you're testing somebody, you're supposed to be testing, like, the upper limit of what they might encounter in the real world.

You're not trying to, like, have 175 pound low bar. You're trying to say, like, you know, this has to cover 90% of the cases that might potentially happen. And so 250 pounds seems like a much, it has much higher application in my mind. Absolutely. So. And then, I'm sorry, go ahead, Mesh. I was even going to do, you know, also like, I'm going to look at power as well. Like, you know, I'm going to do, you know, a vertical leap, assuming, you know,

where I feel like they're safe to test. But I would like to do a vertical leap, but also like a trap bar jump, maybe with, you know, somewhere between 50 and 900 percent of their body weight, just a little bit. really look at like how much power can this person produce. Because that's a good look, I feel like at, you know, force and speed where they come together. You know, that's force and velocity is power. So like, and as people get older, like we all know that's one of the first things to go away. And if that's going away, are, you know, this person, are they going to be powerful enough to be able to stop somebody?

Are they going to be powerful enough to run? It's also a good look at the neuromuscular system, how the brain and the muscles, are working together. So I want to test that, make sure that that's improved as well. But those are the main, I try to keep, I don't want to get so complicated that the person can't follow the test, but I definitely want to get enough information to where I can pinpoint what's going on and also where we can monitor improvement. So one of the issues that you're going to have with any of these organizations, the people involved understand that for the most part, their tests are suboptimal. Like they could be doing a better job.

Right. But you need to have a way you could homogenize these tests across entire states or when we're talking about the military, you know, throughout the entire country. So how can you do a field test? Because like, don't be wrong, you know Hawkins, Vault, any of those companies, if they got the contract to outfit every single military testing center with force plates, it would love to do that. Like I think Sorinac sold a lot of the trap bars for the AFT or at least that's what we have here for our ROC connects. It's like, yep, that's a damn fine day for the Sorenx organization.

But at the end of the day, when you can now be that have that greater level of granularity because you're working with the smaller groups, you can have that degree of precision. And hence, you can also then lose your mind going way too deep into these types of variables. So keep it simple. I mean, I have the tendency to do just that is to go too far. I need to make it make sure that it's scalable because I can't, I won't be able to test everybody. So I got to make sure that my staff can do it as well. So I want to try to keep it, you know, advanced, but simple.

Yeah. Yeah. And I'm sorry, with those strength metrics, that's the nice thing about having a simple max that you can have them do. Yeah. Or something where we're looking at that velocity. And this is where, you know, in Pops testing here, you used to have a vertical jump component.

And they removed it for legal reasons because it was considered discriminatory. And, you know, we can have a long conversation about those. issues but this is for women is that what you're saying for individuals that wouldn't that actually don't have as high of vertical jump and so then lawyers that are my natural thing issue I have with the law is about who is the best argument on who's right and so vertical jump is a good indicator of total body power sure and at least lower body power in your capacity there and that's going to correlate to things like sprint speed and everything else it's also going to be a potential issue of and that's part

the reason why we're doing the research we're doing in my lab, which is at what point is a police officer going to have to run a mile and a half? Foot pursuits are not going to last that long. No, yeah, no way. Yeah. But as a straight up mediocre scientist or a very smart gym teacher, at the end of the day, your aerobic fitness is incredibly important for your recover, how fast you recover between bouts and your ability to perform longer durations.

Yeah. You gave me two options to either go run flat out for three minutes or to have to go live against Doug in Jiu-Jitsu. And every time I tap, he goes right back into it for three minutes. I'm going to find my running shoes. Right. Me too. And so and you cannot homogenize

combat. Right. So we can't be like, hey, in order to pass, you got to beat that guy. And if you don't be that guy, sorry, you have not mastered Kung Fu. You cannot be. Insert this professional. So instead, fire is nice because they can mimic enough things about fire or the tasks there. But like foot pursuit, like they can okay like you can try to do it but the idea of like you are having to physically go against a

we will say chemically enhanced human right that is highly modified to not go into or highly motivated than not go to adult time out and if you do not apprehend them you fail like you can't homogenize it plus i mean how brutal would that be on the instructors fun fun fact so i go over then we do the testing and this is where they do all the training it's an awesome facility and i go in there and I'm carrying my gear in to do the field test. And I hear like the crackle of electricity. And I'm like, that's weird. And then what they were doing was knife defense scenarios.

So the instructor had an electrified rubber knife that every time it hits you, you essentially get a mild tase, which is cut. And they make them go one on one against the instructor. And I'm like, by the end of it, the instructor, which, I mean, those guys are incredible. for a variety of reasons. And like he was pretty tired because he's having to go through and run the scenario 30 odd times. So it's still one of those situations where, again,

for the metabolic side, long story long here, I would think about maybe not necessarily a pacer test, depending on where you're at. You know, you could do, you know, like that good old like 12 minutes, mass distance or max distance you can go. And we kind of work back the VO2. but just something to have a standard. Yeah, yeah.

All right. So I definitely want to, I definitely want to look at that just because you can like estimate their VL2 Max. But I also want to look at like, you know, like lactate threshold, you know, anaerobic capacity. So I want, I don't want to just do like a mile and a half or the 12 minutes per distance. I want to look at other areas as well.

So I was thinking like, you know, after listening to Andy, Instead of doing it like sprinting-wise, put them on like an Airdine or a rower, something where I don't have to worry about injuries as much. And like something like row 500 meters, rest 30 seconds and repeat. See how people, you know, quickly can they recover? So you look at like, you know, how quickly somewhere recover, how good, you know, how well the glycolic system is working. Like, what would you do? Is that good or bad? It's not bad.

So the key thing is, like anything else, lactate threshold is hard because the only way to really do it is you stabs blood and you see what that. Yeah, right. But we can use ventilatory threshold as a proxy, meaning the point of which, like, you're over to mouth breathing. There's no way you're maintaining that through nasal. I don't care whose podcast you're hopped up on. Once you go, anybody goes max effort, they start having to breathe through their mouth. Right. And you also, you know, even perception of like, when does the burn set in?

Like, when's your legs burn, when's your lungs burden? Because that's the pH. dropping because of the lactate and the proton that comes with it. So you could do like a metabolic efficiency, and that's where you're talking about, same thing from chat with Galpin, 20 minutes, highest average, highest wattage they can hold through only nasal breathing to kind of look at that aerobic motor. Like here's what they can really do, non-anarobic. You could go critical power, but that is a meat grinder.

And that is a three-minute max effort sprint because the idea is instead of like a VO2 max where you eventually hit the ceiling and that's as far as you go. you're done. Instead, a critical power test is I kind of drop you and eventually you hit the roof of the building. And so you go through all of that anaerobic metabolic pain and then eventually you flatline and that flatline wattage,

that is the critical power, the power output that you can maintain through a rover performance because you've exhausted all the anaerobic. When I use that with my wonderful students, some of them will take a visit to Puky. Yeah, I've been

A lot of them would take a, see, that's the thing. I don't want to scare this people away either. I know. Like, these guys will for sure throw up. If I did, you know, three minutes, max one next. I would throw up. I'm sure. In my opinion, like, that's kind of the only thing that really matters as far as like on field performance.

So to speak, any like major encounter a police officer gets into is really going to be just like a handful of minutes at best. As far as like max insertion, not like, not like staged in a place and being in like this long drawn out situation. But as far as like I'm exerting myself like in a in a confrontation or in a chase, it's going to be fairly short. They're going to catch the person right away in the first minute or they're going to stop and and call call somebody or get in their vehicle or they're going to go it's going to move on to the next thing. But as far as like actually doing something that's like maximally exerting, it's only going to be for a couple minutes out of time before they take a break or they or they they go this isn't fucking working. I got to make a better decision and change course. Right. So you think, some, uh, don't know, you think, um, you do three minutes and just goes absolutely as

smart as you can. And so you're going to look at like, where do they peak and then where do they end up leveling out? Is that the deal? Oh, they'd peak in the first five, 10 seconds. Sure. Sure. Yeah. It's the last minute. That's really what you're looking for the average. Honestly, a better one is probably just to do something graded. And so you haven't started like a hundred watts on the rower or hundred watts on the air dye. And I mind you have to manually hold it. And the idea is like every two minutes increase the wattage until they eventually hit it. You can go and kind of do back of the napkin math. It's an idea of like where their VO2 max is, plus you can see where the heart rates are so you can kind of design some heart rate zones.

And then when you switch over to mouth breathing, when does the burn really set in? You know, what was the limiting factor to it? And the thing, I like the idea of eventually incorporating a critical power. But that would be you'd start off with that pacer test with sometimes graded exercise for the first month. Because hopefully this is a little bit. long-haul thing. You've got some buy-in. You know they're doing it. That's when I would incorporate something more brutal like that. That's going to give you a better tail because, you know, Doug is spot on, which is you're going to have to go really hard. But the other thing that's important to keep in mind is we all have functional reserves. And so if you've got somebody

who's just got an incredible aerobic motor, that means typically that what they're doing is not, we're putting all this tax on you. You've got all of those. You've got all of those. this effort you have to give. And if I'm literally just putting all of my effort and running as fast as I can, it turns out my situational awareness is probably going to start to shrink down. Like I'm going to start getting into situations where I'm not observing everything else that's going on like I should. And instead of like, hey, he's faster than you. You will not win this foot race. Instead, it's more radio and do whatever you need to. You know, if you're the firefighter and you're biting off more than you can shoe, you have the wherewithal to be like, yeah, that's a 400 pound person. I know I can't drag them.

I'm going to tire myself out. I need to call for a backup or I need to use some type of harness assistance, which is going to make it easier to move that individual. And that requires having that sheer. And the easiest way to see it is actually little kids sports. Because you see little kids play sports and you see them score on their own goal. Yeah. You see them go and make really dumb decisions because it turns out what they were doing

was maximally stimulating. And then they started to get into where they're not perceiving as much. And now they're not perceiving as much, they make bad choices. It's funny and shameful when the kid scores on his own goal. Obviously, there's far worse outcomes in this population. So you want them to have massive strength, so everything is easy. Massive aerobic capacity, so everything's easy.

And then that way, they have the ability to select the correct tool for whatever endeavor they get in. This is awesome. Yeah. I mean, kind of on the everything's easy front, like one of the unspoken things that was in the back of my mind with the last thing I just said, with the kind of the shorter bouts. Like if you, if you very consistently train and you're doing 400 meter repeats on a track, like you're running 60, 70 second 400 meter repeats.

So you're running them hard. You run, you know, it takes you a minute. You rest four minutes. You do it again. You do rounds of that, et cetera.

Then like your mile time or your two mile time, et cetera, those are going to, those are going to adapt. They're going to go up too. Pretty well. Also, you're also going to have a pretty good mile time.

If that's the kind of training you do on a regular basis. The Congress isn't, isn't quite as strong. If you only run longer distances and then you go to run like a max 400, the adaptations from the longer distance stuff isn't going to influence a 400 meter in the same way that the converse will happen. Obviously, at the extremes, you need to be specific and train for whatever you're trying to actually adapt for. But if you're a police officer and you do these like hard one minute bouts as an example, it'll carry over pretty well to some minor strength adaptations, we'll say and or to like the slightly longer duration run that you may may need to do sometime. but probably rarely ever. You're not going to chase somebody for 20 minutes in the real world very often.

No, they're not. They got a car, too. No. And so, yeah, and most of them are going to go after this deadly subject by themselves. They're going to get back up, and they're not going to chase them. Even if they could, they're going to be smart. I hope so they can go home that night. Yeah, but it will.

I mean, you know, Jacob Wyatt, I don't know if you remember him, Doug, but Rabbit, is it, you know, like he's been with me forever. He's a police officer right now. Like the poor guy, he was just a year ago, he was involved in an officer involved shooting. And like, I watched him. And he was so nice. And like, it made me proud of him because, you know, I watched him grow up. But he was so nice to the guy. You know, he comes up, hey, man, let's talk.

You know, let's be friends. And the guy just keeps being belligerent more and more and more. It just was, it was, anyway, but you can hear rabbits. You can hear his breath. you know like your heart rate's going up and he's like getting out of breath because he's having to chase the guy and like luckily

Robin was in great shape or he'd be dead you know he was in a situation where he would be dead because the guy's coming at him with a knife and a bar in his hand like so if he wouldn't have been in great shape and strong then he wouldn't have been going home

to his wife and he has children now so I watched it play out in real life to someone I know so well and you know let's do a quick little segue into some physiology, which is firefighters when they're going into a really hard building fire, police officers, when they're going into, you know, force on force, deadly encounters, your body is dumping as much epinephrine as it can.

Oh, yeah. Powerlifters will, you know, pop some nose torque and listen to Mommy didn't hug me enough as a child music and maybe slap themselves around, but it's still nowhere near. And that level of epinephrine causes global vasoconstriction, which has some positives when you get there. But what we're talking about is it cranks your blood pressure. And then you're doing a maximal effort. So unfortunately, you know, there's a number, like after crush injuries, the number one killer of firefighters is cardiovascular events. Right. If you think about it, that lets you know that their protective equipment is freaking awesome because they don't often die.

And I mean, I'm sorry to be so morbid, but like they don't die of getting burned to death. Like the equipment works. But if the building falls on you, that's physics. Yeah. But if you, You just went through a massive fire that was incredibly stressful. Your cardiovascular system is kind of a little bit there. You're dehydrated from wearing that hot equipment. You've got that massive increase in contractility of your heart plus blood pressure. So they'll go home and succumb to it. And it's one of those things that obviously can also play out in law enforcement.

And so hence, it's like, yeah, do I like cardio? No. but at the same time, if this motor fails, like that's the ballgame. So you want to make sure that it's well developed. And so they can not just survive the pursuit, but their body can survive the physiological fallout, depending on what hits on the far side. Yeah, and with the fire, you know,

they got the smoke inhalation as well. So you got, you know, that element. It's not just the stress and the equipment and the heat, but, you know, you're going to, you're definitely getting, you're going to get smoke no matter. what you have because you know you're going to get some smoke in the latest and like people are going to take those masks to get a lot of firemen will get scared too and then they'll take the mask off and that's why they train them to avoid the claustrophobia that naturally comes with wearing the

SCBA and i mean you're enclosed you're encumbered like i mean it's it's stressful there's a reason why i respect anyone that does these professions and i don't do them exactly but i'm excited to work with them that exactly and that's where And I think the other piece that is an important thing that we keep in mind is in turn, you brought up the tissue quality, but now we're talking about the mobility because they are, most police officers effectively are car drivers. Like most of what they do for a living is they just ride around a car all day. And then the idea is then you have to get up and go 100%, you know?

And that, you know, if you're constantly laminating those glutes, just getting flat or sitting in that seat. Yeah, man. Plus the low backs because they're wearing that equipment and it's still pushing down. down and they're stuck in whatever position for long periods of time. So make fun of bike hops as much as you want, but they're getting in good, zone two, moving all day long, get a lot of dynamic stuff. Yeah.

So, you know, plus driving, get your hands in front of you. You're going to get obviously flaring of the scaps. You know, you're going to get all kinds of like the typosis in the spine. Yeah. So definitely wanted to do like the basic start with like a basic, uh, a red squat test. Obviously, most of them are going to fail that. and then go joint if they do if they're able to do a nervous squat we'll move on but like assuming they can't which most won't we'll go you know joint for joint for sure but like

that's the one i'm going to really have to work with my staff on you know looking at like uh you know shoulders hips you know a lot of the hips man like you see like zero internal rotation like i see that a lot of even weight lifters you think they have great mobility then how them do you know, hip internal rotation is like zero. And it was a Kelly Starrant who, like a long time ago, we were having some back issues. And he told me he's like checked into hip internal rotation and the majority. It's crazy because you see, all these guys have perfect mobility. But sure enough, most of them failed.

And then when we started to work on the internal rotation and improved back pain went away. And since that moment, it's never returned. So. I'm in that category myself. Like I can still almost do the splits. Like I've been able to do splits my whole life because I did gymnastics growing up. And even though I've I have focused very specifically on hip internal rotation, like I do hip interrotation mobility drills every time I train.

And I've been doing it for years and still my hip internal rotations is pretty shit. It's like it's still not great. And I'm pretty flexible in many ways. Do you just do. Uh, hip, uh, internal rotation as far as, um, mobility or do you do like, do you try to like, do I do strength training? So we'll do like, you know, with a cable, we'll do hip internal rotates and strengthen the internal rotators and the external rotators. And that seems to work much better than just trying to like stretch, you know, or like hold positions, but actually use weight.

And another would like a heavy isometric really works well. And so. Yeah. Over the years, I've gone through a whole handful of protocols and whatnot and worked with many people, including people on the on the now biomolecular athlete team. our physical therapist, et cetera. But I've actually never really gone down that road specifically, specifically with you, MASH. I would actually love to have that conversation.

We should totally talk about that would be amazing. For sure. I think heavy isometrics have been the miracle for me as a guy. I mean, I've had terrible mobility. And for a 53 year old to improve certain, you know, I guess certain joint angles, it's like, it's pretty cool. And like, the only thing it's ever worked is just heavy isometrics held, 20, 30 seconds, you know, Keith Barr, that guy.

It was a big, that was a big turning point for me. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I know, Michael, you got to get out of here soon, right? We got to wrap? I have to jump in a couple seconds, but the one little thing that I would add on your point on the internal external rotator of the hip, and that's the thing that we need to keep in mind of survivorship bias.

Because when you get athletes, for the most part, the younger, and so mobility by default is decent. Yeah. And mobility, obviously, by default, tends to get worse with age. So it's a thing where we can obviously always be under programming certain smaller movements, smaller muscles, simply because it's not the clean and jerk. It's not the snatch, not the squat, not the deadlift. And that's why it's one of those things that like, what I've been doing this mind chart really? Like, yes, you've got great hamstring mobility, but you're missing other key types of movement at the hip.

Like, your hip extension, like your hip flexors are tight. You can barely get yourself into extension. you have no degrees of extension because your Iliacus and your soaz is too damn tight. And so that's another one that he talked about. Like we do a ton of like like lunch position holds. Oh, you got to go. All right. On those noses.

And so I'll, you know, like finish it up by saying like we make sure that the torso is vertical. So we're strengthening instead of just like necessarily stretching the soass or the hip flexors that everybody does, but you're actually doing it under load. And so that has been, for me, every time my back hurts, if I just go hold a lunch position, making sure to be as vertical as possible in the torso, it always goes away. And so anyway, I can't even believe I'm just talking about mobility. That's always been like a joke, you know, I'm like so not mobile. But, you know, it's getting better.

Yeah, man. The older you get, the more becomes a topic conversation for sure. Yeah, man, I want to be able to move, you know, like, you know, my daughter's seven. So like, when she's 18, I want to be able to, you know, walk her down the aisle. So like, yeah. Yep. So those little things matter. 100% my man.

Michael Lane already took off. So Coach Travis Mash, where can people find you? Mashleague.com or you can go Instagram, Mass Elite performance. Beautiful. You got any programs or anything coming out? A lot of new stuff about to drop. But a lot of it will be either on the tactical side of things or it's going to be like 53, and about 45 and above the same for uh i guess people trying to age well so already have a lot

out but like um that's where i do a lot lately all right beautiful man uh you can find me on instagram douglas e larsson we are barbell strugged at barbell underscrux shrugged if you want to work with me and you are a master's jiu jitsu athlete and you want to work on strength conditioning and nutrition specifically for jiu jitsu you can dm me on instagram or email me doug at barbell shrug and if you want to work with coach Travis Mash Dr. Mike Lane, Dr. Andy Galpin and the whole team at Biomolecular Athlete. You can go to Biomolecular Athlete.com

backslash Arte. That's A-R-E-T-E. Friends, see you guys next week.