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How to Avoid Training Scars by CHRISTOPHER BRENNAN

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How to Avoid Training Scars by CHRISTOPHER BRENNAN Continuing Education Course How to Avoid Training Scars BY CHRISTOPHER BRENNAN TRAINING THE FIRE SERVICE FOR 136 YEARS To earn continuing education credits, you must successfully complete the course examination. The cost for this CE exam is $25.00. For group rates, call (973) 251-5055. AVOIDING TRAINING SCARS ● methodology was Donald Meichenbaum, who initially “fo- ally five or 10 push-ups. The initial time standards are very How to Avoid cused on cognitive-emotional theory of anxiety and learning generous, 90 seconds or so, to train the student to handle the approaches for the development of cognitive and relaxation stress. We could, of course, make the initial time standard 60 coping skills for anxiety reduction.”1 Survival skills instruc- seconds (which is the minimum passing time), but then there tors have used variations on SIT from the days of ancient would be a lot of push-ups done and a great increase in anxi- warrior cultures without having a specific label for it. ety. Once we warm the group up with a few 90-second drills Training Scars From the brutal rites of passage that are part of initiation (which generally everyone passes), we can then slowly work into elite military organizations through the burn tower evo- our way toward the 60-second mark. As the time standard lutions with recruit academy candidates to law enforcement gets closer to the neurological skill capacity of the students, defensive tactics courses, those who are expected to place their anxiety will increase (they don’t want to do push-ups). their bodies in harm’s way have attempted from time imme- We coach them to control their breathing and focus on their morial to develop a mental toughness in their students. This procedures. By the time this initial SIT phase is complete, is a noble effort. However, ineffective or poorly designed/ex- most of our students will have done some push-ups, and a few ecuted attempts to use SIT can do more harm than good. will have become quite stressed out. We go back to a slow, Educational Objectives mentored approach, without the time standard and reinforce On completion of this course, students will PSYCHOLOGICAL SCARS quality mechanics in donning, leaving the students aware of The second type of performance scar I see in firefighters their difficulties but with the knowledge that they did in fact 1) Recognize the instructor’s objective when the student leaves 3) Discover the benefits of Stress-Inoculation Training a training drill or shift is psychological. It is likely that psychological training scars meet the time standard several times when it was manageable 4) Understand the impact of psychological scars lead to a young firefighter burning out so early in his career. and that their skills are improving. 2) Learn how to recognize and reduce performance s cars The difficulty with SIT is that it cannot be implemented hap- I liken this process to training someone who is learning hazardly or you run the real risk of damaging people psycho- how to lift weights. When someone begins learning how to logically, which can happen without the instructor or student squat or dead lift, he is initially weak relative to his potential. being aware that it has happened. However, these scars can The reason is that he has neither the technical proficiency become ticking time bombs that increase an individual’s or the neurological pattern to move the load efficiently nor BY CHRISTOPHER BRENNAN contained breathing apparatus (SCBA), or back squatting, in stress level and increase risk of injury or illness and, depend- the contractile muscle force. As he begins training, he will their first 50 hours. Most of the learning is neurological. The ing on how deeply you care to examine the issue, perhaps initially see a large increase in the load he can move as he MET A yoUNG FIREFIGHTER SOME MONTHS ago trouble is, if we allow improper or inefficient patterns to be even lead to an increased chance of heart disease and cancer becomes neurologically adapted to moving the weight. How- who was in a difficult place—early 20s, sincere in desire implanted then, that’s what our firefighter will walk away with. (which have been linked to stress). ever, he will then plateau unless he increases the load he is I and drive to succeed in the fire service, but feeling burned This can also be the case if we try and insert new procedures The first critical element in effective SIT is to prepare the moving and forces the body to adapt. out far too early. What had led to this burnout? Was it a string into an existing routine. I’m not sure if there is any citable students for what they are going to experience and what their Adaptation is adaptation—it doesn’t happen overnight. of difficult calls that opened up emotions that were overwhelm- source for this, but it’s accepted that one of the reasons that expected action should be. This has to be done step by step. Whether learning how to powerlift or practice SIT, we need a ing? Maybe the reality of the job didn’t fully match up with this personal alert safety systems (PASS) have become integrated When teaching new recruits SCBA emergency procedures, the slow, steady increase in the stress load that disrupts homeo- firefighter’s perception. Perhaps there was just a bad attitude at into SCBAs is that firefighters were not turning them on. Why culmination is having a recruit reestablish his air supply while stasis but does not overload the system to cause damage. the root of this discontent! No, the answer was “D. None of the weren’t they? Quite simply because during their 200 repetitions in a live fire environment. I have heard military instructors above,” but it didn’t take more than a five-minute conversation of donning, they didn’t have a PASS device to turn on. De- refer to the fine line between “hard and dumb” when it comes THE ISLAND OF MISFIT TOYS to diagnose the root cause: training scars. pending on the study you read, it takes 3,000 to 5,000 repeti- to challenging routines. A surefire way to leave a training scar Instructors who will use SIT in their programs (and we I’ve heard it said that “experience is what you get when tions of practice to replace a habit that has become automatic. (i.e., the dumb approach) would be to take your candidates should) must have more than a basic understanding of the you don’t get what you want,” and there is a certain degree of This is the reason it is critical that our instructors be dedi- with their newly minted SCBA donning skills into a burning human animal and the effects of stress on the body. I have accuracy in that for my life. What I’ve observed and experi- cated to maximizing the effectiveness of their instruction. building and shut off their air. You watch them thrash around examined this in some detail in The Combat Position: Achiev- enced, though, is that “experience” in the context of a fire We must ensure that the mantra “Amateurs train until they for a few seconds, turn their SCBA back on, drag them outside, ing Firefighter Readiness (Fire Engineering, 2011) and highly department training session often leaves a scar. Training scars get it right; professionals train until they can’t get it wrong” and then berate them in front of the other students and instruc- encourage instructors to look deeply at works like On Combat are the leftover performance and physiological damage that is implemented in our training academies and in our station tors for “trying to get themselves killed!” They actually have by Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman and Loren Christensen; can occur when our instructors or peers fail to help us come and company drills. Whether career or on-call, the stakes for behaved exactly how we expect the human animal to behave Warrior Mindset by Mike Asken (with Dave and Loren); Bruce back from a drill as a winner. Now, before I raise everyone’s accepting error (what is known in the engineering commu- when threatened and feel as if they can’t breathe—sheer panic. Siddle’s Sharpening the Warrior’s Edge; and articles by Donald hackles here, I am not talking about the fire service variation nity as “normalization of deviance”) are far too great. The smart-but-hard routine is systematic. For the sake of Meichenbaum, Jerry Deffenbacher, and their colleagues who are of youth soccer, in which everyone is a winner just for show- Basic skill acquisition must be followed by a progressively illustration, I will briefly go over how I train new candidates looking into effective methods for implementing SIT. ing up. However, we need to recognize that the firefighter more challenging set of drills to develop highly effective fire- on SCBA donning and emergency procedures. It begins with What we must avoid in our training is turning firefighters we are training is going to leave us at the end of the drill or ground application. This should begin with a solid foundation a classroom presentation about the SCBA, moving on to a into a living, breathing version of the Island of Misfit Toys shift, and our objective should always be to help that member in the fire academy and continue as our firefighters are inte- hands-on review. With an instructor leading, we show them from the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer TV special—big- improve, not leave him broken.
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