Archives: Strength and Conditioning/Conditioning and Strength

[Mark Rippetoe]

Strength and Conditioning - Conditioning and Strength | Mark Rippetoe

[Mark E. Hurling]

I must have missed this first time around. Good to finally read it. A few things stood out for me:

Size and strength don’t matter, it is all about technique. In the “real world” being too strong prevents good technique, and “will get you killed on the street.”

This is the martial arts paradigm all over again and just as flawed for LE as it is for MA.

Big motor skills are things like breathing, small motor skills are things like moving your arm. These techniques will start out being small motor skills but as you practice will become big motor skills.

Breathing is a motor skill? If it is, we are well and truly fucked. Unless Sully and Jordan know better than me, and likely they do in most if not all respects, I learned that breathing was an autonomic function that you didn't have to think about. The only time I had any awareness that I had (accidentally?) overridden it was during a polygraph exam where the polygrapher shouted "BREATHE!" at me. I had been concentrating so hard on relaxing through it to avoid a false positive that he told me I had been in a 45 second state of apnea.

Then there's this:

Policemen the world over rely on cars these days, and it’s helpful to be strong enough to deal with a bad guy at the end of the occasional foot-chase, unless you were just going to shoot him anyway.

Perhaps times have changed, although you wouldn't know it from the movies and TV, but I never had or saw a foot pursuit go more than several hundred yards. The fleeing suspect either tripped, got caught on a fence he was trying to scale, ran into a clothesline (very entertaining to see), or puked. Usually in less than 300 yards. In those days Ken Cooper and jogging was my Deity, so keeping up was no issue. Although I did purposely hang back on a few pursuits to urge the suspect on for a slightly longer chase to make sure he was good and smoked from it. Other than running the risk of getting hit with vomit, it was much easier to subdue and handcuffed someone too busy trying to get enough air in their lungs to resist.