In order to protect the lives of the innocent, SWAT operators train hard to fight the most violent and brutal criminals in the world. They train with a single thought on their mind; stronger people are harder to kill.
Most special operations teams require a candidate to go through an obstacle course under a determined time to regulate speed, strength and endurance. Since SWAT is a special operations unit, most if not all American SWAT teams use obstacle courses to qualify candidates for a position on a team.
I decided to use the Mt. Sac obstacle course as a gauge for my fitness level. My first time was one minute and fifty-three seconds.
I hope that through a rigorous fitness program I will decrease my time. The fitness program I will use is called Crossfit.
Crossfit relies on exercises from weightlifting, gymnastics and interval training to create a complete fitness program. The program also puts much emphasis on muscle confusion. I believe that this program is perfect for a SWAT operator because of the heavy equipment, fights and sprints that an operator will be required to do on call outs.
Many of the movements that are with barbell workouts have funny names but most if not all of them are jerking movements. The reason this is so important is because SWAT operators need to smash down doors no matter how heavy they are. To do this SWAT operators use heavy ramming tools to smash down the door and these fast-jerking movements simulate the fast and aggressive action of smashing the door down. Slow and methodical movements most training programs do, slow down these strikes and are basically pointless.
The gymnastic type workouts are to keep balance and agility. Both are very important for two different types of fighting. Balance when in different and sometimes awkward positions is a key to marksmanship and can save an operators life, but more importantly a civilian’s life. Agility is the only thing that wins in hand to hand combat, size or strength do not matter and having an upper hand here can save much more than a bullet.
Interval training is a critical part of any workout and especially important for SWAT operators. Interval training forces your heart and whole body to work much harder for a longer period of time then traditional endurance cardiovascular training. Most if not all-bad guys will not stand to fight a SWAT team. Most turn to running from SWAT, so in order to catch them, a SWAT operator must be much faster in order to catch them. Most of these chases will be very short and fast. Very few of these chases ever reach over a mile. Interval training focuses on all out sprints over few hundred meters over and over again to increase speed. Due to the practical application of interval training, it is much more beneficial then distance runs.
Muscle confusion is working out by never following a routine tat your body will get used to, forcing your muscles to adapt to every kind of situation therefore greatly increasing muscle growth. On SWAT it is an operator’s job to hurtle the many different obstacles that come with every different situation. By following a weekly or daily routine, muscle growth will plateau and eventually cause decrease in strength. SWAT operators need to always stay strong and ready for anything.
An obstacle course puts all of these fitness qualities to the test. By working on these principles, I believe the time it takes me to run the course will decrease.
In order to start the very difficult training program I have explained, I began in November with a workout routine, which used exercises from Crossfit. There were three different levels of difficulty and I chose the medium level of the three.
I followed the Crossfit, Extreme Adventure Sports Amateur Training Plan religiously for the first six weeks listed. I did not do the seventh week because I decided to take a break for some pain in my shoulder. I also skipped the cardio only days because I also do karate and it would have been excessive. There were hundreds of exercises but the applications for these exercises were described above. Below are links to the website from which I received the routine from.
Week 6: http://www.extreme-adventure-sports.com/designed-workout.html
After I did the six weeks I decided to move to Crossfit. I would complete the workout of the day that was posted on their main page. Again there were hundreds of exercises that I did not list all of them. A link to the Crssfit website is below.
http://crossfit.com/
I do exercise at least five days and three or four of those days include the Crossfit workouts.
Hey Chris- I have no doubt that you spent a significant amount of time on this. I do need you to use the LIA format and post a log of the time that you worked the course. Some pictures would have been nice, too.
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