ESTCOMPANY PROFILE | 51
Keeping your staff ‘on the run’ The demand on your service is growing. If today is a challenge then tomorrow will be harder. You know this and you know you must meet the pressure of managing this demand while at the same time planning for the unexpected. You do this by managing your assets and having a resilient workforce. Or do you? Words: Gareth Knights & Pete Reeve, Emergency Athlete.
Our most valuable asset is our staff but how do we build their resilience? How do we enable them to continue throughout the long hours and ever increasing demands of shift work? To tackle the unexpected and then return to normal operations with capability intact?
believe that to improve your strength you should be using multiple muscle groups to move heavy resistance. Our favourites are deadlifts and squats — big exercises with big demands on the system, but done in a way that mirrors working activities. To improve overall fitness, we believe you should follow a general physical preparation (GPP) programme, mixing different energy systems in the same workout. Consider 15 minutes of chest compressions in a cardiac arrest scenario followed by a patient carry down two flights of stairs. No problems for a practitioner who's been doing 15 minutes of box jumps, deadlifts and burpees. What about dynamic entry into a house followed by restraining a subject? It'll seem easy after shuttle sprints, pull ups and shoulder presses, all repeated seven times.
Four pillars of health
Injury prevention
Emergency Athlete promotes the four pillars of health: nutrition, sleep, stress mediation and exercise. It aims to hit a balance between these four pillars to promote optimum performance and increase resilience to the demands of emergency service work.
“Training should be enjoyable, challenging but most importantly relevant.” Exercise Within all of our working activities, complex demands are made on our fitness. For a police officer a foot pursuit may end with the need to restrain a subject. Heavy cardiovascular demands are followed immediately by a need to express maximum strength while already fatigued. A firefighter may need to make repeated stair climbs while carrying equipment, simultaneously taxing multiple physiological systems. So to operate functionally at work we must demand complex movements from our bodies yet rarely do we train or aim to improve in a similar way. Traditional approaches to physical improvement promote ideologies that cardiovascular fitness is increased by steady state or interval running and strength is increased by performing sets and repetitions (usually on machines) with measured rest intervals. These methodologies have been used for decades and can be effective, but research has shown us new ways to improve our functional capability and we should look to embrace them and introduce them to our staff.
anaerobic performance, but also a 14 percent increase in aerobic capacity. An endurance only group in the same experiment showed a 10 percent increase aerobically, and no anaerobic increase. HIT was more effective across the board.
More effective training We advocate high intensity training, otherwise known as HIT, which has been proven highly effective in many research studies. Even in studies where it was shown to be no more effective than ‘traditional’ methods, the HIT protocols required a much smaller time commitment. In a study of anaerobic and aerobic capacity, a HIT training group showed not only a 28 percent increase in
All of this fitness is useless unless you can apply it, and being injured stops you doing just that. Another core concept at Emergency Athlete is mobility. Injuries stem from poor positions, and poor positions stem from poor mobility. A few minutes each day working on your ability to adopt the correct position by improving mobility will save you months on the sidelines with an injury. This is a simple aspect of training that yields benefits to both staff and the employer. We cannot change the operational task on the ground but we can prevent the injury. Training should be enjoyable, challenging but most importantly relevant. Visit emergencyathlete.com for more information on functional training techniques, improving mobility and workout suggestions.
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Improved resilience At Emergency Athlete, we advocate a variety of techniques to improve performance. We believe that to improve resilience, you should be strong. We also
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April 2015