By Lt. Bryan Reid (ret.)
Serious firefighters love fitness. We talk about it, measure it, compare it, compete over it. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: Physical fitness isn’t enough to prepare you for your best fireground performance. I learned that the hard way one early morning on a basement fire that was an otherwise routine incident — until it wasn’t.
| READ NEXT: 28 ways leaders can better support firefighter mental health
Routine fire with abnormal physical response
We caught a first-due townhouse fire. When we arrived on scene, we had some moderate smoke showing but conditions didn’t seem too bad.
As our driver was catching the hydrant in the front yard, I proceeded down the Delta side of the house for my size-up. Once at the back of the house, I realized it was sitting on a finished daylight basement. When the downstairs resident fled the fire, they left the basement door open, and I could see a room and contents fire in one of the bedrooms. It was still small but growing.
I keyed my portable and transmitted something to the effect of “Killarney Command We’ve got a small room and contents fire on the Charlie side in the basement. Engine 7 stretch a pre-connect to the Charlie side and we should be able to handle this thing pretty quickly.”
I closed the door to the basement as I waited for our attack line. As I waited, longer than I expected, I watched the fire begin to spread across the ceiling outside the bedroom and continue to move toward the interior stairs.
Eventually I decided to make my way back to the engine to see where our line was. Unfortunately, the residents had also left open the front door of the townhouse and interior door from the basement to the first floor. This created a perfect flow path from the basement to the front door, and the fire gases had lit off and were now venting out the Alpha side front door.
Because of the visible fire at the front door, someone on the Alpha side made the decision to pull the pre-connect to the front door instead of where I called for it — it seemed like a no-brainer to the crew. But now we’ve got 200 feet of uncharged 1¾-inch line on the ground that has to be moved to the back of the house, in grass that should have been cut weeks ago, and around more than a couple trees, in the dark and with a fire that I knew was rapidly taking over the basement and now extending up the interior stairs.
Here is the point, along with a question: As I’m coordinating the crews on scene while grabbing up loops of hose, stumbling through the tall grass, stepping in potholes in the yard and wondering how big the fire will be when I get to the basement, I notice my mouth is dry, my heart is beating in my throat, and I’m struggling to catch my breath. I remember thinking to myself, “I do my best to stay in shape. I’m in the top 50 fitness scores of a department approaching 800 personnel. Why am I so wound up?”
The central question
And that’s my question for you: Why was physical fitness, even “tactical fitness,” not enough to keep me from feeling so taxed during this time?
It wasn’t the physical stress that was challenging me as much as the additional cognitive, emotional stress and anxiety. It wasn’t simply adrenaline. It was cortisol and other stress hormones my nervous system was reacting to while my brain was cycling through all the things that had to be addressed before the battalion chief got there — search, ventilation, water supply, a back-up line. You know the routine.
And this is why the missing element to tactical fitness is cognitive training and neuro-regulation training under stress, simultaneously with physical fitness training. We can simulate all the fireground activities we want, but without training our brain and nervous system to think and stay calm under stress, our workouts aren’t comprehensively tactical — they are simply glorified CrossFit.
But how do we do this?
Stress awareness
Late in my career I was blessed to have met Ric Jorge and, later, Dave Gillespie and then honored to become part of their instructor cadre for Developing High Performance. During training we monitor the heart rate of the participants as well as their behaviors during various evolutions.
When their heart rate exceeds 60% of their max (220 minus their age) we have them identify how they are feeling. Are their ears ringing, head throbbing, vision blurred, hearing impaired? Are they repeating the same actions? Have they frozen? Have they lost the physical ability to perform their task?
The point is we want them to remember these feelings on the fireground where they don’t have the advantage of someone watching a heart rate monitor stopping them and reminding them to take the actions we teach them to down regulate and get themselves under control.
Arousal control
The key is to activate your parasympathetic nervous system to slow your heart rate and breathing so you can begin to think more clearly and then perform physically more proficiently. This is generally done with tactical breathing. There are countless breathing techniques to try. The common thread is breathing from your diaphragm (aka “belly breathing”) and exhaling through your mouth. Both actions activate your parasympathetic nervous system to slow your physiology. Here are a few examples.
- Box breathing: Imagine your breath as a four-sided box. Inhale from your diaphragm four seconds, hold four seconds, exhale through your mouth four seconds, hold four seconds and then repeat for a few cycles. The reset will likely be quicker than you’re thinking.
- Tactical physiological sigh: These exercises mechanically open your alveoli and work even with an extremely elevated heart rate. From your belly, take a breath in, then a second quick inhale and exhale slowly through your mouth.
- Combat breathing: Combat breathing doesn’t have to be perfectly executed in order to bring you back to center, and it is a good option when you need to clear the fog or transition from a physical to a cognitive activity. Inhale through your mouth for four seconds, hold for two seconds, and exhale for four seconds.
- One long exhale: The long slow exhale is probably the simplest option — also the best to use during those “Oh $#*!” moments. It’s simple: Take a normal breath and exhale as slowly as possible through your mouth.
Cognitive exercise
Being able to acknowledge a stress response in the moment is critical, but you also have to be able to think on your feet in a very dynamic environment. As such, the next piece of the puzzle — which is often missing from traditional functional training — is training your brain to process information rapidly under the stress of the fireground.
Metabolic conditioning workouts are designed to train your energy systems to go as hard as you can, physically, for various amounts of time with varying pauses to catch your breath. The goal is to add breath work to down-regulate the nervous system and “brain games” to improve your ability to process information and make decisions.
We all remember those little exercises where you pat your head while rubbing your stomach or rotate one hand clockwise while the other rotates counterclockwise. It takes concentration but, once you grasp it, you can do it anytime. There are countless exercises like this that can be practiced during circuit rest periods — exercises that help create new neural pathways and enable you to better recall information and prioritize tasks.
A couple additional examples: Place different color balls in a bag, enough for each person working out to reach in blindly and take three; then ask them to organize them from darkest to lightest. This simple action will help build scene prioritization skills. Another example: The company officer, or another member, asks questions during the breathers like, “When would you not get on a roof?” or “What is the first thing you should do when separated from your crew?” or “The engine won’t go into pump. What should you do?” These activities force us to think under stress.
Putting it all together
There are multiple ways to introduce a stress response to your workouts. Panic is not the objective. We simply want to illicit that little burn in the pit of your stomach. A few ways to accomplish this include issuing time constraints, competing with each other or with another station, or having a supervisor evaluate performance.
And now that we are cognizant of that “amped up” feeling we can experience on scene — that feeling that tell us that we are having some acute stress — we have to develop an instinctive reaction of employing breathing to center us. And just like any fireground skill, this takes practice. When it starts getting warm interior, what do you do? You get lower. Why? Because you’ve trained on it enough that it has become instinctive. The same is true for decision-making under stress.
Physical fitness is always going to be a top priority, but today’s fireground demands more. We must be able to think clearly under pressure, regulate our physiology and make sound decisions when everything is coming at us at once. When you combine stress‑inoculated cognitive training with tactical conditioning, you stop working out like an athlete and start training like a tactical athlete.
| WATCH: Operational readiness starts with mental health
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bryan Reid served with Cobb County (Georgia) Fire & Emergency Services for 27 years, including a two-year tour through the training division as a training lieutenant, retiring in 2018 as a company officer. Reid has taught on a variety of topics and been published on multiple fire service trade platforms. Reid holds a bachelor’s degree in Fire Service Administration and an associate degree in Occupational Safety and Health both from Columbia Southern University as well as multiple nutrition and fitness certifications through the International Sports Science Association (ISSA). He is the author of “The Salvage & Overhaul Eating Plan: Tactical Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity.” He is a regular presenter at fire and fitness conferences and consults public safety agencies on tactical fitness. In addition to a career with Cobb County, Reid is an adjunct instructor with Texas A&M TEEX. He has served in South Carolina as an assistant fire marshal with the Charleston Fire Department and as a battalion chief in another career department in the Charleston area.
