#88 - 7 Uniform Standards Built for Competitive Tactical Athletes

There's no one-size-fits-all program for tactical athletes. Program hopping, "tacticool" workouts, and named diets don't build readiness - they just feed the inner critic. This episode breaks down 7 standards to train by instead.

Start with your performance target (a race, competition, competitive school, specific times, scores, or results). But know your why. Not "it'd be cool" - a memory, a person, your teammates. That's the fuel that won't run out.

#1 - Run a readiness eval. Test what will actually be tested.

#2 - Respect the 7 standards (prioritize your #1 weakness):

1. Exceed personal standards
2. Fuel the machine
3. Train violently
4. Get strong and handle bodyweight
5. Move fast, slow, and pace
6. Work capacity on demand
7. Recover and do it again

Build your tactical training program around these seven and you'll be uniform ready and ready to compete at the start line. 

The takeaway: One standard is lagging behind the others. Prioritize it and raise your overall capacity.

Create my individualized strategy prioritizing my #1 weakness

Free 3-minute assessment - reverse engineered from the 7 uniform standards. Receive video feedback of your system, strategy, and specific tactics.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey, what's going on, everybody? Welcome to the Everyday Responder podcast, and we're going to be talking about some uniform standards for competitive tactical athletes. Now, I want to be clear the cool part about this episode is there is going to be seven uniform standards that everybody in uniform should be hitting on a week-to-week basis, sometimes day-to-day basis, in my opinion. But the reason for competitive tactical athletes is because, you know, nine out of 10 of my clients all have competitive targets on the calendar. If the the one that doesn't is going to in the future. So I always try to stress test people and say, okay, yeah, we're we're very busy, we're all stressed, we're all tired. But what is something that we can put on the calendar to practice that discipline with a deadline? So I am of a true believer that, hey, yes, as tactical athletes, we are inherently hybrid athletes. We need to get after all performance domains. However, I think that, you know, we should always at times, depending on our season, put something on the calendar where it's like, okay, well, now this is our forcing mechanism. We are going to develop ourselves both physically and mentally through that process. And that calendar date is not getting any further away. So we need to put in the work, right? I think that's a very, very powerful tool that I would empower everybody to do, or I would uh employ everybody to do. It's very, very impactful. And I will tell you from my perspective, as I was taking notes for this episode, I'm like, damn, I got to put something on the calendar. Like, what am I talking about? And uh I actually found a race that worked from a timeline perspective and a date perspective. So I again discipline with a deadline, put my card in, signed up. I always say when people pay, they pay attention. Now we're locked in. We're going to start our prep, gonna start moving towards that. It's gonna be a blast. So I'm gonna be giving some updates throughout the process about training, kind of where my head's at for my own training. Um, talk about fueling strategies that I'm gonna use, how I practice those, how I develop them. So stay tuned with that stuff, but I am super excited about it. Um, and again, we're gonna we're gonna stress test ourselves. So um I think uh again, I think it's such a powerful tool where I call me crazy. I've been in some pretty chaotic seasons, whether it's working night shift, whether it's um, you know, grinding from sun up till sundown with coaching, different things like that. I think that you know, pressure makes diamonds with certain things. And if we put we hold ourselves accountable, we put something else on the schedule. I I think we will surprise ourselves with how much we are actually capable of. So a great tool that we're gonna be talking about a little bit throughout. With all that said, you know, when it comes to I get a lot of different questions about tactical performance, what should I do for training? What should I do for you know, conditioning, for nutrition, all these different types of questions. So I really hope that this episode is gonna answer a lot of those questions. And again, these seven uniform standards are built specifically for that to make sure that we can handle all these different competing priorities. So the goal is to go over these and you know, think from a perspective of hey, if we organize our training, right? This is the this is the the checklist that I use for my own programming for clients. If we organize our training and we make sure that we're hitting these things, not only will we be good for the uniform 24-7, 365, but we will also be good for the competitive goals that we put on the calendar, right? So again, we want to stress test ourselves. The problem that I see with this is, you know, we as tactical athletes, we know that we are all or that I should say the problem that I see with the normal approach or the traditional quote unquote tactical approach to training is we see all these barriers on a day-to-day basis, sometimes week to week basis. We we obviously want to hope that they don't happen, but the reality is they do, right? Things like extreme physical pain or exhaustion, mental fatigue, past fail events, self-doubt, external pressure, complete isolation, fear and anxiety, right? Those things happen to us on a day-to-day basis. And the problem with the traditional tactical training or the quote unquote toughness or discipline or tactical approaches, the problem with those is it's not, they're not fueling our physical and mental capacity to be able to handle those barriers that are coming. Why? Because so many people are freaking program hopping, they have no idea what they should be doing, or they you know jump a program from week to week, or they smash a bunch of different methods together and hope for the best. Maybe they're running some different diets with a name to lose fat. Maybe they're stressed about the tape or whatever that may be, and we're just running random protocols, random things that we see. We jump around, we don't know what's working, we don't know you know what's not working, all these different things. And no wonder why we have imposter syndrome or people are always saying a lack of confidence or we're overthinking what we need to do, right? Because our inner critic is so damn loud because we are not providing evidence to shut it up, right? It's always saying I'm not strong enough, fast enough, powerful enough, confident enough, lean enough, whatever that may be. Why would it silence itself if we are just kind of shooting from the hip or doing whatever we feel like it when it comes to training? Right. It doesn't make any sense, but again, a lot of people do that. And the goal with these standards is really, really, really just simplify what tactical training should be. We focus on these seven uniform standards, and now we can start operating from faith instead of fear. Where if we get these done when we are supposed to, we make sure that there's nothing that's falling off the map. They're always incorporated in our training. Now we have that big picture, we have that overall strategy with what we are getting after. We are going to be good to go. So what do we do? Where do we start? I always say, like I already talked about, there should be a specific performance target on the schedule, right? It's not just, I want to get strong. It's like, okay, cool, that's a great goal. I love it, but like, what does that mean? Why? I want to get fast. Okay, for what? Why, you know, what's the what's your history look like when it comes to running, all these different types of things. We want very, very specific. I have a hierarchy, like somebody, this is not me saying, but like a client. I have a HIROX event on X date, and this is the this is this is what I want to do. Okay, cool. Like we have a specific target. I have a marathon on this date. I want to run at this pace, right? Maybe I have airborne or air assault on this date. This is what I need to be capable of, right? Now we are starting to be specific, or I have warrant school, I have uh CPAT coming up on X date, right? Now we have something that we can work with. We have specific standards, we have times, we have maybe a uh some weight that we want to use, whether it's a strongman or powerlifting, we have reps that we need, we have uh maybe it's a PT score that we have, we have specific targets that we can reverse engineer, right? And I think it's very important, not only just to say those things of like, hey, this is what I want to do. Uh, this is the the how and the when or or the what. It's like now we need to start thinking about the why. This is a big piece that's often oftentimes overlooked. It's not sexy, it's it's one of those things where it's like, ah, this is like kind of cringy. I don't want to talk about this stuff or or whatever. Why do you want to do these things? This is going to be, if we really get to the root, we go a couple of whys deep. Now we can start understanding like why you want to do these things. And that can be our lever for endurance to really keep pushing through when those barriers come. Not if, but when, right? So if you say, I want to, I want to get fast because I think it would be cool, right? And now your schedule is chaotic, maybe some family stress, maybe you're doing, you know, uh long shifts, all these things. How cool does that seem? Not very cool, right? But if you are saying, like, okay, I want to do this because uh, you know, I've always wanted to do this and prove to myself or prove to my team that I'm able to be out front, whatever that may be, it's going to be a lot more powerful than just, oh yeah, it would be cool, right? And it's the same thing, like, oh, I want to be 185 because I want to be lean. And it's like, well, why? Like, what is that, what does that mean for for what? Oh, I'm not like comfortable in my body, or I've never been, you know, confident or have that command presence. Okay, that is a lot more powerful than just saying, I I I want this arbitrary number, right? But realizing like once we go deep, right, we we tap into a memory, maybe a vision, maybe a specific story that's sticking with you, maybe it's you know, doing it for something bigger than yourself, whether it's to prove, you know, uh to your kids or to your family, to your team, maybe it's a legacy of somebody that passed and you want to do it for them. Like now we're starting to cook with fire. Again, that is going to be your unfair advantage because it's extremely individualized to you, and that's what's going to push you through the daily BS that we have to get through. Right. So, again, that is your unfair advantage. And I would challenge you to really sit with it and think about it because it's not going to be found in a podcast, YouTube video, Instagram post, chat GPT, whatever that may be. It's like, no, really sit with yourself, get uncomfortable. Why do you want to do this? Okay, now let's execute. So once that stuff is laid out, now we can get to the execution phase where we have specific numbers, we have specific targets. Now, what we want to do is get a readiness evaluation where we are testing specific qualities that are going to be tested. Very, very important where now we have an understanding. Okay, maybe your aerobic capacity is a little bit weak. Like let's test it. But let's also, again, remember we are hybrid athletes. Let's test our strength as well. Maybe we do some 3 RMs, some five RMs, maybe we do a 30-minute steady state assessment, maybe we do a two-mile time trial, maybe we do a 5K, right? Again, it's going to be reverse engineered from your goals, but it's very important to get this starting point so we can just capture a bunch of different data, whether it's like, okay, this is the weight that we used, this was our heart rate, this was our heart rate recovery, this was the distance that we covered, or these were our time durations, right? And I think it's very important to get those, but most importantly, detach from the outcomes. It's not about saying, oh, like, damn, I knew I was slow or whatever that may be. It's like, no, now we have data that we can retest in the future. So in eight weeks, you retest it and it's like, holy shit, like, damn, I was kind of moving. I improved my distance. Uh, my average heart rate went down. Okay, like now I'm moving in the right direction. We have our trajectory and we know where we're headed. Because again, if we are just kind of shooting from the hip, we are just running without any kind of eval, that is again where that loud inner critic comes in. And it's like, well, you're still not fast. You're, you're, uh, you're you're still overweight or whatever that may be. But again, if we start measuring backwards, measuring against our starting point, we can show the the progress that we're making. So with this big vision, the specific target, I want you to think about that being the long-term plan, right? That is our overall strategy, big picture. That's the long-term target. Now we have our readiness evaluation. This is our starting point. That is exactly where we are starting. It's like, okay, no judgment. This is where we are. But now we understand which direction we're facing because we're still going to hit that long-term target. So those two are very, very important together. Next, we're going to start prioritizing what you suck at based off of the uniform standards. So we're going to go over those seven uniform standards. Again, it's it's extremely important to drop your ego, drop your pride, and truly focus on what you suck at, right? It's so like easy just to do what you're really good at, right? Oh, I'm I'm strong. I can, you know, do two times my body weight in squat, bench, and deadlift, but I have a terrible aerobic capacity. You are still going to operate like somebody with a terrible aerobic capacity. Oh, you can cruise around the track, you can run 630 miles, uh, no problem, but you can't handle your body weight. You're still somebody who's going to get absolutely crushed and exposed, right? The I'm not good enough person, but they, you know, maybe they have elite performance all around, they're still going to get rattled, panic, and freeze. Right. So we need to understand that with these standards, everything is a system. This is one system, seven standards within. Everything respects and reflects one another. So if you really suck with your aerobic capacity, but you start bringing it up, now all of a sudden you're able to recover. Now all of a sudden your energy levels are higher. Now all of a sudden you created a bigger bandwidth to be able to put more strength, more uh hypertrophy, more fueling, right? Now you're fueling the machine, you're doing all these things all because you improved your biggest limiter. Right. And the same thing applies to uh nutrition, the same thing applies to lifestyle. Lifestyle is another huge one that a lot of people overlook. They think about training, they love the X's and O's. And I'm like, well, what are the what are your standards look like? Right? What does your routine look like? Do you go to bed at similar times? What does your uh you know, decompression look like? What does your stress management look like? What do your hobbies look like? Right. You start asking all these questions and and and it oftentimes leaves a lot of tactical athletes flat footed. And it's like, well, that there's a lot of room for growth when it comes to professional development and when it comes to our mental capacity. So maybe that's what you need, right? Maybe you are somebody that you know negotiates with themselves when it gets a little hard and you quit, right? So maybe it's not even your physical capacity, maybe it's your mental capacity, and now all of a sudden we start getting into untapped potential because we start working on your mental capacity and you start building self-efficacy. Right? All these things are connected, and again, the the weakness is always going to be your limiter. So our goal should always be to bring that weakness up to a performance standard. That is how you get that 24-7, 365 readiness for any target, whether it's in uniform, whether it's on a on a course, whatever that may be. So we'll get into the uniform standards now. Again, there are seven. I think it's very, very important and it's crucial that these respect and reflect what you are doing and your availability, right? That is the main thing, and and obviously your your performance targets, because a lot of people will see these seven standards and be like, all right, well, full steam ahead, but they are intentionally built. So it doesn't matter your days of availability, it doesn't matter how many days you can train per week. It doesn't matter, you know, what your specific targets are inside or outside of uniform. If we hold on to these seven general buckets, we'll be able to piece together what we're what we need to be doing to get us from point A to point B. So the first one here, like I already alluded to, is exceed personal standards. This is from a mental capacity standpoint. So I always ask the question what are things that you can execute on a day-to-day basis to ensure forward progress? Very simple. This is self-efficacy in a nutshell. You do what you said you were going to do, right? These are the small things that a lot of people overlook and they don't think it's a big deal, right? It's not a big deal if I hit snooze every day. It's not a big deal if I said I was going to read for 15 minutes and I don't. It's not a big deal if I said I was going to get, you know, 7,500 steps and I got 6,000 and called it quits. Right. But it is. Those are huge from a self-efficacy standpoint because you are doing what you said you were going to do. Right. If you negotiate with yourself on the little things, what do you think is going to happen when you're in the pain cave and your quads are talking to you, everything's burning up, right? And you you don't think you have another gear and your internal dialogue's like, damn, I'm smoked, I'm torched. I need to stop. I need to stop. Well, you're most likely going to stop because you negotiated with yourself on the small things. So with these personal standards, I like to pick three and say, hey, these are non-negotiable. These should get done on a day-to-day basis. I don't care how chaotic the schedule is or what you got going on. You said to yourself, you said to yourself you're going to get these three things in. So you get them in, right? Sometimes you're going to need to be creative. Sometimes you're going to need to figure out how to prioritize. But I promise you, if you get these three three things in on a day-to-day basis, your three, and you start proving to yourself that you are doing them, you are holding your standard, that confidence is going to transfer. So just for some examples of things that a lot of clients do, like a lot of people love to read at night. That is their like quote unquote cooldown for the day. Um, I had a client say the own the last hour, change your life. That is something where, okay, the last hour of the day, I control the last hour, right? I, you know, put my phone down, I get my uniform prepped, I get my nutrition ready, and we call it a night, right? Everything is good to go. Um, another guy, he has do not hit snooze. So first thing in the morning. He's a drill instructor, has absolute chaos, super early wakeups, is you know, hitting probably 20 to 30k steps per day. It's insane, right? So with him, he found he was consistently hitting snooze, having later starts in the morning, and it was just like they he knew it was gonna be going into chaos throughout the day, and he started his own morning with chaos. So we're like, okay, we're going to, you know, put this in. I you are going to see this lifestyle standard every time you open the app in the morning. What are you gonna do about it? Right? Are you gonna hit an X? Are you gonna say, uh, whatever, I'll I'll uh I'll just hit snooze, these five minutes are worth it. Or are you gonna say, you know what, this is looking at me in the face. I'm going to hold my standard. Now all of a sudden you can control the morning, right? And then if you implement something in the last hour of the day, you're controlling the front half and the back half of the day. You can't necessarily control the chaos, the midpoint of the day, but you will be in a much better perspective from a stress management perspective if you control the front of the half and the back half. Again, exceeding your personal standards is not about the small things. These are your lever to be able to get to the big things. Number two here, fuel the machine, right? So very important. And again, the the exceed personal standards is every single day. Now, fuel the machine, this is this as well, is every single day. You need to make sure that you are eating enough to fuel the demands, right? That is just plain and simple. It should be, you know, a non-negotiable standard that you are focusing on on a day-to-day basis, right? So I don't care if it is a fat loss phase, if it is a gain phase, if it is a maintenance phase. The target should always be to eat the most amount of food you can eat to make sure that we're moving in the right direction. So you have a tactical athlete that is, you know, running, maybe they're rucking, maybe they're hitting some full body, maybe they have uh full body and some speed work, right? They're doing a lot of different things, and you're starting to hit me with 1800 calories, or um, you know, your fat and your fat calories or your fat grams are almost double your carb intake, protein is low, it's like, well, we're not fueling the machine. You're you're eventually gonna break down, which is no good, right? So again, making sure that when it comes to carb intake, when it comes to overall caloric allotment, when it comes to your protein numbers, you are intentionally focused on these, right? Again, it's it's simple. I know it's not easy. It takes work, it takes effort, it takes sacrifice. But if you want to get from point A to point B and you really want to be a hybrid athlete, this must be a focus point. The last podcast episode, we had the tactical dietitian. She said a couple of different things that phenomenal podcast. She she said a bunch of different things that really resonated with me. And I was like, wow, that's that's very, very cool. So even her recommendation from a fueling perspective is you don't need to go absolutely bonkers with macros and everything right off the jump. Maybe that's something that you work towards and earn. But two things that she said for non-negotiable, and I posted this as a reel the other day. Your meal consistency should be pretty similar throughout the day. So maybe you're targeting four to five meals, maybe six, depending on you know what your caloric allotment looks like. But they are at you know similar frequencies. You don't need to be on a timer or anything, but it's like, okay, my body knows I am getting fed at these times approximately, and we are making sure that hey, we're we're good to go from a uh uh caloric standpoint. That's number one. Number two is peri-workout nutrition. So your pre-intra and post-nutrition should be dialed in. This is easily something that you can control as well. If you train in the morning, what does your pre-workout nutrition look like? Are you shooting for you know 60 to 90 grams of carbs to 120 grams of carbs? Do we have a post workout meal that's good to go? Right. Because again, we know there's going to be chaos, chaos, midpoint, and sometimes endpoint of the day, or maybe your energy levels are gonna be low throughout the end of the day. Again, this is where that person those personal standards come in huge. And it's like, okay, these are my two meals that are. Pre and post, if at worst case, that's all that you can kind of prep and that's all that you can kind of manage, it's still a win, right? You're you're fueling the sessions, you're fueling the machine, right? So we need to get away from the chronic dieter who's you know consistently eating 800 calories or 1800 calories, you're you know, you're feeling tired, brain fog, consistent crashes. It's like, well, what does your nutrition look like? You are most likely not fueling the machine. We need to make sure that we are fed and we're performing. And the cool thing with nutrition is you will 1000% feel it. Like it's not just a nice to have. You take somebody who is drastically under-eating, or maybe their carb intake is very low. You sometimes even double their carb intake. It's like, whoa, I feel amazing. Pumps were insane, performance went up, my runtime went down. I feel great. This is a big high ROI point that a lot of tactical athletes are missing. Make sure you're fueling a damn machine. Number three here is train violently, right? So, this is a thought process of hey, we need to not forget about the athlete and tactical athlete, right? Many people are either going full bore into a bodybuilding style program, or maybe strongman, or maybe you know, mixing in, conditioning, calling themselves a hybrid athlete. It's like, okay, well, we're moving in the right direction, but we need to make sure that we're being athletic, right? So being athletic, that is tissue tolerance, that is injury prevention, fast twitch development. There's a bunch that comes out of it. But again, here we want to jump, hop, throw, power skip, move multi-directional, like all these different types of things, right? We want to do these multiple times per week. I usually say at like sometimes two times per week, depending on the person, depending on the target, maybe three times per week. Um, you can use them as CNS primers in your warm up. You could do pogo hops, box jumps, med ball throws, um, like I said, skips. We could do agility ladders, things like that, just to make sure that that we have that twitchiness, right? We are athletic. Um, I I see those videos on Instagram sometimes where it's like, hey, show me how to or can you skip? And you see these adults like skipping and they just look like Neanderthals. I'm like, what is going on? Like, so again, like I wouldn't be surprised. Um, I say, you know, don't be a NARP, a non-athletic regular person. If we take all tactical athletes and we line them up and we say skip, I'm sure that there would be some absolute atrocious like skipping or moving like an athlete. So it's one of those things, truly, like use it or lose it. So we need to make sure that we're touching on it. Again, don't need to be crazy with it, you know, going crazy, doing all these um crazy things, but two times per week we'll offer some really good ROI with injury prevention and making sure we're we're we're staying athletic, right? Uh an example I always use is like uh I just picture, I don't know why this always comes to my mind, but um, I wonder how many like firefighters get injured, like jumping out of the truck or uh police officer like blowing a hammy um because they just came into a full bore sprint or not able to clear a fence, right? Like these little things that that could be most likely prevented um if we just mix them into our program. And again, what I like to do is kind of keep that uh primer, a little circuit there, working in some um some whether it's stability, whether it's uh pogo hops, something like that, um, mixing it in in the warmup is always a good opportunity. Number four here, get strong and handle body weight, self-explanatory, but big thing. Hey, we want to be as strong, if not stronger, than the biggest, um, as fast if not faster than the smallest, right? That is our target. We want to be in that mid-range, the multi-tool kind of use here. We're we're uh, you know, not experts in anything, but we're we're we're decent, right? We're good at everything, right? That's the idea of bringing your weakness up to performance standard. So with getting strong, obviously there's a ton of nuance here when it comes to strength training, but just making sure at a bare minimum you can handle your body weight in some of the main movers. So it doesn't necessarily have to be a pure barbell um deadlift, barbell bench, and barbell back squat, but any kind of like squat variation, hinge variation, um press variation, you're able to do your body weight for reps, right? That should be the target. If you can't, um you either need to maybe start working on you know your your body comp a little bit, or we want to also uh, you know, a good another good opportunity would be to increase relative strength. So from a calisthenic perspective, we're able to handle our body weight, um, able to crush standards on a PT test. But again, from a durability and injury prevention standpoint, we just need to be straight up strong, right? We need to, you know, not necessarily be, like I said, a power lifter or barbell purist, because at the end of the day, there are diminishing returns with strength, right? We don't want to be on that, you know, far right when it comes to you know powerlifting totals. But it's like, okay, we we don't want to sacrifice conditioning for arbitrary strength that is is honestly like uh not redundant, but maybe a little bit overdone, right? So again, finding that sweet spot or that Goldilocks zone to really be like, okay, we're strong enough, we can handle our body weight, um, we can rip out some calisthenics, maybe we can farmer carry our body weight for a good duration, we're in a good spot here. Um, when it comes to like the layout here, uh again, it's it's very variable depending on your goals and depending on what your weaknesses are and where they are. But you know, I would say two times per week. Uh, if you're doing two times per week, that's uh I would recommend full body, but there's upper lower, so two uppers, two lowers. Um, you could do like a hybrid split, um, you know, a lower, upper full body. There's push-bull legs. There's a ton of different options there, but I would say at a minimum, um, let's shoot for two days per week and then kind of build from there. Um, but again, it depends on your availability and depends on your targets. Number five here, move fast, slow, and practice pacing. This is a fun one. This is definitely a glaring weakness for many different tactical athletes. I would say pacing in general is the main skill that all of us need to work on. And I am not even just talking about uh like race pace or different things like that. I am talking about pacing for overall targets, pacing for uh, you know, slowing down a little bit when it comes to you know going all in and locking in. Um, but uh, you know, very important nonetheless. So move fast. You know, we want to make sure we are, you know, touching on neuromuscular power. We're working on our leg turnover, fast twitch fibers, we're improving running economy, right? This is building that athletic base. We want to be economically sound here with a base. Um, and I I'll admit I used to say, like with base building, it's like, hey, you know, death by zone two, just go very slow and um just give it time, right? Like I just said, pace yourself. But uh to build a true base, you know, we need to move fast, we need to move slow and intentional, and we need to also practice our pacing, um, especially with tactical athletes where we have limited time. We can't necessarily go into an all easy type stage, right? That's gonna kind of set us up for failure on the job. So again, making sure we're moving fast with the slow, it's also very important, right? We're not neglecting that aerobic, that zone two, that low and slow. But it's very important to improve your overall capacity. Um, there's not a huge recovery burden if we keep that intact. But again, if we hit on uh fast and slow, it's like, okay, we have the far left, we have the far right. Maybe if we put that into perspective, we're going faster than goal pace and we're going slower than goal pace, right? Just to kind of put it into a different perspective there. Now, what we do is we start working towards the middle and we start practicing pacing. So, for an example, if we run a two-mile time trial, right? Like your middle or your moderate work, you're you're practicing pacing, that's gonna be that tempo or threshold, maybe around uh around goal pace, stuff like that. And then we're gonna move fast. So maybe we're moving fast with 200s, 400s, 800s, and then we're gonna move slow, which we're forgetting about pace and we're building your overall capacity, right? So I, you know, we want to eventually work to a point, in my opinion, where we're hitting on one of these per session. There's a ton of different ways you can organize it depending on your availability, but maybe we're doing a full body day and a hard conditioning session, right? Maybe some 200s after. Then maybe we're doing, you know, a uh a tempo run, something in the middle or like kind of threshold-ish. Maybe we do a full body day and then maybe we finish with a row, uh a full body day or uh a full body day. Um, I don't know if I said that twice, but either way, there's there's a bunch of different ways that we can work these in. But I I think the most optimal thing that we could be focusing on is getting to a point where we're working in all these, right? So uh depending on your starting point, if you're building a base, maybe you work on some lower impact, maybe you're on an air bike, so air bike sprints, maybe you're doing hill sprints, maybe you're doing sled sprints, maybe you're working to a point where you're doing 200s. Then we obviously want multiple different easy options, and then maybe, like I said, we blend that to the moderate in the middle. Um, uh again, just for from my perspective, I see a lot of people or hear about a lot of people. All they're doing is essentially that moderate zone, and you're not really getting paid for hard or easy. There's nothing wrong with the moderate, it's very important to learn how to pace ourselves. Um, but that is a big mistake that I made. So, or I made, I honestly made, and I see people make here. So we want to again make sure we're going for max and 10 on these different types of runs, and that is not mean max intensity. Number six here is work capacity on demand. So this is kind of like an umbrella term for a combination of different qualities and different domains in the other standards. Um, but think about you know, strength, think about strength endurance, think about maybe calisthenics. We want to see how you operate with a certain time frame, right? So maybe that's a mystery run where you don't know how far you're going with your team. Maybe it's a uh a certain operation where you have a comp or you need to use a combination of strength. Maybe you're lifting something, maybe you're running, right? So it's a combination of both, but really to kind of put it into perspective is we want to see how you work with you know repeated qualities, uh, maybe under real uh real conditions, and then most importantly without breaking down. So it's kind of again a culmination of pacing, a combination of strength, a combination of uh relative strength, all these different types of things, right? And why is this important? Because we start looking at it from a big picture perspective, and say you have somebody who can run, you have two people, they both can run a very fast mile time, right? You have one person, however, runs the mile and is absolutely smoked for the rest of the day, smashed, brain fog, can't really function. You have somebody else who runs the same time and now they're they're functioning for the rest of the time in the uniform, right? You have uh, you know, some guy, two guys who can deadlift 450 pounds. One guy is out of commission for a couple of days, the other guy is doing a sprint drag carry after, right? So just kind of giving you a different perspective on this. There's a ton of different ways that you can test it with uh and you can get more specific. For example, maybe you do you're getting to a point where you're doing easy work and you are adding in some fun stuff, maybe you're adding in pickups or strides, right? How do your legs feel after that? Can you get back to nasal breathing? You know, we're hitting on fast twitch fibers, we're uh working on pacing. There's multiple different things in there, and we're testing your specific work capacity for that easy run with strides. There's other things that we can do, like um adding in like emams every minute on the minute. Um, maybe we're doing a mixed modality strongman type, and we're doing uh air bike for 20 seconds, resting 40 seconds, maybe um hand release push-ups, 20 seconds work, 40 seconds rest, maybe kettlebell swings, 20 seconds, 40 seconds, and maybe um chin-ups, something like that. And now we're we're testing things under time duration. We have some incorporated rest, but it'll be cool to look at the data afterwards and see your heart rate, see comparisons, and now we can start kind of comparing that in the future to another uh another eval. Another one that I love is amraps. Again, I don't usually traditionally train with emoms or amraps, uh, but they're a good test point. And again, it depends on the goal. But a a good amrap that I use in a readiness evaluation from time to time is a uh 15-minute AMRAP, five hand release push-ups, no, excuse me, five chin-ups, 10 hand release push-ups, and 15 kettlebell swings, right? We see how many rounds that you can get in 15 minutes, resting as needed. Maybe that's our first eval. We tested again in eight weeks, working on those things, and it's like, wow, we, you know, you were able to complete eight complete rounds in the first go round, now you completed 10 or 11, right? Your work capacity for that specificity for these, you know, quote unquote real conditions. We're not going to run an op out there, but um, something where we're testing grip strength, we're testing uh the lower body, we're testing, you know, upper body strength endurance, right? So we're mixing a bunch of different things and seeing how you last in the time durations. So, number seven here, the final one is recover and be able to do it again tomorrow. This is something that again, a lot of people neglect and they think the the old school toughness or the traditional tactical, let's just beat the shit out of ourselves and see, you know, let's do gut checks every day and see how far we make it. That is absolutely no good, right? You take a police officer, you absolutely smash legs with 25 sets of legs. Now all of a sudden you're in a foot pursuit the next day, you're burnt toast. You take a firefighter, smash his chest and try, then you know, has to run into a burning building and push a door down, burnt toast, right? So again, it's not uh, you know, this isn't the flex that that we thought it was of just being like, all right, I'm gonna be sweaty, sore, fatigued, I'm gonna do CrossFit classes, I'm gonna do high rock classes and just be obliterated the next day. Again, that is not readiness. That's the exact opposite. So with all these things, they need to be kind of tapered down to see where you are currently at. So we can slowly increase, right? We can slightly, we can slightly embarrass you enough to show up and and keep adapting, right? That is honestly the goal of training. We don't want to, you know, uh just leave you on the floor, freaking, you know, uh barely breathing, right? That is not productive. That is uh that is testing, that is not training. We want to test on a uh on a consistent basis, but not every single day. We are clearly missing the intent with that. So that, you know, recover and be able to do it again tomorrow is it's very simple. You know, we want to increase durability, we want to increase your overall physical and mental resilience, and most importantly, be that 24-7, 365 ready, right? So you take any uniform and you consistently build around those targets, you will be good to go. And the cool part is now we can start targeting your priority that's going to not only keep you good to go in uniform, but have you hit your other performance target, right? Again, we talked about trying to combine and being competitive, talking about high rocks, races, um, air assault, airborne, selections, thousand-pound clubs, right? Standards, times, uh, weight, reps, PT scores, all these different types of things. You take that on one end, you have these seven uniform standards, and now we can start meeting in the middle and say, okay, we're going to do our readiness evaluation. What do we suck at? Right? What is going to embarrass you the most? That is what you should be prioritizing. But the most important aspect is not the other six uniform standards don't fall off the map. So that is something that I think goes missing, where it's like, okay, we're gonna go all in on a running program. Let me get couched to 5K. Again, liability when it comes to strength. So, what we need to do is say, okay, you know what? I need to improve my aerobic capacity. My running economy is not where it needs to be. Okay, how many days can we train? All right, we can train four days per week. We know the move fast, slow, and practice pacing needs to be the priority. Well, we're still gonna be training the other six. We're still gonna be training strength, we're still gonna be training, you know, power output, we're still definitely gonna be working on personal standards and fueling the machine, right? But we need to make sure your aerobic capacity is good, and that's going to have a great impact on everything else, right? Because again, like I had mentioned, that weakness that you are maybe avoiding, that you are not really thinking about, it doesn't matter which one of the seven you are is lagging behind, it needs to be prioritized so we can avoid getting hurt, we can avoid getting exposed, and we can avoid getting outpaced, right? That is the power of bringing that biggest weakness up to performance standards, right? That is what's capping all your performance. And now we can start hitting 24-7, 365 readiness. We can be good to go in uniform, but also increase our confidence, increase our self-efficacy, prove to ourselves that we are in cape or we are capable of crazy different milestones with whatever you put on the schedule. And again, that is started by bringing up your number one weakness. So I will say the the last thing here is I do have that tactical readiness blueprint. It is based on this episode. It is based on those seven uniform standards. It takes two to three minutes. The cool thing is they're all the questions are purpose-driven, they're all reverse engineered from our seven uniform standards. From there, we'll be able to see, okay, we need to bring this one up, or we we should probably prioritize this one. And then we will build out your long-term strategy and make sure you are good to go. The cool thing is with that strategy, it's uh, you know, the times vary a little bit, but I send a, you know, I'll say eight-minute video going over what we need to focus on, the specific strategy, the specific tactics that you need to be using and implementing to bring up these specific weaknesses. And most importantly, slots for readiness evaluations and understanding that, okay, this process is dynamic. Well, maybe we crush the aerobic capacity, we improve it, we're going really good there. Maybe we need to start bringing up our nutrition. Maybe we're slacking a little bit on nutrition, maybe we're gonna prioritize that, so on and so forth. So if you are interested in that, I will link it below. Again, it takes two to three minutes and it will 1000% be worth your time with an eight minute video, eight to ten minute video um going over the specifics. But as always, I appreciate you. I appreciate your support. And uh, I'm always here if you have any questions for me.