Application
At Powerbag we have redefined military and uniformed services fitness to “be more prepared than the challenges you face.” We consider military personnel, firefighters and police officers to be tactical athletes or they should be. Preparation is not unlike professional athletic preparation. However, the difference is they do not always know the “game” they will be playing, there opposition does not always play by the rules and they don’t know when or for how long they will be called to task. All of these factors make preparation more difficult for these groups as compared to sports and athletics.
The necessity of carrying equipment while performing tasks in inconvenient if not adverse conditions, and other environmental factors, intensify the super-human demands and physical stress placed upon these groups. There are known, as well as unknown and unknowable, conditions of response which reinforce the need for a special brand of fitness and conditioning based upon sustainable, functional physical preparedness which addresses performance fluidity not in merely one or two dimensions but in the reality of three-dimensions. Therefore, conventional linear training models are insufficient. Powerbag training has developed to meet these needs.
Physical Preparedness is a job requirement. Unfortunately, most physical training (PT) programs do not meet users needs because they were designed from a sport and in many cases bodybuilding perspectives and overemphasize size but limit functional strength .Physical preparedness must follow function with tactical response: the capacity to work at high intensity in multi-planar movements for repeated bursts of short duration with fast recovery. Many PT programs fall short of these demands. Furthermore, PT programs fail to place sufficient attention on injury proofing not just physically but psychologically through active recovery and prehabilitation training.
Our armed forces, Firefighters and Police Officers, as tactical athletes, require a comprehensive physical training program which will foster the physical skills necessary for tactical response. Powerbag training focuses on making them more prepared than the challenges they face through improved functional stamina, extreme range reactive strength, three-dimensional ballistic speed, agility and coordination, and integrated active recovery and prehabilitation. Powerbag training is infinitely variable, incremental in sophistication, and psychologically challenging so that users stick with it.
The chaos of tactical response defies prediction and planning. As a result, preparation must cover a wide range of movement, orthodox, varied and improvised.
Injury-Proofing: developing the range and depth of functional skills encountered during tactical response, and beyond the scope of those skills in order to create a ‘safety valve’ for when movements deviate from the expected.
Prehabilitation: priming the body for performance to prevent injuries and to refine the ability to absorb and retranslate force encountered during tactical response.
Active Recovery: specific low-intensity mobility exercise to recuperate from intense effort to prevent overtraining, increase healthy circulation and diminish delayed muscle soreness typical of extreme exertion.
General Physical Preparedness: increasing the capacity to perform work at high intensity for repeated burst of short duration, and increasing the speed of recovery between bouts of activity.
Specific Physical Preparedness: sophisticating work capacity in multiple planes, three-dimensionally through the six degrees of freedom – heaving, swaying, surging, pitching, yawing, rolling
Defining Tactical Fitness
Physical Preparedness can be defined as the willingness and capacity to perform, improvise or resolve a continuum of reality-based physical skills. For the military,firefighters and police, that work involves all of the tasks associated with performance during tactical response. The demands imposed vary in duration, complexity and intensity. As a result, tactical fitness should enable personnel to execute both conventional and unconventional physical tasks. Although conventional PT programs involve mono or bi-planar action on individual joints with long duration of single exercises, tactical fitness demands multi-planar, multi-joint exercise. The body acts as a balanced matrix: a sea of continuous tension pulling in and pushing out. Tactical fitness should increase the strength of integrity of that balance. The key to tactical fitness is teaching the body to act as an integrated whole in every action. Physical preparedness, as a result, must reflect the following goals:
Functional, Varied and Improvised Movements: exercise must cover a wide array of reality-based skills.
Incrementally Progressive: exercise must be intense enough to elicit an adaptive, but sustainable response.
Increasingly Sophisticated: exercise must increase the neurological challenge of movements.
Effort through Efficiency: exercise must maximize the amount of useful work.
Minimizing Discomfort by Maximizing Technique: exercise challenge must derive from functional exertion not dysfunctional mechanics.
The Powerbag concept is on the cutting-edge proving itself again and again where it counts: in the real world on and off the field of sport. However , no matter how much science underpins it, Powerbags are simple, well constructed durable products with the greatest potential for functional, varied and improvised use of the entire body matrix. Thank you and Looking Forward!