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Building the Best Tactical Program

by Coach Travis Mash, MSc

I have spent most of my life chasing strength. World championships, weightlifting platforms, college athletes, kids just learning to squat, and older adults trying to stay in the game. The principles never change as much as people think. You figure out what the job actually requires, build the qualities that transfer, protect the joints that take the beating, and write a program a human being can actually live with. Tactical Strength and Conditioning isn’t different.

Before we go on, if you are looking to host a live clinic with me, Coach Travis Mash, MSc, regarding Advanced Velocity Based Training and Implementation and/or Olympic Weightlifting and Powerlifting for Athletic Performance (I call this my Big Six Clinic), email me at:

Travis@RiseIndoorSports.com (If you are a University D1, D2, D3, or NAIA, high school, or private facility, I am open to talking with you. I had a blast at Penn State University.)

What is Tactical Strength and Conditioning? This is a broad over-arching title that refers to the people around the world in service to the rest of us. Our military personnel come to mind first, but then there are our men and women in Blue, aka our Police Officers, but of course there are many positions on the police force: patrol, detective, motorcycle, boat patrolman on the river or lake, etc. Of course, tactical strength and conditioning refers to our firefighters, EMT, and emergency response personnel. Police work, fire fighters, or State Highway Patrol Officers are no different. It is just less convenient. Their shifts can rotate. Their duties can change drastically from shift to shift.

Several of my colleagues at Rise Indoor Sports and I have been working on a program to help develop the health and performance program for a local police and/or fire department. I’ll leave out the official group until everything is 100% finalized. There has been plenty of red tape, but everyone involved has been great to work with, which has motivated me even more to create the best plan possible.

A patrol officer is not a bodybuilder, marathoner, or weekend CrossFitter. Much of a shift might be spent sitting in a car wearing a significant amount of equipment. Then, without warning, the job can demand a short sprint, climbing an obstacle, wrestling with a resistant person, dragging someone to safety, or moving a heavy object.

Research examining law enforcement physical abilities supports this picture. Occupational performance requires a combination of muscular strength and endurance, power, agility, anaerobic capacity, and aerobic fitness rather than excellence in one isolated quality (Orr et al., 2021; Zulfiqar et al., 2021).

That means we are not simply training for a 1.5 mile run. We are preparing people for intermittent, high force work performed under load and stress, potentially after hours of sitting. If your program ignores those demands, you are training for the wrong sport.

The first key is a real needs analysis, both occupational and individual. Robin Orr, Robert Lockie, Jay Dawes, Joseph Dulla, and others have spent years demonstrating relationships between physical fitness and occupational performance in law enforcement. Strength, power, muscular endurance, agility, aerobic fitness, and other qualities can all influence an officer’s ability to perform job specific tasks (Lockie et al., 2021; Orr et al., 2021).

You cannot program intelligently until you understand which qualities the job requires and which qualities the individual lacks.

Sample Needs Analysis

Qualitative Assessment

Any solid program begins with both a qualitative and quantitative assessment. I like to start with the qualitative side. This is where you become a lawyer gathering facts.

Before coaching anyone, you need to understand where that individual is right now in terms of health and performance, but you also need to know where they have been. Previous injuries matter. Training history matters. Lifestyle matters. There may also be some very low hanging fruit that makes everything else easier.

Here are some questions I would ask with almost any population:

  1. What injuries have you had in the past? When? Did any require surgery?
  2. Have you participated in an athletic performance or general fitness program before?
  3. Would you classify yourself as a beginner, intermediate, or advanced trainee?
  4. What types of training have worked well for you?
  5. What hasn’t worked?
  6. What types of exercise do you enjoy?
  7. What types of training do you dislike?
  8. How many hours do you sleep each night?
  9. How would you rate your sleep quality from 1 to 10?
  10. What does your bedtime routine look like during the final two hours of the day?
  11. What does your morning routine look like?
  12. What time do you normally go to bed and wake up? How consistent is that schedule?
  13. What recovery modalities do you use, such as physical therapy, chiropractic, massage, or sauna, and how often?
  14. Where will you train?
  15. What equipment do you have available?
  16. How many days per week can you realistically dedicate to training, and for how long?
  17. What are your primary goals?
  18. How important are those goals on a scale from 1 to 10?
  19. When during the day do you normally have the most and least energy?
  20. What does a typical day of nutrition and hydration look like?
  21. Do you track protein, carbohydrates, fats, micronutrients, or hydration?
  22. What supplements do you currently take?
  23. Are you using TRT, peptides, or other physician managed therapies?
  24. What medications are you currently taking?
  25. What is your current job assignment, and what does a normal day look like compared with a high demand day?

Now you know where the person has been, where they are now, what they want, what they need, and what resources you have available.

That brings us to Phase 2: Quantitative Assessment.

Quantitative Assessment

The qualitative assessment comes first for a reason. There is no reason to assess power with a maximal vertical jump or clean if you are working with a 55 year old officer who has never trained seriously and recently underwent a total hip replacement.

Assessments have to fit the person standing in front of you. At the same time, research supports using a battery of tests because no single assessment captures everything required of a tactical athlete (Orr et al., 2021; Zulfiqar et al., 2021).

Here are the general qualities I want to understand.

Functional Movement and Mobility

Body Composition

Strength

You do not need to perform every test. Choose the safest and most appropriate option for the individual.

Speed and Explosiveness

Power

Anaerobic Conditioning

Aerobic Capacity

Tactical Work Capacity

This is where I want to choose tasks that actually resemble the job. That could include a weighted dummy drag, sandbag carry, ladder climb, short sprint, stair climb, or another push, pull, lift, or carry task.

Whenever possible, use timing gates or another objective measurement so you can retest the athlete later and determine whether the program is actually working.

Additional Performance Diagnostics

Dynamic Strength Index (DSI) can help us understand how effectively an athlete expresses his or her available maximal force during a ballistic task.

Reactive Strength Index (RSI) provides information about reactive strength and the athlete’s ability to rapidly transition from eccentric to concentric muscle action during the stretch shortening cycle.

Video analysis can also help identify movement asymmetries, compensations, and other movement characteristics that deserve a closer look.

Once you have the qualitative information, you understand the athlete’s background. You know their injury history, training experience, recovery habits, lifestyle demands, and level of commitment.

The quantitative information, lets you know where they are physically. Now you can answer the important question: What does this tactical athlete actually need to improve?

Is it VO2 Max? Power? Absolute strength? Relative strength? Mobility? Work capacity? That answer determines the program.

Elements of a Solid Tactical Program

A good needs analysis makes programming much easier, especially when using block periodization because it tells you exactly what deserves priority. Research on specialist police tactical groups supports developing strength, power, aerobic fitness, and anaerobic fitness while accounting for the unpredictable occupational demands placed on these officers (Orr et al., 2025).

Movement Quality: Movement quality should be addressed in the warm up, within the actual training program, and when appropriate during the cool down.

Absolute Strength: Tactical athletes need upper and lower body strength across multiple vectors. We want them capable of producing force vertically, horizontally, laterally, and rotationally.

Speed: For most tactical athletes, speed primarily means acceleration, rapid changes of direction, and the ability to produce explosive movement on demand.

Power: Power is where strength and speed come together. We need officers who can produce meaningful force quickly, not simply people who can grind through a heavy repetition. Lower body power is particularly relevant because vertical jump performance has demonstrated relationships with occupational performance and injury risk in law enforcement populations (Orr et al., 2016; Orr et al., 2020). See the image below and simply having a vertical leap 2CM higher seems to be quite the difference.

Image 1 Orr et al., 2016

Relative Strength: Relative strength is the ability to produce force relative to body weight. Tactical athletes have to move their own body plus their equipment, which makes this quality extremely important.

Muscular Endurance: This is the ability to repeatedly produce force. Do not confuse muscular endurance with absolute strength. Someone can be incredibly strong for one repetition and still struggle to repeatedly produce force over several minutes. Tactical athletes need both.

Anaerobic Conditioning: An officer may have to sprint, wrestle with a suspect, recover quickly, and then produce another high intensity effort. We need to know whether the athlete can repeatedly perform hard work without falling apart.

Image 2 Clausen et al., 2018

VO2 Max: Aerobic capacity provides the foundation underneath much of this work. VO2 Max represents the maximum amount of oxygen the body can utilize during intense exercise. Aerobic fitness is relevant not only to occupational readiness but also to long term health. Higher cardiorespiratory fitness is consistently associated with lower all cause mortality and greater longevity (Clausen et al., 2018; Mandsager et al., 2018).

Image 3 Mandsager et al., 2018

Tactical Work Capacity: This is where everything comes together. Can the officer sprint, drag a dummy, lift something heavy, climb stairs, carry equipment, and continue working? Tactical work capacity combines strength, speed, power, aerobic capacity, anaerobic conditioning, and movement quality.

Lifestyle: None of this works without addressing nutrition, sleep, stress, and recovery. If someone trains hard but ignores everything outside the gym, they are leaving a massive amount of progress on the table.

Image 4 VALD Performance’s ForceDecks

Some of the additional assessments I mentioned, particularly DSI and RSI, can help us decide where to focus. After recently spending time at VALD Performance HQ in Brisbane, Australia, I’m hoping to incorporate ForceDecks to measure these qualities with even greater precision, along with HumanTrak for movement analysis and Dynamo for assessing force production and range of motion around individual joints. When I was at Penn State University, they had VALD Performance and GymAware in every one of their Strength and Performance Rooms.

Image 4 VALD’s HumanTrak Broad Jump Analysis

Durability and Injury Risk

Durability has to sit near the top of the list. Low backs, hips, knees, and shoulders take a beating from duty belts, repeated car entries and exits, sudden changes of direction, physical confrontations, and years of accumulated stress.

Physical fitness appears to play an important role in injury risk. Research in police recruits has found relationships between injury and measures including grip strength, push ups, vertical jump performance, and aerobic fitness (Orr et al., 2016; Orr et al., 2020). In one study, recruits with the lowest vertical jump performance were more than three times as likely to suffer an injury or illness compared with those displaying the highest jump performance (Orr et al., 2016).

That matters to me because I am not interested in making an officer look good in a tank top if his lumbar spine folds the first time he has to pull a drunk person out of a driver’s seat. Posterior chain strength, antirotation trunk work, scapular strength and endurance, hip mobility, grip strength, and progressive loading are not accessories.

They are part of the job.

Body Composition

Body composition matters before we ever get to the fancy stuff. Many officers find themselves carrying more body fat than they would like by midcareer, often because they spend years putting everyone else’s needs ahead of their own. They live to serve others, and their own health gets pushed down the priority list.

Excess body mass that does not contribute to force production increases the relative cost of moving the body during occupational tasks. The goal is not to turn every officer into a 220 pound powerlifter. We want enough lean mass and strength to produce force while maintaining a body composition that allows the officer to move efficiently.

Efficient Training

The actual training has to be concurrent and time efficient. Most officers do not have a two hour training window, eight perfect hours of sleep, and a stress free schedule. A great program that nobody can consistently perform is not a great program.

For most tactical athletes, a well designed full body session can accomplish a tremendous amount in a relatively short period of time. Squat. Hinge. Push. Pull. Carry. Move. Use trap bar deadlifts when they make more sense than conventional deadlifts. Use sleds, farmer carries, kettlebell swings, landmine work, chin ups, push up variations, and short sprints.

I still believe in the barbell. A well coached squat, hinge, press, and/or clean will do more for force production than a thousand random circuits. But I also believe in autoregulation.

Shift work can wreck readiness. If you send an officer into a maximal squat session after a 12 hour night shift and four hours of sleep, you are not coaching wisely. If you are not monitoring fatigue, the program itself can become a liability.

Ongoing Monitoring

Once a tactical athlete has been tested, the job is not finished. Now we have to monitor training and make sure the athlete continues moving in the right direction.

One of my favorite tools for doing this is velocity based training (VBT). VBT gives us objective feedback about training intent and day to day performance. Some athletes need to move faster, others need to get stronger, and yet there are athletes that need to live somewhere in the middle. Equipment such as GymAware gives us immediate feedback that can help individualize those decisions.

GymAware RS Unit is the Gold Standard in Velocity-Based Training

Autoregulation and Daily Fatigue Management

Strength and readiness are not static. Performance can fluctuate because of fatigue, sleep, psychological stress, previous training, shift work, and countless other variables. That is exactly why blindly prescribing every session from an old 1RM can be problematic.

Police officers deal with stress on the job, stress at home, unpredictable sleep, long shifts, and the additional stress we intentionally create in the weight room. If you ignore all of that and blindly follow percentages written months earlier, you are missing the point of coaching.

Use VBT or, at minimum, RPE, reps in reserve, and simple readiness measures such as jump, grip, or bar velocity checks. Then have enough humility to reduce volume or intensity when the tank is empty.

Programming models such as daily undulating periodization and block periodization can work well because a tactical athlete’s life is rarely predictable. Recent recommendations for specialist police tactical groups specifically support a block approach incorporating accumulation, transmutation, realization, and potentially recovery phases while emphasizing the importance of an experienced strength and conditioning coach (Orr et al., 2025).

That last part is important. These officers need a coach who can think, not simply a PDF they follow until something breaks. No matter what you planned, you have to be willing to pivot based on what is happening at work, at home, and in the gym.

What About Conditioning?

Conditioning requires the same thought process. Long, slow distance work has a place for developing aerobic fitness and supporting recovery, but it is not the entire answer.

Police work involves multiple physical qualities, including aerobic and anaerobic fitness, strength, power, agility, and muscular endurance (Orr et al., 2021; Zulfiqar et al., 2021). That means conditioning should prepare officers for both sustained work and repeated high intensity efforts.

Interval work, shuttles, sleds, short circuits, and repeated efforts that resemble a chase, fight, drag, recover, and repeat scenario can be useful tools. At the same time, we still need enough aerobic development to recover between those hard efforts.

Do not train only for the academy test. Push ups and a 1.5 mile run might be the gate, but they are not the career. You should definitely train to pass the academy test, but then it’s on to surviving the job and coming home to the family every night.

The officers who last need to be able to produce force, accelerate, change direction, hold onto someone, pick something heavy off the ground, and still have enough gas left to continue doing their job. Measure what matters, including body composition, aerobic capacity, jump performance, upper and lower body strength, power, relative strength, and tactical work capacity.

Then retest and adjust.

Sample Day-

Here’s a sample of one day of training programmed in my Bridge Athletic App of course:

Warm-Up in Bridge

Power Portion of the Bridge Program (Notice the PDF for Education)

Strength Portion from Bridge

Core and Conditioning in Bridge

Bridge Allows me to add Educational Videos, Articles, and Podcasts for the Athletes that want to understand ‘The Why’

Here’s the Article section. I added at least 1-2 Educational components every single week in this program. 

Two more elements that I want to tell all of you about Bridge Athletic before I wrap this article up are the new courses that I can add and now I can suggest nutrition. The athletes can track their macros right on the App, so now all of their data: strength, power, aerobic work, work capacity, nutrition, velocity, and any VALD Performance Testing is all under one application. This is going to make my job easy, and it’s going to make it easy to collect data, discern what the data is saying, and then it’s clear what steps to take for the athlete’s benefit. Super excited about what we will be offering at Rise Indoor Sports. There will simply be no competition for us now.

If you want to take a look at my Programs on Bridge Athletic, you can view them here: Coach Travis Mash on Bridge Athletic.

In Summary

Consistency wins. A twenty minute session performed four days per week for ten years will outperform a six week smash program that ends with a blown out low back and an officer on light duty.

These men and women have to be ready on a Tuesday at 3 a.m., not simply on test day in May. Write the program like you are coaching an in season athlete who also has a family, a court docket, shift work, and a schedule that does not care about your periodization chart.

Science gives us the map. Orr, Lockie, Dawes, Dulla, and the broader tactical strength and conditioning community have done a tremendous amount of work connecting physical qualities with occupational performance. Our job is to apply that science with some art.

Perform the needs analysis. Test the individual. Identify the limiting qualities. Individualize the program. Protect the joints. Build the posterior chain. Improve grip. Develop strength and power. Build the aerobic engine. Then monitor the athlete and adjust the plan as life happens.

Get tactical athletes strong enough that the job feels lighter while keeping them capable of moving quickly and efficiently under load. Then get out of the way and let them do the work they signed up to do.

That is a tactical program I will put my name on, and that is the tactical program we are building at Rise Indoor Sports.

At the end of the day, it is really the same way we should coach any adult. Perform a needs analysis, assess the individual, build the program around the results, and monitor continuously.

Simple does not mean easy. It means everything in the program has a reason.

Sincerely,

Coach Travis Mash

References

Clausen, J. S. R., Marott, J. L., Holtermann, A., Gyntelberg, F., & Jensen, M. T. (2018). Midlife cardiorespiratory fitness and the long term risk of mortality: 46 years of follow up. Journal of the American College of Cardiology, 72(9), 987–995. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jacc.2018.06.045

Lockie, R. G., Moreno, M. R., Rodas, K. A., Dulla, J. M., Orr, R. M., & Dawes, J. J. (2021). With great power comes great ability: Extending research on fitness characteristics that influence work sample test battery performance in law enforcement recruits. Work, 68(4), 1069–1080. https://doi.org/10.3233/WOR-213437

Mandsager, K., Harb, S., Cremer, P., Phelan, D., Nissen, S. E., & Jaber, W. (2018). Association of cardiorespiratory fitness with long term mortality among adults undergoing exercise treadmill testing. JAMA Network Open, 1(6), e183605. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2018.3605

Orr, R. M., Ferguson, D., Schram, B., Dawes, J. J., Lockie, R. G., & Pope, R. (2020). The relationship between aerobic test performance and injuries in police recruits. International Journal of Exercise Science, 13(4), 1052–1062. https://doi.org/10.70252/RPXS2372

Orr, R. M., Lockie, R. G., Canetti, E. F. D., Black, J., Robinson, J., Dawes, J. J., & Schram, B. (2025). Conditioning for strength, power, and aerobic fitness for specialist police tactical groups. Strength and Conditioning Journal, 47(1), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1519/SSC.0000000000000841

Orr, R., Pope, R., Peterson, S., Hinton, B., & Stierli, M. (2016). Leg power as an indicator of risk of injury or illness in police recruits. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 13(2), 237. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph13020237

Orr, R., Sakurai, T., Scott, J., Movshovich, J., Dawes, J. J., Lockie, R., & Schram, B. (2021). The use of fitness testing to predict occupational performance in tactical personnel: A critical review. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18(14), 7480. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18147480

Zulfiqar, M. M., Wooland, J., Schram, B., Dawes, J. J., Lockie, R. G., & Orr, R. M. (2021). Battery fitness testing in law enforcement: A critical review of the literature. International Journal of Exercise Science, 14(4), 613–632. https://doi.org/10.70252/PYWH7079

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