Operator Health and Performance with Casey Glass

Jon Becker: So my guest today is Casey Glass. Casey is the founder of War Fighter Health and Performance, and for the past 11 years has been a special operations strength coach for the US military.

Casey grew up on a ranch in Texas, and in college played soccer at Texas Christian University. She also interned with the Strength and Conditioning staff her senior year.

While pursuing her Masters in health and fitness at Purdue University, she became their graduate assistant strength coach. She then went on to work for four, and a half years at the University of Arkansas starting as a paid intern, and leaving as the associate director of Olympic sports Strength and Conditioning.

11 years ago she accepted a position that would change her life, working in the human performance program for US Special Operations units, working to improve our war fighters operational performance and their resilience.

Last year she founded WarFighter Health and Performance, an organization designed to bring the experience, and skills she acquired working with our soft units to law enforcement Special Operations units, and other First Responders.

I'm excited to talk to Casey because several of the units I work with have worked with her since she started this new business and have reported amazing results with their operators.

I hope you enjoy my chat with Casey Glass.

My name is Jon Becker.

For the past four decades, I've dedicated my life to protecting tactical operators. During this time, I've worked with many of the world's top law enforcement and military units.

As a result, I've had the privilege of working with the amazing leaders who take teams into the world's most dangerous situations.

The goal of this podcast is to share their stories in hopes of making us all better leaders, better thinkers, and better people.

Welcome to The Debrief!

Jon Becker: Casey, thanks so much for being here. I'm excited to have you on the show.

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Casey Glass: I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Jon Becker: So why don't we start with your background because I think it forms kind of your later experience. Why don't we start with our own sporting career so to speak?

Casey Glass: So as you probably already mentioned, I played soccer in college. I was not the best skilled player but I had been going to the gym, lifting, running, training since I was in the eighth grade, so I had a little bit of an edge when it came to athleticism. I could jump higher than most of my teammates, sprint faster etc.

So, I really chose to lean into that to try to buy some playing time and it worked. I spent a little extra time with the strength conditioning coach who helped me hone those skills, and was able to use my athleticism to get a few more minutes on the field. That's pretty much where the love of strength conditioning was born.

My strength coaches were so cool to help me out and to give extra time to me that way, and for me to see that as long as you work hard some opportunities will present themselves, and then I wanted to coach other kids and give them that opportunity.

Jon Becker: So you go on to do your bachelor's degree, and then you decide you're going to continue with graduate education.

Casey Glass: Yeah. To be a Strength and Conditioning coach in the collegiate field, you have to have experience as a graduate assistant, and you have to have a master's degree.

So they will pay for your master's degree if you go coach for them for a couple years.

They'll give you a couple teams that are yours, and then a few more teams to assist with plus all the groundwork and then you go to class at night you get your master's degrees and exercise physiology, and the coaches there will mentor you, and they'll help you study for your certification.

Jon Becker: And that was Purdue?

Casey Glass: Yes.

Jon Becker: So you graduate, and go to work for?

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Casey Glass: After I left Purdue, I got a job as a paid intern at the University of Arkansas and basically what that means is they barely pay you and you don't get benefits but you have teams and you work there full-time so you're 50 to 60 hours a week. So paid intern is a little bit of a confusing name.

I think you're being used as an assistant coach but you just have the least amount of experience on the staff.

Jon Becker: Got it. But you're there for four and a half years right? You eventually go into a paid position and then a leadership position.

Casey Glass: Yeah, so I shifted into a full-time position and then my last year there I was the associate director of strength conditioning.

Jon Becker: And why did you decide to leave? When does the soft opportunity come up?

Casey Glass: It was just that last year and a half. So my brother went into Special Operations and I had been programming for him and his buddies when they were deployed and he told me that they were starting to hire Strength and Conditioning coaches on their base.

So this was a brand new thing, it was the first time I had heard of this opportunity or ever even considered working with that population. And truth be told, I'm a bit of a control freak, and so I just felt like if this is going to be done well, I need to go do it myself and make sure my brother and his friends have everything that they need.

So I loved working at the University of Arkansas. I had a great schedule. I had great teams. I had good relationships with my coaches. So it was not an easy decision to decide to leave and go off and try something new that nobody really knew about because it was the first few years that they had Human Performance Coaches in soft.

So it was a bit of a leap but it paid off big time because this is definitely where I belong and this is where I want to stay.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I think for the kind of those who are not aware it's about 10 or 15 years ago that U.S. soft forces really began to invest in performance psychology and Strength and Conditioning. We started to realize that professional sports teams were doing all these things to take care of their players but we were not doing that for our special operators. And you saw a pretty radical mind shift , and that's about the time you enter right?

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Casey Glass: Yeah. I think we had a couple stream coaches before me and a dietician and then they had athletic trainers and physical therapists. So that was the initial wave but imagine. I mean, you're working with hundreds of people in the staff with two coaches, one dietitian, one or two athletic trainers. It's just not enough people and they didn't have performance psychologists on board yet.

So when I got there it was still very new and it was very new to the guys to receive coaching or to have somebody watching them in the wait room, having somebody trying to help them trying to provide these resources and services. So there was certainly a learning curve for us for how to get the population comfortable with us to trust us and understand what we're offering, and a learning curve for them I think to accept help in that arena.

So it definitely took a while.

Jon Becker: So talk to me a little bit about what your role as a Soft Strength and Conditioning Coach is? What is your role with the operators?

Casey Glass: So if you think of it in terms of sport you've got you got personal trainers for general population and then you have Strength and Conditioning coaches for sport which just means that instead of working with one person you're typically working with a group of people and that group has an athletic goal versus an aesthetic goal or a health goal.

So what we do is we're consulting with the guys on training programs, or we're writing training programs for them conditioning programs. We're coaching from the dietician, with the psychologist, with the physical therapist and athletic trainers to talk about how we get them back faster from injuries, or with the psychologist. If there's any kind of underlying belief surrounding fitness that that is holding them back or surrounding their injury that's holding them back, how can we as an entire staff kind of gather around them and just help them get to where they need to go. So that they can be better prepared for their job or they can get back to work faster, or stay operational longer.

Jon Becker: And in your time working with the units you work with, what have you noticed as far as patterns go in in the way that the guys train versus the way they should train? Kind of give me your overarching Lessons Learned.

Casey Glass: So the biggest pattern is they train too hard too often. So there's a very commonly held belief that a workout isn't effective unless it's really hard, unless I'm sore afterwards unless my heart rate is through the roof.

It's a very unhelpful belief because nobody can sustain that. These guys mentally can force themselves into doing that over and over and over but eventually their bodies are going to break down. That's the biggest thing that we try to change.

I spend the majority of my job just trying to educate guys on how a smarter way to train is going to balance some low volume low intensity work with high volume high intensity Page 5 of work, and then how and where to fit that in given their overall life and work stress which is very high.

Our bodies don't know the difference between mental stress, work stress, family stress and physical stress. It's all going to take its toll, so you spend a lot of time educating them on how to fit training around that so that they can maximize their sessions instead of beating themselves up.

Jon Becker: I think that to some degree the thing that makes a good special operator, an ability to handle pain, a strong mind and willingness to persist almost becomes the enemy in fitness because they are going to work too hard, and when they get injured they're going to train too hard and train too early.

It does strike me that you probably don't spend very much of your time trying to get guys to move harder. You spend more of your time probably trying to woo them down, and get them to move more intelligently.

Casey Glass: Yeah motivation isn't an issue here. I knew it wouldn't be going in. So that part of the job is very easy, it's just you're changing beliefs. You're changing beliefs that were seemingly helpful or maybe actually helpful for them. They needed it to get through selection or maybe they were 18, 19, 20 when they were training for selection so they could handle a higher workload and recover faster. They weren't being woken up in the middle of the night by two small children.

So things that may have been helpful before aren't helpful now and as they progress through their careers. So educating them on that very carefully because you have to recognize that the things that they have been doing got them to where they are today.

Jon Becker: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I always tell the story of starting a business at 17, I took risks that I would never take now. And if you put me back then, I would not have been successful with my current mindset at 17 but if I had my 17 year old mindset now I’d destroy myself. So it's hard to learn balance over time but I think we have to learn it.

Casey Glass: Being flexible enough to recognize how much your life has changed. I'll have guys maybe in their early years struggling to get their 5K down to a time that they ran in college when their only job was running on the track team. They were so much younger, and they were leaner because their job didn't require as much muscle mass.

So I have to remind them “Hey, that was a long time ago, and you don't recover as well.

You don't sleep as much now. You don't get as much rest now. You're 15 pounds heavier because of the muscle mass that you've put on for this job. You're not the same person so we can't train you the same way. We've got to shift your beliefs, and recognize where you are today and find out how to maximize a training plan for you now.”

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Jon Becker: Last year I interviewed Kelly Starett, and one of the things that Kelly talked about quite a bit was that there's an over-reliance on musculature and that movement quality ends up compromised. From your perspective what is appropriate fitness for a soft operator? What does that look like?

Casey Glass: It's going to depend on the unit. Some units are doing a lot more ring than others, their inserts are longer, some have to swim. So definitely the program needs to be accustomed to whatever the demands of that unit on that deployment that year that rate that rank whatever it is.

But generally you don't have to be super strong. You don't have to be strong, a competitive crossfitter and you don't have to be as fit as a Collegiate Runner. But somewhere in between, if we can drop your strength down a little bit we drop your conditioning down you become that shock of all trades.

So there's a saying in sport is ‘What is strong enough?’ and then once you're strong enough you're just focusing on how to weave that strength and express that strength or express that speed that power that conditioning during the game during the sport during the practice. And we're trying to do the same thing here within soft, is how strong is strong enough by looking at okay what kind of loads do you actually have to lift and in what positions.

And once we can accomplish that let's look for other weaknesses or other ways where your fitness can support your job. And if there are none then let's just maintain and we can drop your training volume and intensity to do that, and that's going to give you more energy for work for life at home with the kids more more minutes to sleep or to eat.

Jon Becker: It's kind of a crazy thought to think for for personalities who are by their nature extreme and are constantly trying to get better at everything it is kind of a crazy thought to say, “Hey, you're strong enough, just try to hold this and back your training down to maintain this, so you can recover and spend your time in other places.” I can see where there would be a little bit of resistance to that initially.

Casey Glass: For sure, but then you say, “Hey when's the last time you went to the static range? Do you want to go now? You've got 30 minutes. You can go do that.” Whatever the case is maybe try to point out that that freedom in their schedule is really going to pay off.

Or really what I do is we've got a certain level, it's based on research within our population, the majority of guys can execute XYZ on these lifts, these times on runs, swims etc. If all of your qualities are meeting that, then we can work on boosting one or two of those kind of as a hobby at that point.

You don't need it necessarily but if you're meeting the mark across the board and you are that Jack of alter then now is the time if you really want to try to push one of those ceilings up we can do that or if you want to try to lift all of those ceilings up we can do that at that point. But first you have to meet the mark all the way across the board versus being really strong but not being able to run as fast as your teammates.

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Jon Becker: Have you come up with a system, or is there an easy way to articulate what you guys see as these are the kinds of domains that you need to be focused on in fitness?

I think there's a million ways to look at the problem but this is a very specific industry.

Are there specific domains that you're looking at that you think others should look at?

Casey Glass: You want to mimic what they have to do at work. So we'll take some measurements when they're out at training distances. Usually distances and heart rates and then we'll look at the training loads how heavy is that person that you have to pick up how heavy is your gear and you and you tail your programming to those specifics which does require you to be well rounded. You have to have a really good aerobic base.

Then how much time above the threshold they're spending, we can look at their training for that and see, “Okay how many minutes above threshold did you spend during those three weeks of training?” Then we can mimic that in their training.

There are things that guys will leave out if they're not following programming that was made specifically for them. They usually don't do any jumps other than box jumps so they're not jumping forward they're not doing single leg jumps they're not doing hard Landings which is something they need for their job.

Even just hopping out of a Humvee with 75 pounds of gear on it's a pretty hard landing; they're not doing agility and their job is very much three-dimensional. You’re living in a three-dimensional world.

So those are the things that we want them to do more of and then sprinting, upper body power, med ball throws, things like that that usually get left off in favor of just doing a powerlifting program or just doing a 5k program.

Jon Becker: Yeah so it tends to get simplified into I know my own personal fitness. I do the Iron Man distance triathlon. I know that building for Iron Man you're building a very specific kind of fitness that is not overall healthy or good.

I noticed as I started getting injured four or five years into racing Iron Man that I had lost all my lateral movement capability. I started having IT band problems and all of these things that were lateral movement problems. And finally worked with a doctor that was saying, “No, you need to move laterally. Everything you do is linear.” It strikes me here that there's so many different directions of movement and types of fitness you're trying to build that it probably becomes very easy to get focused on just running, or just running a particular strength routine.

Casey Glass: Yeah, we definitely need to have a lot of variety for them to be prepared for this job, and then even rucking making sure they don't forget to ruck because sometimes that might get left by the wayside especially if they have a race, or something that they want to train for outside of work.

Page 8 of I would say that the most common problem is that our guys train like they're only going one direction. I don't think they realize that they're actually moving in 3D and they're moving in 3D with load on which means more forces going through joints going through tissues. So I'm not surprised the first time that you're ever on terrain and you may also be wearing nods that you roll your ankle because you step in a hole because you're not used to putting force through those tissues at that kind of lateral angle. You don't have the perception that reactivity to change direction really quickly and get off of that leg before the tissues give, the same way you would if you did agilities on a regular basis if you did single leg jumping on a regular basis you would have more control over your body and be able to react faster to those scenarios and the tissues would be more used to those forces.

Jon Becker: That's very interesting. How you express to them like this strikes me as very complicated and I'm sure that in your brain you've simplified it into domains or into areas. If I'm a SWAT operator listening to this what are the big buckets of things that I need to be looking at?

Casey Glass: So you do need a good aerobic base because anything you're going to build on top of that whether it's if you're out on a long call you just need that duration to be able to handle it. So everybody should be doing zone two work, lots of long zone two work and then look at what do you have to build on top of that okay what kind of load am I wearing. If I'm having to do prisoner handling well that's explosive and there's a lot of tension there. Am I having to crawl through crawl spaces? Am I having to jump over things? So you need to be able to do those things when you're partially fatigued. So just look at the analog of your job look at the durations, look at the paces look at the loads look at the ranges of motion and how much force you're expressing and what those movements look like and then you want to be able to recreate that in your training and use the minimal dosage that you need to get the maximal outcome versus training super hard at everything all the time.

Jon Becker: From your perspective what is appropriate aerobic fitness? What kind of durations do you think SWAT operators spec ops units should be looking at for their Zone Two work?

Casey Glass: You mean mileage for a week?

Jon Becker: Yeah mileage or or duration or however you want to express it.

Casey Glass: Again it depends what a SWAT operator's got to do and and even maybe SWAT operate SWAT operators in different locations it might look a little bit different.

So you really just need to focus on specifically what your group is doing. What's the longest call that you've been on? What's the longest mileage that you've had to track Page 9 of somebody and what did that pace look like? And you need to make sure that you can do that on any given day. So if we're talking like Army soft units versus Navy soft units they might be doing very different things. If you're talking I know like with some HRT they train to be able to track somebody through the woods or do a long insert and that may not be the case for hostage rescue in a city.

So whenever I'm working with an organization we go into detail about what is the worst case scenario that requires the most fitness and let's make sure that we're capable of that duration and we're setting you up with the mileage you need each week to do that.

For the operators that I work with we're going to do some longer runs but it would be fine for your longest run to be 90 minutes, your longest Zone Two that would be fine. If you want to go to 120 minutes, and you've built up to that, that's also beneficial and it is fine. I would say at minimum I'd like a 90 minute Zone Two to feel easy but that might be longer for other groups or if you're in a submarine might be very different. You might not need to be running, may not need to be your movement to do that you could probably just cross train anything.

Jon Becker: Yeah that makes sense. Let's talk for a minute because with the launch of the new business you're moving into working with law enforcement First Responders.

What do you see as the differences between the units you're working with now and the law enforcement units that you're working with?

Casey Glass: So I'm definitely still learning. Every time I talk to an organization I'm getting more and more information. The big thing that stands out is for soft units when they go on deployment that's a smaller portion of their year. The majority of their job they're training and they'll go on deployment for a smaller portion whereas police are essentially deployed every single day. So if you're on deployment and it's busy and you do three missions, you witness two or three traumatic events but if you're police that could be every day every other day. Your nervous system is going to be queued up every single day because there's a constant threat versus soft if you're training for 6 nine months, the threat's not as real. It's very different effect on your nervous system and a very different effect on your psychology. And then if you're police you're going to get a couple days off. If you're soft you're going to get gear weeks here and there you're going to get 3 weeks vacation you get opportunities to decompress and talk to psychologists and things like that.

The language that I use in my head is like police are deployed every single day and that is just sounds even more brutal. Despite that they have less resources like we talked about earlier with soft we've got clinical psyches we've got performance psychology just we've got PTs, we've got athletic trainers to help you with your injuries you have strength conditioning, coaches, dietitians who can look at your blood work, we've got doctors, we've got everything for them but then police don't really have that. So that's why I started this business. How can we get that into law enforcement organizations at a price point that meets their budget because they're not funded the same way that soft is.

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Jon Becker: Yeah the concept of Allostatic Load has become beginning to find a home in law enforcement discussions and as you're talking about that it strikes me that. I've had this conversation with law enforcement and soft units is when a soft unit returns home the threat is over and there's a downtime that allows them to recover and rebuild and then and then retrain for deployment, whereas law enforcement it's just this kind of constant background Allostatic Load that you're not going to be able to turn off.

Casey Glass: You're going straight home to your family without that opportunity to decompress without being able to sit down with a professional after each shift, and work through that and unload that as much as possible. You just have to go right back into your daily life, and then the next day switch right back over to your work life. So there's not as much of a separation there.

Jon Becker: So working with the units you're working with now what we've you I've heard you mention this Five Pillars concept. Walk me through what you see are those five pillars that we need to be looking at?

Casey Glass: So these came about. We call them the five Core Concepts because this is what between myself the dietitian and our mental performance coach these were the things that we were meeting about that with the guys and with each other that we were talking about. Again we always try to wrap around the guy and use a collaboration to make sure that we're actually finding the root cause of whatever issues they have. So for example a physical performance issue might actually be a nutrition issue. They may be under-fueling. I can write you a great program but it's not going to work for you if you're not fueling enough for that program. Then as coaches as we're talking to each other we're just realizing we're all repeating the same things over and over and over and then those turned into our five core competencies. They're layered on those initial conversations that we would have with our operators which are about self-awareness and regulation. So that's our first core competency. Self-awareness meaning what beliefs does this person hold about fitness, health, their tactical performance, whatever we're meeting with them about. Then let's compare that belief to data to see if it's actually accurate and a lot of times it isn't. So that belief that “I have to train hard every single session. I have to be sore, sweating and have a high heart rate.” That's not an accurate belief and it's not a helpful belief. So we need to address that before we're able to move on. I'm going to ask him to train a little bit differently and then that's where the self regulation piece comes in because it's going to be very uncomfortable for them to go from five days of lifting a week to 3 days of lifting and to have two out of four of their conditioning days be very low intensity. They're going to have to sit with that discomfort in order to trust the process and get through the program and see the results.

There are other aspects of the self-regulation so if we're applying it to your tactical skills do you have a hard time regulating your heart rate? If you're in a scary scenario every single day, you're a police officer you're walking up to a car and the middle of the night all by yourself you don't know what's going to happen there how's your heart rate? If your heart rate is too high, that's going to affect your motor control, your decisionmaking. You may get some tunnel vision. Do you need help regulating in that way? So Page 11 of self-regulation is is pretty broad depending on what you're working on. Then once we establish those beliefs We compare them to data we work on this concept of selfregulation because it's going to be uncomfortable making changes and doing things differently than we can move on to mental agility because if we're asking you to change how you're doing things we need you to be mentally flexible and be prepared to take in new information. We also want to make sure that you're able to be to think dynamically because your job is dynamic and situations are always changing. We don't want biases that you have clouding your decision-making capability moving forward, so mental agility is our second core concept.

Then after that we talk about movement quality because we see a lot of injuries in the weight room that I don't think we should see. Making sure that you can hit the movements that you need for your job for long-term health with full range of motion without pain and being able to do that underload. So we spend a lot of time working on movement quality. So to get a little deeper in that step one of movement quality is making sure that you can breathe well meaning that your rib cage, your ribs are joints we need to make sure that your ribs are mobile just like every other joint. Because if your rib cage is stiff which happens and it especially seems to happen a lot in groups of folks who are wearing plates, wearing kits all the time, they've got pressure on their front, pressure on the back of their rib cage so they can't really take full breath throughout the day and the rib cage seems to stiffen up then you can't fully expand your lungs. So if your rib cage can't fully expand then your lungs can't fully expand. If your rib cage can't fully expand and then compress then you can't maximize how much CO2 you're blowing off which is a waste product of exercise that you need to get rid of.

Then if your ribs are stiff it's going to cause stiffness out to the limbs as well it's like this trickle down effect. So you're using a compensatory strategy to breathe all day that's 20,000 reps where your joints aren't moving optimally. So we always start our movement quality assessments and conversations with trying to clean up that rib cage movement.

Then if your rib cage can't move well then your diaphragm doesn't move well and if your diaphragm doesn't move well your nervous system is going to be trapped in fight or flight because it needs that diaphragm to move up and down to be able to calm you down. That's parasympathetic breathing that's why diaphragmatic breathing is so important to bring down a heart rate or to calm somebody down in a stressful situation which is really important for officers and operators, agents Etc. Again if the rib cage can't move well you can't rotate either.

So I know a lot of folks that they maybe do a lot of thoracic mobility drills and don't see any changes and it's because you have to cue the rib cage first you have to clear the rib cage first if you want to see really good changes in rotation, inside bending if you want to be able to round your back which we want you to. A lot of folks in these populations are stuck in a bit of an arch called a position of extension and we just don't want you to be stuck in any position. Movement quality means that you've got movement options. So we start there, we incorporate the breathing and then we make sure that each individual Page 12 of in their training session is moving through appropriate ranges of emotion for their job and for health. So if somebody's the only squat they do is back squatting and they can't get below parallel on a back squat without compensating or maybe back squatting hurts then we're going to change it to front squat, we goblet squat. We'll switch you to a squat where you can go below parallel that way every time you train you're training without pain. You're hitting a fuller range of motion and your body will adapt to that so that you will retain a fuller range of motion. And it's something that we can load without pain and will be able to continue to load it more and more heavily.

Jon Becker: You raised a lot of really interesting things there, breathing being one of them. I want to just push on that for a minute because I've read a lot on this and it's an interesting topic to me. Most of us don't breathe correctly. I think it'd be interesting from your perspective what does correct breathing look like from the outside?

Casey Glass: So the way that you would know if you're breathing well at the bottom layer do you feel like you can take a full breath especially if you can take it through your nose-- that would be great. Mainly we want to focus on the upper ribs that attach directly into the sternum and those should be able to expand ribs. Lower ribs move a little bit differently; they can literally get bent out of shape because if your upper ribs get stuck which is again the case with a lot of officers and a lot of operators because they're in plates and kit all the time, then the lower ribs will actually become hypermobile.

They'll move too much and they can kind of stick out the front of your body a little bit and that's what stretches out the diaphragm because that's where the diaphragm is attached. So you just want to make sure that your upper ribs, the ones that are directly around your lungs, can expand 360 degrees and your lower ribs if you lay on your back aren't poking out of your skin.

Jon Becker: You think about the especially modern law enforcement you're wearing a battle belt or or a duty belt probably have something in your lower back like handcuffs.

At a minimum you're wearing concealable armor but you may be wearing an attack vest depending on your job. You're in a car a lot. You can see where breathing moves movement and range of motion quickly get compromised. It strikes me that without having a good underlying foundation for breathing and movement you're much more likely to get injured.

Casey Glass: Yeah imagine you're stuck in a shortened range of motion. So the only clean squat you can do is maybe a quarter of the way down and then you throw weight on your back and try to force yourself to parallel over and over and over because that's what you believe is effective training and that you're supposed to do. Nobody's ever given you permission to goblet squat with your heels elevated to reclaim a full squat.

Nobody's ever coached you to inhale into your shoulder blades or coached you on what a proper brace looks like it. It's not just flexing your abs there is a breathing component to that making sure that you're bracing with your-- I'm going to use earbuds it's “exhalation Abs”. So if you exhale your air out you're going to find that your abdominal belt is probably tighter than if you just take a deep breath and flex. Those are the abs that you want engaged when you're lifting. Those will put your rib cage, put your pelvis Page 13 of in a good range of motion so that your joints can move cleanly, and it'll be easier to expand into your chest and in between your shoulder blades expand those ribs. If you can't do those things then you're going to struggle with your movements and you may be picking optimal movements to restore that range of motion. If you believe the only way to be fit for your job is to back squat all the time or barbell deadlift all the time and you're restricted in those ranges already.

Jon Becker: Yeah and I think there is an overreliance on strength in the community on the idea of muscularity. When we ran our SWAT competition we would see teams that were big and they were strong but they couldn't raise their hands all the way over their heads, or they had a hard time getting into certain positions. I've seen guys who are so muscular that they can't lock out their arms under their guns. I think that there is a misperception in a lot of cases of what good movement looks like.

Casey Glass: Again, it comes down to what do you need for your job. Do I want everybody to be able to do an overhead press? Yes. But when you've been working for as long as some of these guys have and you've accumulated some injuries, maybe you've had shoulder surgery and you can't overhead press without pain then we can find a workaround. We can do an incline press instead. If it's not a movement that you very specifically need for your job we don't need to hyper fixate on it as some magical point of performance that doesn't actually relate to your job. So it's always important that here's the box of movements we want because they're considered full ranges for health but then here's the box we actually need for your job and let's look at your injuries and see where you are now and then really focus on getting you those movements that you need for your job. Then additional range of motion is a bonus if it's something that can contribute to health but it's never going to be perfect.

So being realistic and not setting unrealistic standards that are arbitrary, keeping things related to your job at all times. It can be more motivating too because if somebody's telling you you need to do something that you physically can't do because of a surgery you had you're going to feel like you're a little inept at something, you're a little bit weaker, you might feel a little bit fragile when you're not you don't need that movement for your job. If you don't need that movement in your day to day life you're fine we'll work around it.

Jon Becker: Yeah but that obviously requires a high level of touch which is what is currently lacking in law enforcement is somebody who is a trained professional to say, “Hey, you don't need to be able to do this but you do need to be able to do this and I need you to focus on trying to develop this capability to prevent injury.”

Casey Glass: Yeah that's what we're trying to offer. We're trying to bring our Lessons Learned in soft to a wider population that just hasn't been given the resources but that do definitely deserve and need the help.

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Jon Becker: Okay so let's keep going with the five. So we've got self-awareness and regulation, we've got mental agility and then we've got movement quality. What's next?

Casey Glass: So next is load management and this goes back to what we're talking about earlier about how you don't need to be going hard all the time. So there's a lot of different ways that you can manage load. The most important thing that I want everybody to know about in these field is a term called auto regulation so your training needs to flex day to day to your “Readiness” is a term, some people use the term “Energy Availability”. So if you think about you have one officer that's coming off of a officer that's coming off of two days off they're not going to be able to perform the same way and they shouldn't be required or asked to hit the same level of volume and intensity because that's not going to be equally beneficial to both of them. So if one officer is fresher, he's going to be able to do more weight, he's going to be able to hit his goal paces for more reps. If another officer if she's coming off of a 17-hour shift she's going to be more fatigued and all I'm going to do is drive her into a hole if I expect her to do the same thing. So with our programming I always make sure that it's flexible so that she can adjust it to a the squat variation that makes the most sense for her. She can hit a full range of motion and she can load it heavy. Then what kind of energy availability does she have coming off of that shift? the programming needs to flex with her so that she does a little less volume, she does a little less intensity and that's going to lower her injury risk.

So we use things like reps and reserve on a lift instead of using a percentage of one rep max. So let's say I can lift 100 lbs is my one rep max and I was to program 85% for myself for this day. It's five reps at 85%. But what if it's me coming off of that 17-hour shift and if I was to do a one rep max that day my one rep max would be 85%? So now I'm asking myself to do five reps at my one rep max, it's not possible and it's way heavier than I intend for the session as the coach. So instead what I'm going to do is I'm going to say do five reps and leave two reps in reserve or if your Readiness is low. So on the training app we use you take you answer a few questions at the beginning of each session and it's going to give you a Readiness score. If your Readiness score is below 2.8 then leave four reps in reserve. So that way I know you're going to move well. I'm not going to over tax you. We're going to get something out of this session. And we're going to live to fight another day. But then the officer that's coming off at two days off you're going to leave two reps in reserve so you're going to be going a lot heavier and we're going to be an intense session for you.

Jon Becker: I think this is an interesting concept because one of the differences I've built for racing by myself and I've built with a professional coach. The probably the biggest thing that I learned in that is that there were a lot more low intensity days with a professional coach than there were when I did it myself. I trained more consistently but there were more days that it was like I just want you to go run for 30 minutes easily. For my mindset and growing up in this community I think for a lot of our end users mindset is I'm either going to go in and do a hard workout or I'm just wasting my time.I If I'm supposed to do eight reps at 100 pounds and I'm supposed to do eight reps at 100 Page 15 of pounds, anything less than that is a waste of time. I think what you're arguing for here is a very different concept than the way most of us tend to see it.

Casey Glass: I mean if I'm coming off a 17- hour shift it's still going to feel heavy. I'm still getting a lot of motor units firing. I'm still taxing my central nervous system so I'm still getting out of it what I need to get out of it. It's just the weight and or the reps that have changed the intensity for the day that are still there.

Now that said there are some days that are just it's just better to live to fight another day instead of injuring myself today or putting myself so deep in the tank that I'm going to struggle on my next shift which can be potentially very dangerous then I'm just going to do 30 minutes in Zone Two today and I'm going to work on my aerobic capacity bucket.

Then the next day that I have enough rest that I can hit a higher intensity of training then I'm going to hit a really high level of intensity for that day when it's appropriate.

Jon Becker: That makes a lot of sense okay so continue on load management and auto regulations so get reps and reserve as a concept through which you regulate training.

What else is there?

Casey Glass: I use an app that gives custom paces for running but I like to couple that with something called “Rate of Perceived Exertion” and that's because we're not going to test your runtime so if we're using a 5k which is a common one we use with a lot of groups we're not going to test your 5k every week right but you might be getting faster, you should be getting faster with training as weeks go by. So the paces that we took off of that race four weeks ago may not be accurate anymore because you're faster. So I'll say use this pace as a ballpark but the intent of the day is that you hit Rate of Perceived Exertion nine out of 10 and if that means hitting that pace gets you to a nine then you hit that pace. But if you're getting faster you're going to have to go a little bit faster to hit that pace, that goal intensity of the session and that's going to fluctuate with your energy level and with your progression and fitness. The fitter you're getting until we can test again we need to make sure that we're pushing you hard enough and that might mean continuing to adjust that pace by using a rate of perceived exertion. I'll also change the amount of reps so if it's you're going to do 8-12 200s. Today I give a range. I'll say you're going to do 8 to 12 200s at this pace. If hitting that pace you're only at an RPE7 when you get to rep eight then you're going to do rep nine and you're going to do rep 10 until you get to that RPE9.

So somebody who's either having a really good day they've got a lot of energy and good recovery or maybe their background they're a more experienced runner then they're going to automatically get that higher volume. So then you can have again two people with two fitness backgrounds or coming off of two different shifts with different energy availability you can have them on the same training program but have that training program become entirely customized to their needs for that specific day.

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Jon Becker: Yeah that makes a lot of sense because every day you show up in the gym every day you show up at the track you're different. I think that's probably the biggest thing I learned from working with a professional coach is there were days that I showed up and I said, “I'm kind of tired” but I ran really fast. There were days that I showed up like “I'm going to kill it today” and felt terrible. So it is I think the idea of giving two different metrics should feel like this and striving for this allows you to kind of balance that if you're honest with yourself.

Casey Glass: Then again it lets you hit the goal intensity of the day versus overcooking it or undercooking it.

Jon Becker: As you're talking and I'm hearing the same thing that I heard from a lot of professional Strength and Conditioning coaches it strikes me that as alpha males we want to go out and train like an eight all the time. What I've heard from other coaches that I've spoken to and it sounds like is underlying your philosophy here is we really don't want to be there kind of ever. We want to be at a six or a nine, we're trying to separate our training into low intensity and high intensity not medium intensity all the time.

Casey Glass: Very true. I found that with a lot of guys that will come to me to improve their running that they live at seven. Seven's kind of a no man's land for running physiologically. Another way to put that is they've done all their runs in Zone Three. So they haven't done any Zone Two work (any of that low intensity oxygen delivery work to develop those basic aerobic capabilities) and they haven't done any V2 Max work either to really push that intensity to force those specific adaptations. So they've unwittingly put in a lot of time and a lot of miles without getting the adaptations that they were shooting for because they're living in the middle in no man's land.

Jon Becker: Yeah a triathlon coach told me the problem with triathletes is they terrain it to seven all the time and what they should be doing is training at a five and a nine never at a seven. The problem is that training at five feels like you're not doing anything and training at nine feels terrible. So you kind of Goldilocks your way into training at seven all the time.

Casey Glass: Well if you got your fitness level where it needs to be and you're just trying to maintain a seven can be a good thing and I do think some officers and operators they're there but they're still not giving themselves permission, so they're still doing 9- 9-9 everyday. So it really just depends on your scenario. If you train at a five and train at a nine most of the year then you're going to buy yourself some time where it's okay to just do a few sessions at a seven for maintenance. So I mean context definitely matters but yeah the majority of your training you need a large volume (for conditioning Page 17 of specifically) a larger volume of low intensity training and then you take field trips into the nine.

Jon Becker: Got it well and that kind of brings up the idea of energy balance too which I know is your fifth pillar here. Talk to me a little bit about energy balance.

Casey Glass: The best way that I can explain energy balance is you have to imagine your weekly recoverable energy as a water bottle. So if I have an 8 ounce water bottle and that's all that I can recover from I can recover from 8 ounces of stress then I need to make sure that I'm not constantly stressing myself for 12 ounces I'm not trying to overflow that water bottle. That's what overtraining is another way to think of that is what under fueling is that's what under recovery is. We see that very commonly. I need to fit my physical training and my other mental stressors. They all have to fit into that 8 oz water bottle if I'm going to be able to recover and come back next week. Now if you eat more your 8 oz water bottle turns into a 10 oz water bottle. If you sleep more your 10 oz water bottle turns into a 12 oz water bottle so now you can do more training. But it's up to you to be realistic about what the size of your water bottle is and to balance your stress and training with that.

So another way to look at it is that a lot of operators that I work with will come to me after being on a mass program for about 6 months, and they've only gained 5 lbs of mass and now their elbows hurt and their knees hurt. So they've given up on that dream, “Give me something different. This isn't working. I don't even care about this mass goal anymore”. The reason for that is they have too much work in life stress and they're not eating enough and sleeping enough to recover from that 5 days of lifting. So what they were doing is they had an 8 oz water bottle and they were trying to shove 12 ounces of water into it and they weren't recognizing that it was just spilling all over the place. So what I'll do is, I'll give them three days of lifting and probably more conditioning than they've been doing so they anticipate hate. The belief is that I'm not going to gain any more mass on this. I might even lose some because of the conditioning. But within 6 months they'll gain 10 to 15 pounds of muscle mass and that's because we found energy balance.

They weren't going to eat enough to build a 12 ounce water bottle, they were only going to eat enough to build an 8 oz water bottle, so I gave them 8 ounces of stress. And because that was balanced their body could repair itself and it could grow more muscle mass even though we were conditioning; which again that's just a belief thing folks think that they can't get strong in condition at the same time. They can't put mass on in condition at the same time but it's not exactly true so energy balance is all about reality.

What's the reality for this individual and how much training stress can they accommodate or can we increase the size of their water bottle by improving their nutrition By improving their sleep quality or duration or by reducing other stressors?

Jon Becker: So what do you see most commonly with nutrition in your operators?

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Casey Glass: Under fueling, constantly being in a deficit and a lot of that blame is they're not eating enough carbs. I think because of the cultural cycle that we had for a while like paleo carnivores, carbs are bad, carbs spike your insulin, making people afraid to eat carbohydrates and then couple that with guys that are just too busy they're missing meals all the time. They're just too busy. They're not thinking about food. They're not prioritizing it. They don't have a lot of time or breaks to eat it. So they're just not getting enough total calories, especially not feeling well with carbs. So a lot of times we will increase their calories and we'll specifically increase their carbs to meet our new goals and their body comp will actually improve, their performance will definitely improve.

But their body comp will actually improve too because they didn't have that energy balance before. So their body wasn't happy, their hormones weren't happy, they weren't stable, their body was a little shell shocked and having trouble functioning at those lower calorie levels with the kind of work that they were doing and the kind of stress that they were experiencing. And that can fall all the way into hormone issues. And we see that a lot in Special Operations has a lot of hormone issues, is just not getting enough sleep, not eating enough and then if you throw too much training on top of that it's just not a very good effect.

Jon Becker: Yeah eventually it's raining so much that the house isn't even getting repaired anymore. It's just between sleep and not sleeping or sleeping poorly and working out really hard and under fueling and you just kind of end up in this downward spiral that eventually just wrecks your hormones and wrecks your health.

Casey Glass: Yes. And your tissues aren't repairing so you might have some extra joint pain, chronic soreness. If you're chronically sore I'm going to reduce your training or you are going to increase your calories; those are the only options. You can increase your calories, and I'll leave your training the same. If you do not increase your calories I'm going to reduce your training because we have to find that energy balance to get results and to keep people healthy long term.

Jon Becker: Yeah know it makes a lot of sense. To kind of conclude our time together let's talk through the model for War Fighter health and performance. When a team comes to you and says, “Hey, we want to work with you”, what does that look like?

Casey Glass: So we're a human performance company and we deliver longevity focused training and education to tactical organizations. So we have multiple teams of strength coaches, nutrition coaches and mental performance coaches; so those three experts would make up a team. We will go to your organization and we'll do a root cause analysis. So you tell us what your health and performance issues are. We're going to do some surveys. We're going to do some interviews. We're going to talk to people and if given the opportunity maybe even some physical testing and additional testing if it's available and determine what are the root causes that are driving these issues and then the team can decide what kind of a solution is going to be best for them. So we offer consulting. We offer in-person or remote education. But the most effective solution is Page 19 of letting us be your Human Performance team. So that way you get those three experts.

They all have a master's degree or a PhD. They all have experienced coaching in soft. So they are no strangers to these crazy schedules night shifts High allostatic load trauma.

They will collaborate and use the information they found in your root cause analysis to create custom programming for you. So they're going to deliver daily training and education to your team via an app. They're going to use psychology based coaching to help create buy-in because that can be an issue anytime you're trying something new, and to build better health and performance habits in your culture. You get all that for less than the price of hiring one full-time Wellness Coordinator. We're trying to bring you that holistic model at a price point that fits inside your wellness budget.

Jon Becker: That makes a lot of sense. Where can you find you if they want to learn more about this they want to reach out to you. What's the best way to do that?

Casey Glass: So go to our website it's Warfighterhp.com, and you can contact me through there.

Jon Becker: Beautiful. Casey, thanks so much for taking the time with me today and we'll include all your contact information in the show notes.

Casey Glass: Thanks for the chat Jon. I appreciate it.