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Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast.
As always, my name is James Gearing and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on
the show Army veteran and in extremis performance team member, Jake Labhart.
Now in this conversation, we discuss a host of topics from Jake's early life as an athlete,
his journey into the military, his immersion into strength and conditioning, the application
of fitness and strength when it comes to shooting, standardized fitness tests, and so much more.
Now before we get to this incredible conversation, as I say every week, please just take a moment.
Go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback and
leave a rating.
Every single five star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier for
others to find.
And this is a free library of over 1000 episodes now.
So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories so
I can get them to every single person on planet earth who needs to hear them.
And one more side note, I don't know if you've listened to this already, but my Instagram
was closed down a couple of weeks ago for posting kindness videos.
So anyway, if you are looking for us on Instagram, the new page is now at behind the shield 911.2.0
so 2.0.
So with that being said, I introduce to you Jake Labhart.
Enjoy.
Well Jake, I want to start by saying thank you so so much for taking the time and coming
on the Behind the Shield podcast today.
Thank you for having me.
I really appreciate the opportunity.
So where on planet earth we finding you this afternoon?
Today, currently where I live is Salina, Texas C-E-L-I-N-A.
A lot of people say Selena, but it is Salina.
We have that redneck draw, but just north of Dallas.
So we're up here in the Dallas area and yeah, trying to have some good weather a little
bit of rain that we hadn't had in 30 days.
Is there a big red flag danger at the moment?
Are you thinking of wildfires?
No, fortunately it's cooled off a little bit so it's not as bad, but this summer was pretty
spicy.
So no wildfires, but it's been warm and dry.
Gotcha.
All right.
Well, let's start at the very beginning of your journey then.
So tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what
your parents did, how many siblings?
Okay, wow.
I wouldn't expect to go that far back.
All right, let's do it.
So I was born in Sherman, Texas, even a little further north as close as you can get to the
Oklahoma border.
I'm one of three kids, so I'm the oldest.
I've got a brother and a sister, brother in the middle and sister younger.
We were very heavy into athletics growing up.
So my brother played in the NFL.
He played at football at Texas A&M.
My sister played volleyball at Texas A&M.
They were both freak athletes.
I was the chump of the three of us.
So I was okay with football.
I got some Division I scholarships, but my heart was really towards the military, which
came later on in my life.
But I graduated from Texas A&M as well.
Both of my parents were actually physical therapists, which also came into play in my
career.
So it was very cool to see and they were very influential in my life.
Physical therapists, but they own their own practices.
So they had outpatient orthopedics.
They owned a home health practice and then they did some consulting in different areas.
But I would say where I saw a lot of it was my dad specifically.
He trained a lot of athletes.
So growing up, I was always seeing him in the clinic working with different athletes.
Again, me and my brother and sister all played sports at pretty high levels.
And so what I did not know at a younger age was just like the way he viewed and looked
at things was actually very similar to how I personally work in the tactical community.
My mother also practiced quite a bit, but whenever they got later in their life and
eventually sold their practice, she stepped in a lot more.
So that was kind of who I got to see growing up.
When you look back now, bearing in mind that one of your siblings went to the NFL, another
one was an elite volleyball player.
My son's a volleyball player at the moment.
So it's a fun sport to watch as a parent, it doesn't stop and start as much as some
of the other American sports.
And then you obviously were Division 1 as well.
What were they bringing to your childhood to allow you to level up where other kids
may be born in different family dynamics, maybe wouldn't have reached the same pinnacle?
When I look back at my parents now as an adult, what's the word I want to use?
Sport was the first thing that was about to come out of my mouth.
The love and support that they gave to us.
But they also taught us really hard lessons.
So we grew up on a ranch where a lot of our friends would in the summers go into town
and like play and go play at friends houses on PlayStation or Nintendo 64, whatever you
had back in the day.
We worked, so we spent a lot of time out there playing in the woods.
But in terms of sports, one of the things I saw that they gave back, one, my dad, how
he viewed using his physical therapy side and how he viewed strength and conditioning
at that time.
Again, not knowing it now, but back then, he was very specific.
So he trained us in very specific areas and had really good progressions.
But more than anything, I look back at both my parents, they did not push us.
So there was no yelling or expectations of some level of performance.
They just let us play.
We went and played sports.
And then if we wanted extra, then they provided us ways to do that.
And for us specifically, it was through them.
We did do some maybe lessons at different points in our life.
But for the very large portion of it, it was like, hey man, my dad, as an example, and
my mom actually, you want to get better?
5 a.m.
Sweet, I'll drive you up to the stadium and you can run bleachers.
And they would do things like that throughout our life.
But they gave us the opportunity to pursue it.
It was never forced upon us.
And so I feel like one of the big pieces there that did separate us was definitely work ethic,
but then just availability, to be very honest.
They were willing to take that time to be available and allow us to push ourselves,
but also guide us to that process.
This would be an interesting question for you, multi-generational physical therapy family.
When I first moved to the States, and I've told this story many times, as I started meeting
more and more people, usually kind of either side of 30 or beyond, now deconditioned, there
would always be an Uncle Rico story.
While I would have been in the major leagues or whatever, if it wasn't for my ACL, MCL,
slapped hair, insert thing here.
And I started going like, what the fuck are they doing to children in this country that
they barely graduate school or college and they're already destroyed physically?
So then in all these conversations, I went to UF and finished my ex-phys degree and you
live here long enough, you start to see that in some cases, arguably a lot of cases, there's
performance squeezed out of youth athletes at the expense of longevity and wellness.
What is your perspective of that?
Oh, I think that's a, like you said, it's generational, but I think it's multifactorial
question or answer maybe.
Looking back on our experience, I think we were very fortunate.
And again, we were not pushed, which I think, you know this, right?
When you're looking from a human performance perspective, whether it be engineering or
performance intensity, but stress, stressors are the things that are going to make the
impact, right?
Whether the stress on the muscle that allows it to grow to get better or the external stress
and the external stress and the external stress that boom, the stars aligned and you're injured,
right?
I think looking back on our life, I think we were not pushed in the sense of, and I
think they encouraged us, I don't mean that, but it was never a negative pushing, never
yelling you need to be doing better kind of thing.
So I think that that was one.
Two, we were given opportunities.
So we played baseball, we played football, we played basketball, we ran track.
My brother did gymnastics.
He tells people all the time, like parents consist, he's five nine now, he's probably
like 195, but playing in the college level, he was five nine 175, 180 until he got into
the NFL, right?
So my point being is very undersized.
I see all these parents that are like, you need to go to these lessons.
You need to do, do, do, do, do, right?
I do understand we live in a different generation.
My sister now is a volleyball coach.
She literally took a team to state within about two to three years.
Amazing coach, but she also coaches at a club volleyball program, one of the largest actually
in the country.
So I see that other side of it now, but if I was going to go backwards and what you're
talking about overuse and injury, stuff like that.
Yeah, I think it's shifted wildly.
I think back in the day and even Patrick, my homes have been pretty open about a lot
of athletes, drewberries, go play sports, just go be a kid, learn how to move motor
patterns.
And honestly, even stuff that I do now with special operations units, it's building these
motor patterns that were maybe not taught and maybe not allowed to flourish.
Whereas now I feel like we're trying to force motor patterns.
Well now you find weaknesses in other areas because kids are so specialized that yes,
you are overusing or potentially the opportunity for injury.
I'm not saying that sometimes it doesn't work out and I don't think I'm alone in this, but
I say this statement and I think a lot of people just are kind of like, yeah, genetics
is a very real thing.
Some people are genetically more gifted for different opportunities.
So I'm not saying work's not a real thing because it very much is, but I think at the
same time we see people that are overreaching and sometimes it's like, I don't care how
much you throw at that personal trainer, at that specific coach, the chance of going to
the NFL, maybe look at something else or you're just harming your child if you're the adult
there.
Sorry, I know it's a long-winded answer, but I answer your question.
No you would.
I mean, perfect example, I'm never going to win world's strongest man.
I'm six foot one, one eighty now.
I used to be one sixty eight when I was a firefighter.
So yes, genetics is definitely a real thing.
But I think that's another truth that comes out of these conversations over and over again
from the longevity and performance side.
The multi-sport athlete seems to be over and over again.
That's the truth.
If you've just got a kid who's a pitcher and all they ever do is pitch, their shoulders
going to blow out at some point.
It's a foregone conclusion.
And then also the mental side, I've had even people say, look, even letting kids go out
there and making up their own rules.
If child playing shouldn't have a dude in a stripy shirt telling them what they can
and can't do at the play level.
Yes, if you compete, but the love of play, I think we've got to be careful we don't
destroy that too, because that's such an important part.
And that's where innovation comes.
That's where creativity comes.
That's how these sports were even invented in the first place with simply people playing.
Absolutely.
And even my three kids now that are just now getting into sports, I've got ten, six and
two.
I just want them to enjoy the past whenever I'm home, but like the past two nights that
I can very vividly think on my two sons, the youngest two, they just want to throw the
ball.
Like I'm not specifically trying to teach them this or like, no, no, no, no, no.
In baseball, you need to do this.
Like I'm just throwing an object at them and I just want them to practice catching it.
Now, my middle one's now to an age where he's like, dad, no, right here, throw it right
here.
Well, I'm actually trying to move it around because I want him to just practice.
But at the same time, it's just like, they just enjoy playing catch with dad.
And I think the hand-eye coordination, we just need to get back where I think sometimes,
there are kids in my community, three, four years old are going to batting lessons.
That's insane to me.
You don't have just like you're saying, without rules, just play those motor patterns and
start letting them build.
So anyway, yeah, I think that's something societally we've kind of forced ourselves
into.
Absolutely.
Well, you mentioned about having a burning desire to be in the military.
Talk to me about how you found yourself in education first.
Yeah, it's a really good question.
So I went to Texas A&M.
So I originally went to the Air Force Academy and I went to Texas A&M.
Originally went to the Air Force Academy to play football.
I was like, ah, that's not for me.
I wanted to play football, not do academics, which is ironic how much academics have been
in my life since then, but when I was at A&M, I did, I kind of was like, hey man, I had
some coaches who are influential in my life.
And so I was like, hey, education, right?
Like I can check my boxes for my prerequisites for PT school because my parents are like,
hey, that's a good profession.
I was like, school's not for me.
Just let me out of this place pretty much.
Like I had a good buddy who was at SEAL Team 4 at the time.
He's like an older brother to me, a mentor that I've looked up to my whole life.
And I wanted to go to the military.
And so while I was at A&M, I was like, let me out of here.
But I was like, I can get an education degree.
I do enjoy teaching and coaching.
But to be honest with you, there wasn't like this massive passion.
However, comma, as I got into it, what I found is, is I do very much enjoy teaching.
I enjoy the more than anything, the influence you can have in that person's life.
And so that was kind of where I started, right?
I got my education degree, my wife and I got married for one year while I was waiting to
go to the military.
I went and taught.
Looking back on my life, that's one of the funnest times I had was just getting to speak
into middle school kids' lives and then coach.
And I didn't care about winning or losing as much as I did those young men as they further
on in their life.
I hope to this day, they remember Coach Labhart from a good like, hey man, you know, that
dude cared about this kind of thing.
And so yeah, that was kind of where it started for me on the teaching side.
There are so many stories of people finding themselves doing random things early in their
life and then it comes full circle.
And Steve Jobs famously took calligraphy at college.
He didn't do an actual major.
He just took classes.
And then fast forward years later, he was the first one to put fonts on a computer.
So that was that kind of tie in.
How did that year teaching middle school kids factor into maybe even teaching the tactical
community today?
It was hugely.
It impacts it directly.
I mean, there's been times where I've gone back and I've looked at like building out
a curriculum and structuring a class, time management, but then having to learn different
teaching styles where there'd be visual, auditory or kinesthetic, right?
Like or tactile, I guess which term you want to use.
But understanding those pieces from my bachelor's degree and then working with these middle
school kids to flipping around is no different.
It's just a different population with special operations units and understanding how to
do those things to where one kid or one operator may not understand it, how you're saying it.
So they see it.
Well, I need to make sure my demo reflects that, right?
With a firearm or versus a math problem on the whiteboard.
So yeah, it's absolutely, I feel pretty comfortable on skin, but also teaching.
I would say that there's been times maybe with special operations units, I was a little
more nervous early on in my career, but I'll tell you straight up that first day in the
classroom with seventh graders, I was like, oh boy, I hope they don't see right through
me.
So I think it directly correlates.
So walk me through your journey into the military and then any kind of deployments that you
found yourself and then I know obviously the story continues to selection.
Sure.
So no deployment.
So like I said, I was waiting to go into the military.
So I taught for that year.
I enlisted at the 18 X-ray pipeline.
So I'm pretty sure it's still there, but back at the time when I did enlist, you could go
with an 18 X-ray contract to go into the special forces pipeline.
So you go basic infantry school airborne, and then you go to selection right after that.
And then go into the Q course for whatever MOS that they would want you to go into the
18 or the SF pipeline.
So I did all of those.
I went through infantry school, airborne selection.
I got selected and I was slotted as 18 Delta, which is the special forces medic to essentially
go into the Q course to learn that specialty.
And then once you graduate the Q course, you actually become a green beret and go to your
group.
So I made it through selection and then I went into the 18 Delta pipeline.
It was a tough time in my life.
I was pretty successful up to that point.
I one timed everything.
When I went to the 18 Delta pipeline to actually try to go be a green beret medic, I ended
up getting hurt pretty bad.
Knowing what I know now, I could have handled this very differently, but unfortunately you
don't know what you don't know, right?
I injured my back.
I started with a small little ouchy that grew to, I had drop foot.
I just had a disc issue in my lumbar spine, whereas compressing the nerve enough that
caused a lot bigger issues.
Again, knowing what I know now, it's actually very manageable and treatable.
But at that time, unfortunately where I was at in the Q course, that's just not how it
worked.
It wasn't so much a, hey, go get yourself better.
There are those opportunities maybe I should say, but for mine it just wasn't.
Once I got drop foot, unfortunately I went through the process anyway and I got med boarded
out of the army within a pretty quick span early in my career, which was very difficult
for me, but because I was seeing all my buddies that were going to group and they were getting
their green berets, they're going to group, they're going to deployments.
I was just very much like, what am I doing with my life?
I had a college degree, I was a teacher, I was married.
I just had my first child, my daughter.
It was very much a time of what am I doing next kind of situation.
Well, speaking of back injuries, I had a, I would argue near career ending back injury
when I was a firefighter a few years ago.
You can imagine, I'm sure you've probably heard from the law enforcement side, you get
hurt, you go to a really shitty workman's comp doc.
They tell you just take these pills and then we'll slice and dice you and medically retire
you, whatever that path looks like.
But it took me on a very different journey because having the knowledge that I have,
I was like, well, this is not going to be fixed by scalpels and pills, this is a rehab
issue.
And so it was very dogmatic, put myself through Cairo.
And while I was there, my chiropractor introduced me to a thing called foundation training,
which was created by a chiropractor who'd messed up his own bag.
And it looks almost like yoga, but it's not, it's, it's cancer levering the body using
your own, you know, your arms as extra weight.
So you're lengthening the muscles, but you're strengthening them at the same time.
Absolutely incredible.
Like I shout from the rooftops about it.
I went and got certified, I taught my firefighters, but that was such a huge piece.
And it wasn't just getting out of pain.
It was a few months later, I was deadlifting, you know, heavy again, and you know, with
correct form, but being able to be a good, strong firefighter, not just kind of masking
an injury the rest of my career.
So and if you've ever heard of that, but it's an amazing tool.
I haven't heard of that specifically, but the concept.
Yeah, man, it's tough.
Like you're, you're this candidate that has been selected to start the training to hopefully
become a green beret, right?
And you're like, man, I got to be physically like, bam, top notch.
And I look back and some of the, the, the programs or the workouts I was following or
doing were random, way too high of intensity with not enough rest.
And it was perfect recipe and that still happens.
There's a lot piece, there's a genetic piece, there's lots of variables here, right?
Unfortunately that was the situation I was in and I just didn't know any better.
You know, obviously I know we're fast forwarding here, but then I go get my doctorate in physical
therapy and I'm like, first off, you're an idiot.
Like why, like why did you do those things?
Right?
You don't know what you don't know.
But, but then I look back to kind of what you're talking about your opportunity.
I didn't like really get to treat my back until I got out of the military and into grad
school and I was like, whoa, this is, this was super manageable.
If I just known, right?
That is great.
That, that process and I, and just full transparency, I was super angry.
I was angry at the world.
I was angry at the military.
I hurt because I wanted my, my friends to be safe and I felt like I should be with them
kind of thing.
And I went through a lot of emotions, but that has also driven me to where I am today
because we, we work with teams and units and I can tell them like, Hey, I've been there
in those shoes where you, you're, you're limping along, right?
And just waiting for that breaking point.
But there's other things you can be doing to bulletproof those joints or your back or
whatever it may be.
And so it's, it's had a huge influence on my life.
It was very hard for me to go through.
And I'm not trying to sound like a baby.
I understand there's a lot of guys that went through a lot worse than I did, but my journey
that was just emotional, that was a very hard time in my life, but it's, it's made a huge
impact to where we are today, fortunately.
Right.
But to your point, very manageable.
You just got to understand and have somebody teach you and be willing to accept it and
go.
I would imagine even though it was a somewhat short period in the military that after a
couple of years and you know, you're, you've passed selection, especially this is really
forced as your identity now.
And when you got hurt, that was kind of stripped from you and you're probably left wondering
what the hell am I, what the hell am I going to do?
But also who am I now?
You could not have articulated that any better.
Like to an exact T you're right.
It was only a couple of years, but the guys you form those relationships with, you go
through selection and again, I wasn't like an 18 year old kid, right?
I was married.
I was 26, 27 at the time.
I'd already had one career or if you want to call it, I guess, you know, I had a professional
job as a teacher and instructor or teacher and coach.
It's not like I just did this like on a wild night.
I was just like, Hey, I'm going to go in the military.
Right.
I passed selection and like that's where my vision completely was.
And identity is the perfect word.
Since I've got out, I've done a lot of different things, but one of the things I've worked
with is a lot of nonprofits, specifically with the veteran community.
And it's been interesting for me because I've seen your biggest pie pitters at Delta Force
that have had more deployments than anybody else all the way down to the people that were
in that maybe didn't deploy, but had less time.
Everybody suffers an identity crisis when they get out of some level.
Right.
And I've been very fortunate to have a lot of friends that I can speak to through my
experience, even though I did not do anything specific in terms of deployments, but you're
exactly right.
Like trying to fight through that identity piece was not a fun journey.
And because I felt like I didn't do anything per deployments, I also didn't ask for help.
It was a very tough time in my life and I'm very fortunate.
I'm super blessed for my wife and multiple friends that spoke into my life during that
time to get where I'm at today.
Yeah.
I think this is the thing.
I mean, what I see in the first-respondent professions, this can happen not only with
an injury, which almost happened with me, but also with termination, with retiring,
with promoting to an admin area.
You've lost that identity in some of those, but also that tribe.
And if you ever read Sebastian Junger's book, Tribe, but you think about us as a species,
most of our history, we have been very, very tribal in a good way.
And if you were outside that tribe, that meant ostracization, it meant death.
So inherently, it does not feel right to be taken from that tribe.
So you add that and that loss of purpose and that identity, you've got a whole Jenga tower
of reasons why, depending on how low you got, people we see, people take their own lives,
people drown in addiction.
And a lot of that is that crushing element of being snatched from that profession that
you adored.
Yeah.
Like you said, and I think military is known for being really bad about it, but it absolutely
is in the first responder world as well.
As I've moved from military to most of my friends slash connections are on the law enforcement
side specifically, but just really first responder.
I know you've had lots of people on, but the psychological side is something that I think
is not covered enough, unfortunately, in that community.
But yes.
Absolutely.
Well then walk me through, what were some of the tools that you said your family, but
what were some of the things that pulled you out of that dark place?
And then walk me through your journey into physical therapy.
Yeah.
So I'm not sure when I cleared out of that dark space, to be honest with you.
I just kind of kept putting one foot in front of the other.
Like I said, at that time my wife, she still was my wife, but at that time when I was in
a tough place, my wife was there, but then also like I said, we'd had our daughter.
Honestly, it was kind of like selection.
It was just like, just keep moving.
And I felt like there were times where I was literally on my face, maybe crawling metaphorically,
but I just have to keep going.
Because I got out and I literally was, I was like, I don't know what I'm going to go do.
Am I going to go be a teacher again?
I've had this pretty wild career change.
And honestly, at that time PT school was just kind of like a, man, you got the prerequisites
for it.
There's a PT school right there.
Let's just go see if we can apply and get in.
That's what your parents did.
I don't even want to sit here on this podcast and lie and be like, oh yeah, that's what
I always wanted to do.
It wasn't.
It was just kind of like, well, I don't know, let's see what happens.
I went into PT school and I was still super angry.
I was not in a good place, unfortunately.
When they made PT a doctorate level program, you have to do research.
And I did not want to work with geriatric patients, pediatric patients.
And honestly, I didn't really want to work with athletes, even on the orthopedic side.
I really good buddy who was actually at the state level on the SWAT team out there in
North Carolina, or I guess I go by SRT, but regardless, he was like, hey man, we're trying
to rebuild a physical fitness test.
Do you want to help us with it?
And I was like, sure.
And to be honest with you at that time, in my life, there's a pretty tough time.
Again, my moving forward was just like, I had somebody, I had the tactical world where
I was like, hey man, like I was involved with that at one point, let's just see what happens
there.
And I just kind of kept going.
When I started as a good idea fairy, just, it just kept going, just kept going.
And then it snowballed and it snowballed.
And I was very fortunate that I had a lot of people.
Sometimes what happens is I feel like with our company and the some of the success we've
had, they're like, hey man, you built this, like we need you doing this.
And that's like hard stop.
It was not, I've had so many people speak into my life.
So many people have, it feels like get to that next block, right?
That help you just take that one next step up.
And I don't know when I came out of it specifically, because I think I carried so much hurt and
anger, but then it was like a failure feeling.
And then I had so many guys that I served with that would saw what I was doing, that
would reach out to me or the guys that I stayed in touch with it.
Honestly, some of those guys just being like, Hey man, I'm really proud of you and what
you're doing.
I think those are really the pieces that hit me really hard because I wanted to be with
them, but I appreciate so much them coming back and speaking into my life.
So I think that was kind of the process that I went through for that.
And law enforcement honestly was a big piece of my life.
As much as I tried to give to them, whether it be in pro bono work or working with teams
and just trying to give my expertise for free, not expecting anything back, I formed a lot
of relationships and friendships that also spoke into my life that I think again helped
me kind of crawl out of that dark time.
You touched on fitness testing before.
I'd love to unpack that before we get into the kind of high performance shooting in that
area.
Here's how correlated to the strength and conditioning side.
There is a time and place.
If your job requires you to have, let's just for simplicity, agility, cardio, strength,
lower body strength.
Let's just say those three things.
Okay.
So agility, if I want to test to know James's agility every year, let's run the 510.5 or
the Pro Agility, right?
It's a validated test.
It's very specific to agility.
Cardio let's run the mile and a half or two miles, whatever it is that directly correlates
to your aerobic capacity or aerobic endurance, aerobic.
If we want to lower body strength, let's do a one rep max of either back squat or deadlift,
let's say, right?
Those will give me very specific information where James is on those specific measures
if those are the things that are most used in his job.
From there, have a separate test that says exactly what you're saying in CPAT.
I think that like I've seen those before.
There's a time and place to check, can you perform the job?
Right?
Yes or no.
I don't care gender, age, whatever it is, can you do the tasks that we do at every single
job?
Yes.
Okay.
He can keep his job.
If James comes to me though and says, hey man, how do I get better to be like Billy Bob?
Okay.
Well, if I don't understand that those strengths, cardio and agility are the metrics that are
going to make him good at his job, all I'm going to say is like, man, you just need to
try harder, James.
Put your fire suit on faster.
I don't know.
I'm just trying to get things up.
But these are the things I can send it back to the gym and say, hey man, your cardio is
good, your strength is good, but your agility was crap.
That seems to be probably where I, but as a strength and addition coach, I can tell
you directly, that's where I need you to be better.
There's GPP and there's the SPP side.
Right?
And I think understanding those two things, well, now as a strength coach, if I don't
understand your job, SPP is really hard for me to train.
I can just do on the GPP side.
Right?
So coming all the way back to the testing, this is what I tell teams because teams will
come to me with these good ideas.
Hey man, we're trying to bring in new recruits and we're going to test these recruits or
we want to test people on our job.
We want to run around gas mask, blah, blah, blah, whatever.
Okay.
That's good if you want to check the box and say yes or no, they're capable.
But if they don't understand what these other performance metrics are, if you don't understand
what these performance metrics are, it's going to be really hard to tell them how to go into
the gym and fix those things.
Right?
And I think early on in my career, it took a lot of time to figure out what those different
things were and working with a lot of different teams, agencies, what did the research say?
There's just so many variables.
It was not simple of like, ah, Cooper standards, that sucks.
Run around the gas mask.
Ah, that's right.
You know what I mean?
Like there's a lot of trial and error and understanding the education side, but also
the application side.
So the physical fitness testing was early on in my career.
It was just a journey.
I think what's interesting with the fire service is, I mean, for example, to get to a high
rise fire when the elevators are out, you're climbing tens and tens of stairs with a hundred
pounds on your back.
If you're doing a full high rise trip before you go to work.
And I think this is the harder thing to measure is really the muscular endurance.
It's having the fitness on the load for prolonged periods of time, whether you're crawling,
whether you're dragging, whether you're advancing hoes, you know, it's not driving your car
and all of a sudden you're in a foot pursuit.
You know, there's a lot of encumbered carries and climbs that we have to do before we even
go to work.
Yep.
No, absolutely.
And that's where again, so to be very honest, like earlier in maybe early mid career, I
would have fire departments reach out and be like, and we had pretty big ones like Dallas
Fire reach out and be like, Hey, can y'all come in and build those tests and build performance
programs just like you're doing for Dallas water, whoever.
And I would just tell them like, I don't understand y'all's job enough.
I feel like I'm doing a disservice by coming in and taking your money and being like, yeah,
here's this perfect thing that I've never tested.
I don't know enough about your job.
So it would take me time and effort, not in a bad way that I don't want to put effort
in, but it'd be time that I don't know if you have, and I don't know if I have to build,
right?
And so I think understanding those things, like you're saying the job function of it,
I hear that and I think either, you know, capacity piece or anaerobic endurance, but
then you obviously there's a strength component there.
But again, you have to be able to look at that job and say, this is what is needed and
then build it accordingly.
Whereas I feel so often, so those are, I would say more SPP.
And for maybe for listeners that don't understand, because I think you do, but SPP, the specific
physical preparedness or specialized physical preparedness or the general physical preparedness.
General just being like, just generally, are you in good health?
Generally are you in good standing?
Generally do you have strength, power, endurance, like any random person would?
Well, the specialized is kind of what I'm talking on.
And I think that's where we really tried to hang our hat as we built the company.
Specifically, specialized, what can I bring you for your job to make you better at your
job?
Not a football player, not a soccer mom, not a banker, law enforcement, special operations.
And obviously there's some bleeding over in the like military as well.
But that was the thing I think we really tried to hone in and look at as we've grown the
company.
But I do think it started in my early days because I think coming over from the military,
I was like, I got it.
It's law enforcement.
Ah, we're brothers, right?
Like I know what y'all do.
Very different, lots of differences, right?
And when I stepped into it, all this building of tests, well, it helped me understand their
world because I was coming in doing job task analysis.
I was doing consulting and I was building these tests so I could very much understand
what is it that they needed?
What were they doing?
Well, then that transformed or morphed into performance side, injury mitigation.
Well then it transferred even further than that into the shooting and the direct application
and CQB and tactics.
Just to clarify, I don't teach those, but how do you move and use a firearm in those?
Well, you can do that from the human performance side.
You can use that from the mechanics side.
But if I hadn't had that early in my career of actually building out tests, it would be
a lot of guesswork for where I'm at now, right?
It would be theory to where I've able to take objective data and show the officers, well,
this is what you're doing.
And then we see performance.
So when you're programming now, you've been through this path, is it a parallel between
a fitness component test and a job specific test combined?
Well, you know, two separate ones parallel?
When we're testing or building programs?
I'd say testing for now.
Yeah.
So now as you are helping these teams in 2024 and you've progressed, you know, what would
it look like as far as a presentation of a fitness test for a SWAT like organization?
So we don't do as much testing now.
So now we're coming in and building programs.
We have so much data testing.
It's not that we're not trying to keep up with the data, but the testing we do now is
way different.
So we will do, sorry, I said that now I'm just straight going back on what I literally
just said, because it's just way different.
Now it's implemented into a class.
So we actually still do a speed, agility, power, and then capacity, so anaerobic endurance
in our class.
So just where are you physically?
But then we've turned around and we do those same tests now with a firearm in their hands.
So we want to see how do they move with a firearm and shoot.
And that was one of the, some of the research we've done is where are you at physically?
And does that correlate to your shooting, specifically shooting with movement, which
has been very interesting.
We found some very key things that correlate.
Some of it is with the higher performance physically, and the other one is competition
shooting.
That's maybe a whole different road to go down.
But in terms of testing, it's very simple.
We have simplified it, maybe I would say from back then to now in 2024.
We've simplified it and we send out a report that says these are your strengths.
This is where you ranked out of 400 SWAT officers across the country from full time, part time
teams.
And we give those people that information back on this is exactly where you performed,
but here's how you can get better at these exact things.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, absolutely.
Whereas I think a lot of the tests that I've seen don't give them that specificity on
this is where you're weak.
Here's how you can get better at it.
So we talked before we hit record about the niche area that you found yourself combining
human movement with the shooting accuracy, the shooting skills.
So when did you start seeing that need?
And then talk to me about that.
What is the deficit of some of these trainings?
And I'm sure this is going to tie into lack of fitness standards that results in a poorer
performance with someone in law enforcement with their weapons specifically.
Right.
This is a good question.
This is actually going to go all the way back to the very first question about sports and
youth.
So I will circle back.
So once I got out, when I was finished my doctorate, I was able to go to USASOC and
I was doing all these testing.
I worked with a lot of the federal teams early on in my career.
We were building all this human performance pack.
So we were coming in and testing.
We were also building human performance packages.
As I mentioned, we would come into a lot of these federal teams and we would do a job
task analysis.
What that looks like for us, we would come in, we would see the people on their teams.
We would go into the shoot houses.
We would see what are their mission capabilities, whether it's a lot more CQB, was it where
they do a lot more vehicles, were they sitting in their vehicle stage somewhere, was it a
lot more executive protection or dignitary protection, whatever you want to call it.
We would go in and look at what was the application.
Well, then we would reverse engineer it.
We would go to the gym with them and watch what they were doing there.
We would go to the shoot house, watch what they were doing there.
So we worked with a lot of really high level teams.
I was super fortunate early in my career to be invited out to a pretty special place.
And in that world, it's a lot of word of mouth.
So there was a lot of phone calls that were made and I was able to go to some places that
I think a lot of people don't.
Specifically, one of the places in DC I was with, we went out, we were doing a job task
analysis and I'd seen it, but I hadn't identified it quite yet of what I felt like the problem
was.
But I was with this unit.
We went out and we saw what they did for vehicles.
We saw them do CQB.
I saw a lot of movement.
Exiting vehicles, running to positions, engaging, moving to a next position, engaging, lots
of movement.
Went to the shoot house, watched them run CQB inside the house.
Movement, movement, movement.
Went to the flat range, stand there.
Zero movement whatsoever.
And I'm not knocking on that unit.
I'm super close to that unit.
I still train that unit a lot today.
I mean zero.
It was all static.
It was just standing there delivering with a gun.
I was very fortunate at that time.
I'd grown a relationship with that unit and I asked the team leader, I was like, hey man,
why don't you all do movement?
And he was like, I don't know.
That's a good question.
What would you do?
And I was like hadn't thought that far ahead.
Dang it.
Right.
And so literally he was like, show up with a plan tomorrow morning.
Because we had also done a block in the gym.
We had taught and we have them running around.
We had implemented movement on everything because that's what we saw them do with their
job.
And so he was like, show up with a plan tomorrow.
And I was like, cool.
So I went back to my hotel and I jammed together what I thought was a good plan of like, how
am I getting these guys moving from things I saw?
And I was just literally reverse engineering how I saw them exit a vehicle and move, but
then really how I saw them move in CQB.
And I just tried to break it down to its simplest forms in my own experience with it of creating
pretty much straight line movements.
And then how do I move that onto the flat range?
I came in the next morning with a plan.
I tried to pretty much just build out isolated and then start stacking on and progressing.
And he goes, okay, well show us how to do it.
And I was like, all right.
I'm not bad at shooting with a gun, but at that time in my career, I was kind of like,
meh.
So I was like, hey, just pay attention to my movement.
I was a division one football player, so I could move well, but the shooting was not
so much my thing.
But I left there embarrassed, but at the same time I left there with like, hey, I think
there's something here.
And so I took it upon myself to come back and I built a whole curriculum off of that.
To where one, I built a curriculum.
Two, I started training on how to shoot and move at a higher level to where I'm at today.
And that was kind of how this all kickstarted.
To where I identified this deficiency and I saw it with him and I was fortunate to have
a good relationship with them.
But I started thinking back to all the other units I was training with, whether it be from
a part-time local special operations unit to a full-time, very high level federal special
operations unit, I saw it at all of them.
So then from there is where this two-day class that I built that really ignited to where
we are now, that's where that class came from.
That was kind of my realization of like, hey, I think there's something here that has not
been done.
And if it has, as I've advanced in my career, there's maybe one or two places it's done
on some variation, but not to what we're doing at that level.
Obviously, I come from the fire world.
I've done some weapons classes, but I'm still an absolute white belt.
Maybe I've got one little stripe on my belt.
That's about it.
But I've obviously had these conversations with a lot of people from the military, from
law enforcement.
And one of the ones that really stuck out early in the podcast was Lieutenant Colonel
Dave Grossman.
And he talked about one famous, infamous shooting where a police officer was killed and he had
the brass in his hand because of the training scars of being at the range static and being
told, you know, pick up your brass so they would hold their brass.
What were you seeing kind of nationally when you start getting to the law enforcement side
of the training scars of simply qualifying in a static range once or twice a year?
Oh boy.
Yeah.
So that story is infamous.
That is not the only one though, right?
And so yeah, I'm not going to identify that team.
But interesting enough where this was like this concept was really, really loud to me
was again, I'm still early in my career.
I'm figuring out like the gun piece and where it supplies to all the human performance stuff
I'm doing.
Are other people doing this?
You know, all this kind of because I was trying to like, is there a template I can follow?
No, I'm not finding one.
So you're trailblazing at that point.
You're learning a lot of wrongs and some rights.
But I was training with this team, similar concept.
They would shoot fire three rounds standing, then they would drop down kneeling and they
would fire three rounds in that one, moved to a different position.
And I'm not kidding you.
I went to this team.
I was teaching, I was doing actual that fitness and the shooting testing.
I wasn't even teaching shooting at that point.
A dude literally had his jaw wired shut.
He was at his house.
These two people, he lived off of a road obviously, but I kind of want to say it was a highway
firm call on some acreage.
Two people were road raging, drove through his front gate, were chasing each other around
in the front yard.
One was shooting at the other.
The SWAT officer gets his gun, a Glock 17 for those of you who don't know has at least
17, I guess 18 if you have plus one, goes out into his front yard, thinks that he's
going to the person that's in distress and he walks up and knocks with the gun in the
lower, but knocks on the window and says, Hey, are you okay?
You okay?
That person thinking he was the person that was chasing them, shooting at him, shoots
him in the face.
They speed off to both of the vehicles and this guy, it shot him through the jaw and
out the other side, grabs his gun.
One, two, three drops to a knee.
One, two, three.
And to this day, I still remember this guy vividly because he's talking to me with a
large mouth like this.
And I did not even at that time know that story that you're referencing.
I've since heard it many times, but I remember being like, how is that possible?
He had 17 rounds and he fired six in the exact same course of fire.
And I remember just being like, and talking to them and they had identified this in their
training.
This team was pretty progressive.
And they were like, dude, till that happened, we did not understand how static we were and
how much of a training scar we had built in our guys.
He didn't even remember it.
He just straight defaulted.
I mean, he'd been shot in the face, so I'm sure he's in shock, but he literally is defaulted
to one, two, three, one, two, three.
And I remember it early in my career.
That is since advanced to where I did, I thought that's just a part time local SWAT team.
Man, I'll tell you straight up, like the stuff that we're going in and teach every single
unit we've ever taught, I've yet to meet one that's like, we have full training days like
this that are fully focused movement because that's what we do more than anything in our
job.
You go on YouTube and look for officer of offshooting.
Good, bad, any of them.
I don't like to throw out random numbers because I am pretty data driven, but I would guess
easy, easy 75%.
Look closer at 90% officer of all shootings when you watch them, probably the officer,
but definitely the officer and the bad guy are moving.
And so as I go work with all these law enforcement agencies, I'm like, why is nobody moving?
Why is it?
Okay.
James asked me the question.
Why is no one moving?
Okay, here's why.
When I asked that question, literally the answer I'm given is safety, time and or resources.
And those are the answers.
And it's like, okay, so help me understand this.
In the training academy, now advanced to SWAT.
Well, we don't teach movement.
We don't teach a lot of movement because of safety.
Sorry, hang on a second.
So we don't teach movement for safety, but then we're like, yeah, go out on the street.
It should be fine.
And then 75 to 90%.
And again, I'm making those numbers up.
That's not documented anywhere that I know of anyway.
The officer is moving.
That seems like a problem to me.
I just realized that's why they shout freeze because they're not trained to hit moving
people.
Now it all makes sense.
Seriously, hey, stay right there.
Don't move.
This makes sense.
I remember the paper.
No.
You know, like I'll joke aside, like I, early on, like I, that's the answer I was given.
We don't have the time for it.
We don't have the amount of bullets to shoot and it's for safety reasons.
Early on, that's what I was told.
And I still, people will say that to me when I, I don't so much ask anymore because I kind
of, I feel like at least I've had enough experience.
I kind of know the answer, but what I really realized, I think the bigger deficiency is
just education.
They don't know.
They don't know how.
What teams that do implement movement, what they do is they say, Hey, here's the course
of fire.
Start right here.
You run over here, fire five rounds.
Okay.
Well, you're just telling somebody to move and shoot.
You're not actually teaching them how to move.
So go to the fire world.
And again, please give me some grace here because I don't know anything about fires,
but I'm sure there is a way that you should carry.
Firefighters are amazing breacher's right?
A lot of the breaching in the SWAT world comes from the fire world.
So how to carry a halogen is just as example, right?
There's a way that's more efficient to run with that thing than another, right?
Trying to balance it on my finger versus like two hands and running with it, right?
Is it going to be more efficient?
How to actually use that tool.
There's body mechanics that make way more sense how to use that thing effectively than
not, right?
The same things apply with, with firearms.
There's more efficient ways to do it than less efficient ways.
And I think some of those have been identified in as an example, mechanically, how to hold
the firearm.
So we don't shoot teacup anymore.
Bang, bang, bang.
We shoot two hands on like this, right?
Well, why?
Because it's more efficient in managing that recoil.
So there's things that we've done that with in the, I'm just going to blanket tactical
world, whether it be fire or law enforcement or EMS.
The thing that I saw as massive efficiency though is like, no one had taught them how
to move.
When people, one of the rebuttals I'll get, well, I've been moving for 30 years.
That doesn't mean it's right.
Like that doesn't mean like Tom Brady's been moving for 30 years or whoever name, whatever
NFL player, but they still have a strength and conditioning coach.
They still have a quarterback coach that helped them move better.
And that was where I saw the deficiency was it wasn't so much from a safety thing.
I think safety was an out for a lot of the training side.
It was more, they didn't know how to train it.
And I think that's one of the big things that we've kind of come in with is, well, that
is our expertise, is movement.
We understand the biomechanics.
We understand kinesiology.
We understand how to move mechanically well.
Well, now where I'm just teaching you how to do with a firearm in your hands and the
implications it has when you do it well versus whenever you don't move well, you can still
shoot just what problems are you going to run into?
Does that make sense?
It does completely.
Yeah.
What about the relationship between what we talked about earlier, all the pillars of performance,
the aerobic, the anaerobic, the flexibility or mobility?
What were the correlations between someone who already was moving well, the same in a
prior occupation, an athlete, whatever, and maybe one of the less conditioned officers?
Did you see a pretty linear kind of relationship between physical ability and actual accuracy
on the range?
We did.
So the more highly trained from a physical fitness perspective were our top performers
on shooting.
However, Kama, we looked at, like you said, a lot of those independent variables.
We also have a survey that we've, I'm not sure what number we're up to, probably six
or 700 survey that we've, excuse me.
We capture a lot of data.
How many rounds do you fire a month?
How many ranges, excuse me, how many days on the range do you train movement?
Who builds your workouts?
What you're eating or dietary habits?
It's a battery of questions.
All that to say, the people that performed higher performed higher.
We could not isolate out a single variable.
However, Kama, we could not isolate out a single variable.
So the correlation that I, this is kind of Jake's pulling, there was one, there's a couple,
I think agility or speed, I can't remember which one of those was one of them.
So the better speed or agility you had, I'm pretty sure it's agility because it's more
technical skill.
You also had higher, but the other big one was competition shooting.
If you have ever, or if you can, or you shoot competitions, so like shooting matches, we
saw that they had a higher performance on the dynamic shooting.
So that was our biggest indicator.
If you out of 10 people, if I want to say it's a 75%, if you say yes, there's a 75%
chance you were going to be in the top 70 in this top 75 percentile.
So 75 and 75, but the top 25%, there's a 70% chance you were going to be in that top 25%
if you have shot matches before.
If you're not a big shooter, you may not know this, but that is a massive debate slash what's
what I'm looking for.
Argument hate, hates maybe a little strong in the tactical world and the competition
world.
There's a lot of bickering about like, Oh, when those paper targets are shooting back
at just I'll start running matches.
Okay.
It's a training skill.
It's just another way to train regardless.
I'd address that is one of the biggest things we saw in terms of performance.
Why do I think that all those other metrics, maybe we couldn't isolate one versus another.
What I personally think is if you're dedicated to your physical fitness, you're probably
going to be dedicated to your firearms training as well.
And that is what we saw.
It was not so much a very specific one that you, because I would love to be like, Hey,
James, great.
You're a white belt with a stripe in shooting.
If you want to be a brown belt, all you got to do is focus on speed work.
Right?
Like I would love to be able to do that.
Unfortunately, that's not what we found.
We found if you go shoot matches, it's a very solid start.
And we found, I think it was agility, but it wasn't the strong of a correlation.
Now when you say matches, I'm assuming it is these dynamic shooting matches that I see
versus that Turkish gangster.
Like they say raw dog in it.
Yeah, definitely not the Turkish gangster shooting static and his cool pose.
No, yeah.
So the matches generally that we saw or we classified it as there's USPSA, there's IDPA,
there's IPSIC, which is international version.
And then we even classify in there the tactile games, which is a newer shooting competition.
But really it's USPSA and IDPA, I would say are the big ones.
There's three gun, two gun, stuff like that as well.
They're generally because they are, they're teaching these shooters to come in and train
shooting and movement at a very high level.
And as much as guys don't like it, it's a great training skill.
Doesn't mean one or the other, but it's a good skill if that's your job requires shooting.
Absolutely.
Well, going back to a comment you made about the resistance for some of this training,
because people quote unquote might get hurt, which I've heard all the time.
And you take a step back and you see the likelihood of injury or in law enforcement's world getting
killed.
If you're not training with realism, as far outweighs a twisted ankle or whatever might
happen or will happen, this is a dynamic training.
That backward mentality has always driven me crazy that this kind of like lowering of
standards and softening of training to try and kind of please some HR department rather
than setting our first responders up for success, like an MMA where the cage should feel relatively
easy compared to the gym.
Yeah.
No, you're spot on.
I think it's a double edged sword.
So in the, in the, in the tattoo world, one of the common phrases I've heard for quite
some time is train like you fight.
Right.
Um, I think there's been some good things that came from that, but I think there's been
a lot of bad things too.
Right.
So in the double edged sword piece, there is that train like you fight mentality of
understanding what is it that we're training towards.
But then the negative pieces is hang on a second though, we're, we're, we're not in
the fight right now.
We need to be training for those specific pieces.
So use that, the fight to identify the most common variables, but then we've got to go
train those variables independently.
Right.
Because one of the things I see sometimes is agencies and teams will be like, Hey, well,
we had this officer involved shooting or we had this one, one, the operation, right.
The hostage rescue that went bad or went right or whatever.
Right.
Well, then they go and they get so focused on and they, they build every, they're training
around this and it's never that, but the, these concepts and it's like, hang on a second,
come back to this variable, these, the independent variables and then stack those variables.
And then we go into more of that realistic training.
Right.
But there's a process that has to be done.
So often, and this is not just a Jake thing.
I I've trained, I've been very fortunate because the movement that I've implemented into the
shooting community has taken off, but I've been very fortunate because it's afforded
me the opportunity to train with some of the highest level shooters out there because,
Hey, surprise, surprise.
They want to find that edge.
They want to find that next step.
And so I've been able to go in with some of these shooters and they're like, Hey, show
me what you got.
Right.
Because it is very mechanically driven that I don't think anybody was doing at the time.
Well, from going and training with these high level shooters, it allowed me to be a better
shooter.
Right.
Cause I don't want to go out and just get dusted by these guys.
So I want to come out and not look like a dingling.
Well, what I found was these guys, this is where their training lives.
They train the fundamentals so they can do it on demand every time at a fast speed.
Well, what I see with some of these agencies, the train, like you fight mentality, they
only want to look for this up here.
And so they're not getting good at anything.
They're just getting good at that one baby scenario.
Well, now we move that to the human performance side.
We were seeing the same thing, man.
I got to train the fight gone bad, right?
Everybody's heard of fight gone bad.
I got to train the fight gone bad.
Well, I got it.
Maybe that is a real scenario, but right now you're running on two hours of sleep over
the last week.
You're going through a divorce.
You got an officer involved shooting the week before that.
And now you're walking into the gym and you're like, I got to get better.
We'll train like you fight, fight gone bad.
I'm going to tell you what's probably going to happen.
You have, I'm not a fortune teller, but you probably have an injury in your future.
Right.
And so I think that there's this, this balance between exactly what you're saying.
Cause I also agree on the opposite side of it.
We have the HR command side, they're like, we just need to sign that piece of paper saying
that he's in, he or she is in good standing.
You're not helping them get closer to when they have to perform at that fight.
You're actually giving them a crutch because you're not pushing them and challenging them.
But on the flip side of it again, is that other piece.
So there's this, there's balance that we've had to learn of how do we train this person
that wants to go hard in the paint and how do we push them at the same time and prepare
them for when that situation comes.
I think that's where the worlds must collide.
Right.
Like I have to have my expertise and how to do the human performance.
I need my expertise and apply the application of shooting to the movement.
But at the same time, like if I don't understand their world and what is required, that's a
massive piece missed because as much as everybody wants to be pipe hitters and say that they
run CQB all day and do all these cool things, there's a better chance they're going to pull
their hamstring because they've been sitting in a car for a long time and all of a sudden
have to jump out and chase somebody for that long.
And so anyway, there's just a lot of pieces there.
The dynamic is not clear cut.
And I think too many people have tried to make it black and white.
I think that there's a lot of gray there.
And if you don't understand both sides though, you're more than likely going to miss a piece
in my opinion.
You mentioned two hours sleep and people listen to this.
I talk about sleep deprivation all the time and I always talk, especially when it comes
to law enforcement, not the black or the white cause, not the ones, the George Floyd or the
one where the police officer did nothing wrong.
It was a complete good shoot, but the gray area ones, the car that did run from them
and then the teenager panicked and now he's reaching his glove box to get a driving license,
but they think it's a gun.
It's those kind of thought processes that have happened.
No one ever says, when did that officer last sleep, were they forced to say another shift?
So talk to me about your observation of the environment that law enforcement works in.
In the fire, their hours are absolutely insane.
But in law enforcement, you think about 10, 12, whatever they've worked, and then you
think about the recruitment crisis.
We are so overstaffed in law enforcement, a lot of these men and women are being forced
to work even more, so arguably are hugely under slept.
So what have you observed of that in general?
And then the impact of that on their ability to perform at this high level that you're
trying to squeeze out of them?
Yeah, that's a really good question.
I'll pick the low hanging fruit first.
Man, which I know you know the answer, but there have been legitimate studies done on
lack of sleep deprivation or sleep deprivation, lack of sleep.
It is literally like you've had X, I don't remember the exact formula, but X number of
sleep you have, X number of hours you have not slept, number of alcoholic beverages you've
had, like literally is the correlation.
It's been shown, proven, like this is not a Jake, good idea.
So that low hanging fruit there of like, if you think that sleep is not a factor, you're
just straight wrong, fact, objective.
When you take a look at law enforcement and the job that they have taken on, it is not
easy.
I have worked with lots and lots of special operations units.
I've worked with special operations units that have been an officer of all shootings
that have shot, that have unfortunately had to shoot people more than others, right?
I've worked with special operations units that have been under very high profile scrutiny.
They've been, had a critical eye on them from the world, social media, the media, at the
local level and the federal level.
Here's Jake's two cents, and I'm not trying to be politically correct, this is truly how
I feel.
This is unfortunately, fortunately, depends on how you look at it, how I live my life.
I would say that I'm not a guy that lives on either one of the eight ends.
I'm the guy that's somewhere here in the middle, generally in my life.
I think that the, it's very easy to armchair quarterback.
I think that there has been a lot of, as you said, whether it be George Floyd or a lot
of these high profile cases, yeah, there are black and white, wrong and right.
I don't disagree with that.
But what I do think is there are a lot of pieces of information there that from the
outside viewer, if you have no context to their world, it's very easy to armchair quarterback
and not understand sleep deprivation.
They are humans too.
They have personal things going on in their house.
They haven't had sleep.
Hey, I'm just saying, you know, the whole like cut funding.
Okay, well, they already don't have enough training that they should have, whether it
be from a financial standpoint, bullets, resources, time, however you want to look at it, staffing.
Some of it's like who you got, who you got, right?
Yeah, I understand we want these higher standards on this kind of thing, but are you going to,
unless we're going to start cloning certain people, that's impossible.
The person standing in front of us is not that.
There's so many different variables there.
When I personally look at shooting and I personally go in and train officers, whether it be human
performance or the shooting side, I, my teaching style is, is I want to be along beside you.
I want to, I want to lift you up.
I don't go in and be like, you suck.
Even whenever they don't perform well on a specific test, I try to use as an education
point to hopefully lift them up because I think there's plenty enough people that can
easily pick on why they're not doing certain things.
But when you look at shooting and I've taught special operations at, I mean, all the levels,
here's what I try to tell people.
If you're a full time team, full time SWAT team, whether it be federal or local, you
run probably more operations.
So your op tempo is higher.
So you're go, go, go, go, go.
Because of those, you depend upon the structure of the team.
Full time teams generally have maybe one that's in training, one that's standby and one that's
operational.
Doesn't mean that you just get to twiddle your thumbs when you're out, we're not operational.
When you're on standby, if you're standby, you can't drive outside of a certain amount
of limit.
You may not be able to have certain amount of alcoholic beverages because all of a sudden
you may not be on standby anymore.
If you're on the training one, training is a very big word.
Training may be firearms, maybe jujitsu, maybe administrative, maybe less lethal.
There's so many different factors.
So your full time teams are busy is my point.
Your part time teams, the National Tactile Officer Association, the NTOA is the national
SWAT organization.
They have standards for what is a different tiered teams essentially.
If you're a part time team, roughly, you get eight hours, twice a month.
So one day every other week, that's your training you get.
Additionally, you have a full other job probably, detective, patrol officer, whatever it may
be.
I'm just going to use a very simple example.
I know people that were there, but I'm not going to go deep into it.
But Uvalde is an example.
You take part time teams, you take officers that have a lot of things in their life.
And I'm not, just to be clear, I'm not giving them an out.
They made decisions that they had chosen to do that job.
They made decisions not to go in and that was absolutely 100% wrong.
There's a lot of mistakes, but I'm just for context, right?
You take very SWAT teams, train eight hours every other week.
And then we say, Super Bowl happens.
This is the big event and you got to be on your A game and be at the top of your field
in that moment.
No matter what's going on in your life.
However, comma, look at the other side.
This is the example I give.
I don't care what your NFL team is.
I live here in Dallas.
I am not a Cowboys fan.
I just don't really watch NFL, but Dak Prescott is the quarterback there currently, I think.
Pretty sure.
Nine percent sure.
Hey, you're going to get eight hours to train every other week.
And then we're going to wake you up at a random time to play in the Super Bowl against whoever.
Probably going to be a little less hard on Dak if he does not perform well.
Our expectation is to be kind of like, listen, I'm not trying to get officers outs.
There are a significant number of officers, guys that work with me.
There are part time teams that have families, do competitions that train their absolute
butts off to be the highest level operators that I've seen.
So I'm not trying to get people outs, but at the same time, to your question, I think
there's a whole lot of variables that if you don't know those, I think everyone needs to
chill out a little bit and be maybe a little bit like take a back seat and be like, hey,
man, there's a lot there that I don't know.
I don't understand about their world.
I don't understand about human physiology, the stress, the impacts are there.
Again, there's other people should be holding them accountable.
I'm not disagreeing.
I'm just saying to your point, I think there's a lot of gray there that a lot of people don't
understand.
And sometimes that's hard because we see it happen in the news and yeah, it's frustrating.
It's angering.
It's sad.
We have a lot of those emotions, but also want to encourage people.
There are a lot of officers.
I've trained thousands.
There's a lot of officers and put in a whole hell of a lot of time to be leaders in their
community and be out protecting you and others to their whole heartedness.
So anyway, I know there's a very long answer, but I think that's a very complex question,
which I do appreciate you bringing it up because I think a lot of people just see it black
and white.
That guy's an idiot.
I can't believe you do that.
Right?
That's just not how I view it.
As I've trained more and more units, I just don't think it's that clear black and white
in terms of the amount of variables that are impacting their performance.
See, this is, I agree 100% what you've just said.
And this is the thing when you heard the defund, which was obviously the most ridiculous statement,
it's the opposite.
And the same with the fire service.
We've got a recruitment crisis because they're still working the same kind of work weeks
that they work when they simply just ran fires and they were in the house, playing cards
and petting the Dalmatian 80, 90 years ago.
But now that's not the fire service.
Now we do EMS and everything the police can't handle, it's the fire department, all of it.
But when I look at law enforcement with the firefighter's eyes, one to a car is insanity,
not training because of a budget, air quotes, but then you have an avalde.
How many millions and millions and millions of dollars is that going to cost that city?
You know what I mean?
One complaint or one cruiser that crashes into a minivan full of kids, whatever it is,
when we are under slept and under staffed, the possibility of a mistake being made is
exponential.
So understanding the proactive investing at the front, not only you really forging performance
in the people, you're also avoiding these freaking tragedies that is going to cost your
county or city millions of dollars.
Yep.
No, you're 100%.
I could not agree more.
There's the upfront pieces.
Denver, it's been a while since I've talked to any of them out there and or looked at
the studies, but Denver PD and the fire department years back, either definitely when I was in
grad school, but they brought in a PT and a strength coach, hired them, the city hired
them.
They saved millions of dollars with a capital M millions in injuries and healthcare costs.
I understand, like we're talking about like those are the, that's low hanging fruit.
How many agencies could do that?
It would be astronomical.
It would give more jobs into the medical field.
Like it could be huge.
Well, now we're talking about those same types of preventative things we could be doing,
but now, and those are people like rolling their ankles probably, right?
Well, now we're talking about things that are preventative of like firearms training,
again, breaching, whatever y'all call it in the fire service.
Like think about the problems we could solve with the upfront training if we invested that
time and money into it.
And listen, man, I'm frustrated about it.
And I think a lot of people that don't know, they should understand that they don't because
maybe they're not involved.
But I also, again, on the flip side, I'm working, my 2025 schedule is pretty chaotic, we'll
say in the amount of courses that we're teaching and being brought in by agencies across the
country that are seeing, hey, we need to, we need to get them training.
Like we need, it is better training than maybe what we were doing.
Right.
And I do think we've been very fortunate because we're kind of, we allow for a chief or administration
to double dip because they're like, ooh, these guys not only do human performance, but they
also do shooting.
And so we can kind of, they can double dip and it's advantageous for us, but it also
allows us to stay our lane.
Right.
And so listen, there's good things that are happening.
And I try to focus on that piece, but I'm not going to sit here and lie to you and be
like, yeah, it's all daisies, James, like everybody's just doing great things out.
Like, no, it's a progress.
I do think progress is being made.
And I think the right people need to keep on pushing.
Cause I think we're heading in the right direction.
At least I hope.
Yeah, I agree.
I mean, there's a shift, even the fire service from the rest and recovery side.
And this, the beginning of a revolution now, which is going to sweep across the country
whether they like it or not, you know, either you go along with it or you can't hire a single
person because no one wants to work for you because everyone around us figured it out
and created a better environment.
I want to go back to the performance side, you know, one more area before we do some
closing questions.
When I think of, you know, efficiency of movement, cardiovascular fitness, being used to being
discomforts of being in that pain cave.
Sometimes I think about a calm mind.
I think about strong breath control, which I would imagine again is imperative for accurate
shooting and good decision-making.
So talk to me about the breath and the clarity of mind side of this movement piece that you're
bringing in.
Yeah, that's a good question.
So, I don't tap it, let me say this, breathing is absolutely an important piece, but it's
not as specific as how we're applying it as, you know, in, out, in, out, squeeze type of
thing, it's not like that.
And so we don't cover that as much.
Honestly, more so we speak about it more on the human performance side, whether it be
box breathing or different ways for a, I don't want to say, oh my gosh, sorry, like paracetamol,
like a calming, but just more of an awareness, a mindfulness, that's what I was looking for.
More of a mindfulness piece, exercise, breathing.
What was the other thing you just said?
I'm so sorry.
That's okay.
Well, what I was alluding to was when you're static, you know, you're just thinking about,
you know, in, exhale, squeeze, but when you're getting people to move, that's, now they might
already have an elevated heart rate and you know, there might be an elevated stress level
because you're having to move and look for a target now.
So I would imagine there's a great opportunity to start training that realistically.
Right, right.
Yeah.
So some of the research on that, and I can't remember the shooters where they're on skis,
nori skis, and then they shoot rifles that are precision rifle.
I can't, biathlon, I think it's what it's called.
Yeah.
Biathlon.
In the Olympics, they have some very good research on that of higher, VO2 max, higher
success and accuracy.
To be honest with you, we don't do that as much for the reason of the shootings that
these officers are getting in when they're moving CQB.
I don't want to say it's something you can't control, but it's something that, well, you
can't control from a physiological perspective, physiological response, but training it on
the outside, the things that we're working on more is mechanics.
So how are you moving efficiently?
And those mechanics are going to allow you to have a more stable shooting platform.
Honestly, the thing we train probably the most is visually, visually and body mechanics.
So helping guys and girls understand when they're moving, what is the impact that you're
putting into that firearm and therefore what is going to happen when you pull that trigger.
Right.
Are you familiar with overspeed training?
I'm not.
Okay.
So overspeed training in the human performance world, sometimes strength coaches will use
it.
So we're going to sprint 15 yards, let's just say, and we use a radar gun and we say,
ah, good job.
James ran 10 miles an hour.
Okay.
And then we turn around and we put the bungee cord on you and we slingshot you across and
you run 12 miles an hour.
Right.
So it's overspeed training.
We're assisting you in that same movement.
Overspeed training says we hope that there's a neurological adaptation that, and this is
not how it works, but just for simplicity sake, your body, the neuromuscular connection
understands in those motor patterns, ooh, James just moved at 12 miles an hour, 12 miles
per hour.
That's what it feels like.
If there's a neurological adaptation, we unhook you, you sprint and you run at 11 miles an
hour because we're over emphasizing the stimulus on those muscles.
So we're saying like, ooh, he can go at a faster pace.
And we kind of find what that next gear is, if you will, right?
Again for everybody listening, I understand that is not how it works.
I'm just giving a rough example because then from there, you've got to go train, continue
to train that one, but two, you still got to do all the other individual pieces, speed,
power, strength, whatever.
What we found on the shooting side though is if you're standing there as static and
you're shooting slow, you never move.
Well, visually what your body, the sensory information you're taking in, it's shooting
from a stable platform, very, very slow, right?
Because that's how we're shooting in the range.
You'll look at an officer getting their shooting, they're moving and they're shooting fast.
Visually the brain is like, holy crap, what is happening?
The body at that point has not felt movement.
It has not felt shooting fast.
And so it's just screaming like, oh no.
It's literally a Jesus take the wheel moment.
We're hoping for the best here, right?
And so when we built this program, whenever I tried to look at it, I said, okay, in CQB,
in my opinion, for everybody, I apologize because I've been saying this all the time,
CQB, close quarters combat, so how you would clear structure as a tactical unit.
I tried to just break it down and look at it and said, okay, all right, let me think
here.
There's decision making, there's movement and there's shooting.
If I'm going to isolate three variables, okay, well, decision making to me, you need experience
and you need somebody experience in teaching that.
That's on me.
I'm pretty good at shooting.
I'm really good at movement.
So I tried to hyper focus on those two variables.
When I started looking at how to do that, we took in that class, we take people and
we move them in the gym, just like an athlete would.
We try to help them build those motor patterns, the motor patterns they need in the house.
So forward, lateral, diagonal, all these different movements.
You watch an officer, they get some shooting, bang, bang, bang, they're looking for cover
and they run in a backwards diagonal, right?
Sweet, I can do that in the gym.
I can teach them how to move in that direction.
Just like Tom Brady or whatever professional athlete you like.
Strength coach says, hey, here's the movements.
How do I build that in the gym?
How do I train them in the gym?
Build those motor patterns and those mechanics.
Then we do the exact same thing with firearm.
I check off, essentially I built a baseline test.
It says, yup, they have the accuracy, they can do it.
From there, everything is over speed training.
They've proven they have the fundamentals.
So we shoot faster so the brain can process visually what are they seeing and then we
add in the movement because that's another stressor in intensity modifiers, what I call
them.
So we add in those pieces, but we teach them how to move so that once they go move in a
house, the movement is secondary.
The movement, the brain's like, hey bro, I got it.
I've trained this.
And everybody's like, yeah, I've been doing that for 30 years.
Yes, you have, but if it's wrong movement, your body's still chirping at you.
It's like, I don't like this position.
Change your mechanics.
You're like, dude, that's what you got.
Figure it out.
Your brain's having that conversation.
It may feel like it's secondary, but it's not and if you think it, what we found though,
let's get impact or shooting because you're taking away a piece of that Venn diagram.
And so that's really what we focus on when we come in and from the strength and conditioning
side is how do we clean up those mechanics?
How do we help them move better?
Well then as we progress, we also added in the shooting piece so we can cover hopefully
two of those three circles of decision making, movement and shooting.
Well, we can knock out movement and shooting and really help them run those on the background,
but we use over speed training.
So we're not tapping into so much the breathing or the heart rate.
It's really about those mechanics and the vision to allow them to be in more control.
What about strength?
How much does that factor in?
Obviously the larger the weapon, the heavier it is.
Where is that kind of sweet spot between needing to be strong enough and obviously having excessive
strength?
Oh man, that's a great question.
I don't want to say not at all because that obviously is not correct, but I would say
it's less.
However comma, if you have a heavy kit and a heavy firearm, yeah, you're going to believe
that energy is going to bleed off quicker, right?
If you don't have the strength to sustain it.
But generally, especially from the law enforcement side, a couple of different variable or situations
maybe I should say.
Yeah, if you're on a surrounded call out and you're standing out there for hours, most
of those guys aren't standing at the ready.
They're normally placing their firearm on something and assisting.
Excuse me.
If you're clearing a structure, generally it's pretty quick, right?
Again, I understand for some listener that's going to be like, no, well I did this.
Like I got it.
There's outside variables or there's outliers.
But for the most, they're generally quick performance.
Also, in my experience, I can generally go work with a team and I can real quick identify
the experienced person because the experienced person, instead of having 15 mags across their
chest, they have two because they know in the 20 years they've been on that team, in
the however many shootings, they've never needed more than 60 rounds or whatever it
may be.
Right?
And so there is a strength piece, just like all the performance metrics, but I would say
there's a lot of experience there too, in terms of the job applicability, which I think
again, from the human performance side, if you don't know that you're missing a piece.
Right?
So from the strength side, yeah, it's a factor, but I think I would say it's something that's
focused on maybe a little more than it should be.
How about that?
I think that's something I've realized as you become an older tactical athlete, it's
that efficiency, that kind of young bull, old bull mentality.
Oh man, perfect word.
Perfect word efficiency.
Yeah.
I completely agree.
Well, before we wrap up and go to some closing questions, are there any other areas of what
you're bringing to the law enforcement profession that we haven't covered?
Do you want to make sure you slide in there?
No, man.
I think that the human performance side, we still program for a lot of teams.
We do a lot of consulting on whether it be testing and stuff like that, but also instructor
development.
Although I think that we do a really good job on it, but I think that can you bring
in an expert to be more efficient or can you limp along and go get some certification,
but really it's a weekend long course versus the person that has six years of graduate
and undergraduate under their belt kind of thing.
So I think that's an efficiency piece, but I understand coming back to the system of
funding.
Obviously I would say it's the main one, but that to be said, I think the human performance
piece, I think maybe I've underplayed it a little bit.
We did a lot of testing.
We program for a lot of federal and local agencies at the training academies and at
the PD.
We build our strength and conditioning programs and I think I'd say I'm a little biased, but
I think we're pretty good at it.
I think we very much understand the tactical community and what is needed and we're still
learning, but I'm just saying I think we have a lot of really good experience and our coaches
either have a master's or a doctorate.
I do not think education is end all be all, but I think it's something I do believe is
important.
And then obviously the shooting side, we do a lot of teaching shooting and right now I
would say that's our, it's been our big foot in the door to a lot of agencies because again,
kind of as I said earlier, chiefs and our administration is like, Hey, I can double
dip with these guys, but I also see it on the other side where sometimes the people
that push back on the human performance, they're like, Oh yeah, I'll go to a shooting movement
class.
Well, then they get there and they're like, Oh, I see how human performance is impactful
to my shooting.
Right.
And I think that's a bridge we've gapped pretty well.
And so yeah, and then everybody in between, honestly, if it deals with one of those two,
we've been fortunate.
So I would say those are our main two things I want to push out.
And so yeah, I appreciate the time and the opportunity on it for sure.
Beautiful.
Well, the first of the closing questions, is there a book or are there books that you
love to recommend?
It can be related to our discussion today or completely unrelated.
Ooh, that's a really good one.
Grit by Angela Duckworth.
I would not say is related specifically, but it's one that I read that I pull a lot of
my personal life from, but also I've seen it a lot in my professional life with just
to where I am at.
There's a lot of pieces there, but one of the things that I will say that I think I
took a lot from is the person that's, she talks a lot about being talented and maybe
not having to have to fight through literally grit to get to that end goal.
I think I see a lot of those high performers sometimes, and I think that they forget that
piece.
That's always a push.
It's always a grind, no matter where you're at.
But grit by Angela Duckworth is a really good one.
Gosh darn it.
I cannot think of the name of the book, but it's a business book and it talks specifically
the big takeaway that it's got a lot of really great points in there, but do less and obsess.
Oh my gosh, that's going to drive me nuts.
I can't think of the name of the book, but do less and obsess.
And here's what that means.
I see a lot of people, especially in the law enforcement, firefighter, all of it.
You have a lot of things you have to be good at, right?
Specifically SWAT, you have to be less lethal.
You have to be lethal.
You have to be sniper, assaulter, breacher, all these different things.
Sometimes you need to do less of those things and really focus and hone in on what is that
skill I need to be good at right now.
Then move on to the next one.
What you've maybe not mastered it, but you've got it to where you need it.
It's where I see so many people get wrapped up in so many different things.
In the book, just to clarify, in the book what he talks on specifically is companies
that try to do 50 different things.
He's like, nope, do less and obsess at this one.
Once you're really, really good at it, bring in another facet of the business and maybe
it's Italian.
But I use it whenever I teach.
That I think is really important of making sure we're honing in on, am I good here before
I move on.
Beautiful, what about films and documentaries?
That are impactful or what are you like?
Oh, that I like.
Oh, so me and the kids are going through Lord of the Rings at the moment.
The kids love Lord of the Rings.
I am a huge office fan and if someone's not, I can't trust them.
No, I'm just kidding.
But no, I don't have anything that's been super impactful in my life, but I always run
in the office in the background if I'm doing work or jamming on programs or something like
that.
But no, outside of that, me and the kids are going through Lord of the Rings and the wife
are going through Lord of the Rings at the moment.
Have you seen the British office?
I started, I couldn't fully just commit to it though.
I never made it all the way through.
Are you a fan of it?
Well, it's a different humor.
I like both of them, but yeah, Ricky Gervais, he's special that one.
I prefer the British one, but I thought the American one was great too.
All right, all right.
Nice.
All right.
Well, the next question, is there a person you'd recommend to come on this podcast as
a guest to speak to the first responders, military and associated professions of the
world?
I'm thinking of some of the other shooting instructors that I know that I think have
been super impactful in the law enforcement, specifically community.
And that's a long list of guys, but I think that there's a lot of shooting instructors.
So there's some guys I've seen on the podcast that I think have really cool resumes, but
maybe don't do as much on the shooting side that some others do currently.
But there's a group of guys that I feel like are really leading the charge right now on
making a difference in the shooting side, which is obviously a piece that I think the
world is very hyper aware of any time a gun goes bang from a police officer or people
finding out.
I think that'd be something really cool to have on the podcast of some of the other guys
that are teaching shooting as well.
There's a long list of those Mark Smith, Joe Farewell, Ben Steger, Matt Pranka.
There's a lot of people there.
So yeah, I don't have a specific one for you, but I think that'd be something kind of cool
that you could bring on.
Brilliant.
All right.
Well, then the last question before we make sure where people can find you and an extremist,
what do you do to decompress?
That's a really good question.
So I'm pretty big in box breathing, especially when I'm laying at night trying to go to sleep
and I have a million things in my brain.
But the other things I do to decompress, honestly, man, is just I really try to hyper focus on
time with my family.
My wife also travels for work.
She's a director for a device company.
And I feel like one thing is we've grown through both of our careers is quality time over quality
quantity.
I see a lot of people that have a lot more quantity together as a family, but I think
we've really learned to make sure that that quality is there.
There is gosh, man, holy smokes.
I can feel it creeping up my chest as I even try to say it.
I love spending time with my kids and my family, probably more than anything else.
Seeing the next generation and trying to be an influence as much as I can out in the community,
and knowing that I'm trying to be a good dad and a good husband first.
I love my family more than anything, and I'm super, super blessed to have them in my life.
So I think decompressing is honestly, man, five o'clock, my phone goes on to do not
disturb.
Sometimes I will check it, but man, decompressing, there's nothing better than just being with
my kids and whether it be going to the park or getting a good walk in or stuff like that
is what I really enjoy doing.
Beautiful.
All right.
Well then for people listening, where can they find In Extremis Performance and then
any other places to reach out to you?
Yeah.
So multiple ways.
We have our website, InExtremisPerformance.com.
I'm assuming you can maybe put that in the link somewhere when they go hear it.
So we've got a lot of the website, so you can go in and you can see all of the programs.
We have programs you can go on and get personally.
You can see our contact information for how to schedule a course, whether it be a shooting
course or a human performance course.
It also just has a contact page, so if you're wanting something specific for your department
or just individually.
Our Instagram is inextperformance.
So InExtremis shortened to inextperformance is our handle.
Man, so that's been a really interesting journey, Instagram.
I hate Instagram with a burning passion, but it's a really good place to mass put out information.
And I think we put out a lot of, I say free.
I hate using that word, but we put out a lot of educational information.
It's not like, ooh, we got to hook them so they come paid to come to our class or any
kind of thing.
But I think we try to put out a lot of really good information that you can learn from.
We don't get into the good, bad, being mad at people, hating people or anything like
that.
We just try to be good humans that hopefully are putting out good information so that if
you're someone that carries a gun for a living, whether it be cop, military, or just a person
that is responsible with their firearm, that hopefully you can learn.
So there's that through our website, you can find our contact information, but mine is
Jake at inextremistperformance.com.
And yeah, those are, I would say the main ways to hear about us.
I know you brought, I think you asked, actually you asked before we went live, but Scott Howell
has Ironside podcast.
So we put out a lot of podcasts.
Scott's part of the company.
So he puts out a lot of podcast episodes as well, where we really dive into the human
performance and application.
So that's been kind of cool.
But yeah, those are the main places to find out information on us.
Brilliant.
Well, it's been such an interesting conversation.
I've been talking about, especially the kind of the high performance physicality behind
the shootings is quite a unique conversation.
I haven't really had much before.
So I want to thank you so much for being so generous with your time and coming on the
Behind the Shield podcast today.
Yeah.
Well, thank you.
I really do appreciate it.
It's a cool opportunity to get to share with people.
And at the end of the day, I hope someone hears this and either goes and looks at our
Instagram or contacts us because we truly care about the community.
I feel like we've built a really, really good team that it's not about money.
I tell people this every time when I teach a class, if you go look at our page and you
want our programming or you want our range book or you want whatever it may be, I'll
give it to you for free.
I truly we care about making a difference.
And I've been very, very fortunate and blessed, honestly, to have a good group of guys that
have been around us.
And so anytime we're able to share that message that hopefully impacts the larger community,
I'm appreciative and I appreciate you having us on to be able to share that.