Replicating wrestling with someone...

[Se7en]

Anyone have any suggestions for workouts that you can do by yourself to condition yourself for wrestling another person. For those who have had to tangle with someone else, I think we can all agree how quick you get gassed, even though you can do cardio all day long.

Suggestions?

[JSD73]

You need to go and look up a book called Infinite Intensity by Ross Enamait.

I fought a guy on the side of the road for almost ten minutes before my back up arrived and I attribute the conditioning to his routines.

There is a big difference between 'cardio' and muscular endurance as well..understand the two.

[adeutch]

I'm guessing the book JSD73 recommended makes this point, but there is a big different between cardio and high intensity.
Also when you say "wrestling" you don't mean that literally do you? When I think wrestling, I'm thinking greco roman or something. If this is for police work, I'm guessing you mean FIGHTING, as in no holds barred. In which case, how bout getting a heavy bag. There's a ton of workouts you could make up that will gas you as fast as a fight and you get to work on your strikes against a human sized target. You could use an interval timer (like a gym boss) and hit the bag with maximum intensity for 3 minutes, then drop and do 20 burpees, then jump right back up and throw elbows or knees on the bag for 3 minutes at high intensity, and then drop and do 20 more burpees.. They had classes like that at a krav maga place I used to go to. It looked like an incredible workout and was supposed to condition your body for fighting.

[adeutch]

...........deleted...........

[adeutch]

You need to go and look up a book called Infinite Intensity by Ross Enamait.

I fought a guy on the side of the road for almost ten minutes before my back up arrived and I attribute the conditioning to his routines.

There is a big difference between 'cardio' and muscular endurance as well..understand the two.

10 minutes! You musta had to dig REAL deep for that. I can't even imagine.

[GrayPatriot]

Join your local BJJ or grappling school and go to a lot of open mat. Some schools roll for 5 mins with a 1 min break and go for an hour... Not a whole lot of meatheads in there as they just don't have the wind. You will find out real quick what shape your cardio is in...

The best example I can give when I roll with the military guys. These kids are a lot stronger, younger, and often bigger than me. Some are good for only 2 mins and then literally quit!!! It is the closest thing to controlling a suspect in real life. Not all suspects are trying to fight you some just don't want to be arrested or detained and you are trying to control and cuff them.

Waiting for someone to copy, edit, and repost my comment above :-)

[NORCOCOP]

A bunch of the guys in my dept use Infinite Intensity and it seems pretty effective for sure. I agree with Grey Patriots general line fo thinking, nothing beats actually doing the activity to give you stamina at that activity. I do no cardio or running in my overall fitness program. That said I train a few hours at my martial arts school most weeks. I generally spar or roll a few hours a month. I can do 3 5 to 10 minute rounds of all out full contact sparring and mat work pretty regularly. I did over half hour grappling session with an experienced partner who out weighed me by 30 pounds last week. We only took a couple breaks between submissions the whole time.

My point is find a game partner and roll. If you can go to a school great if not watch tape on the web and learn for free. I personally prefer the school setting and drive an hour each way because I love my school. But if I had to I would do it in my basement with a friend.

[Se7en]

Thanks guys... I guess wrestling wasn't the best term, but when we do defensive tactics class in the past one of the instructors will have you lock shoulders with him and you'll take turns going around the mat trying to swing each other around off that persons feet. I think it's more to simulate when you have resistance against another person you find yourself winded very quickly. I'm certainly no roman god, but I think I'm in fairly decent shape and the last class I had just going through the warm up routine, which consisted of resistance drills against a partner, I found myself quickly light headed and breathing like I had asthma. It wans't a comfortable feeling. I've been in a few scuffles on the street and I'm always amazed how quickly it takes to become gassed.

I appreciate the suggestions so far.

[Se7en]

Guys I also had another officer send me a study that was done (I think in Europe) where it took several police officers, both male and female, who ranged from decent shape to really good shape, and the test concluded that after approximately 60 seconds of an officer simulating fighting with someone they were pretty much done physically and mentally. Scary...

[GoodWitness]

This may be the study you are referring to. If not, it shows similar results in terms of fatiguing quickly - and the interesting point to take away is that even those who were in outstanding condition fatigued at about the same point as those considered less fit. The study looked at the effects on memory and cognition, and has some very interesting conclusions about the reliability of officer recall about situations where they are subjected to this type of exertion. Just an FYI, Winnipeg policing is no cake walk, they have a lot of violent crime, gangs, drugs, etc., so I'm thinking these officers were likely very familiar with high-intensity physical interactions.

The Force Science research team that explored officer exhaustion through a unique set of experiments in Canada last September has now issued its official findings--first presented in detail in the Force Science Certification Course conducted in Wisconsin this past week (4/18-4/22) and scheduled for integration into future courses--with these significant conclusions:

• Less than 60 seconds of all-out exertion, such as an officer might expend in trying to control a combative offender, can deplete the average LEO's physical reserves and put his life in peril;

• Environmental awareness and memory are also affected adversely, hampering an involved officer's ability to deliver accurate, detailed statements and testimony once a desperate fight is over;

• Even officers in top condition are not immune to the rapid drain of physical prowess and cognitive faculties resulting from sustained hand-to-hand combat.

"The bottom line," says Dr. Bill Lewinski, executive director of the Force Science Institute who headed up the research team, "is this: If an officer can't resolve a struggle very quickly, a tactical withdrawal or swift escalation to a higher level of force may be necessary and justified for personal survival. And investigators and courts need to understand that an officer who doesn't provide details surrounding a major physical conflict is not necessarily being deceptive, malicious, or uncooperative."

TEST DESIGN. Force Science News explained the testing sequence of this research in Transmission #159 [9/24/10] soon after the project launched (click here to read it.) To recap:

Researchers recruited 52 officer volunteers (42 males, 10 females), ranging in age from 23 to 51, with an average of 8 years on the job. All were "familiar with officer safety training involving high aerobic physical engagement," according to Dave Blocksidge, a Force Science Analyst from the London (England) Metropolitan Police, and one of the research team.

"During an initial briefing, all the subjects were told to remain alert and try to absorb and remember as much as they could about what took place," Lewinski says.

First they were given a crime report to read, which included details about the m.o. and descriptions of an armed robbery crew that had attacked 3 locations. Then in a gym used for training by the Winnipeg (Manitoba) Police Service, the officers were paired, with one-half instructed one at a time to launch a full-force physical attack on a 300-lb. hanging water bag and the others (a control group) assigned as "partners" to observe as the action took place. All were fitted with heart-rate monitors and the "physical exerters" also donned VO2 masks to measure oxygen consumption and gas exchange.

The exerters were told to attack the bag with as much ferocity as they could muster, selecting their own "assault movements"--punches, kicks, and/or palm, elbow, and knee strikes. During the attack, a researcher shouted "encouragement" ("Harder! Faster!") on 3 occasions. Once the name of a familiar intersection in Winnipeg was yelled out and another time a random 3-digit number was hollered. Unknown to the participants, all this would prove relevant later in a memory test.

The exerters were to sustain assailing the bag until they no longer had strength to keep going or until they were visibly maxed out ("breathless and struggling to continue") and were told to stop by exercise physiologist Justin Dixon of the London Police, who supervised this part of the experiment.

"In terms of upper-body involvement and energy expended, the bag drill realistically replicated a full-force fight by a moderately trained officer to control a strong, dynamically resisting suspect," Lewinski explains. "Two officers actually collapsed, and the rest were severely taxed as they moved on to the next phase of the test."

That required the exerter to run upstairs and outside to a trailer that a "known felon" was suspected of occupying, a distance of 145 feet. En route, the officer passed a gaudily dressed role-player holding an electric drill, who stared at the exerter intently but said nothing and made no aggressive moves.

Inside the trailer, the officer found a "living room" mocked up with furniture and a variety of visible weapons, including an M16 carbine, a revolver, a sawed-off shotgun, and a large kitchen knife. After a 5-second delay, a "critical target" emerged from another room--"a large, black, middle-aged male," wearing a black t-shirt, blue jeans, and a black bandana. He screamed profanities at the officer, commanding him/her to get out. He was not armed, although several of the weapons were within his easy reach.

The trailer scenario lasted about 15 seconds. After that, the exerter was permitted some "recovery time" while his observer partner ran through the same trailer exercise.

After 3 minutes' rest, Dixon drew a blood sample from each participant to measure lactic acid levels. The officers were also given informational "updates" about the robbery crew.

Then all completed a battery of memory tests administered by Dr. Lorraine Hope, a cognitive psychologist from England's University of Portsmouth. This testing included a review of what exerters and observers could remember about what had happened and a photo lineup in which the officers were asked to pick out the suspect they'd confronted in the trailer.

PHYSICAL DECLINE. The heart monitors, face masks, and blood tests all confirmed that exerters reached an intense level of energy output during the bag blitz. Heart rates, for example, leaped from an average resting rate of 73 bpm to an average maximum of 179 for the bag beaters, significantly higher than the modest average rise to 104 bpm for the observers. The exerters' blood lactate levels, reflecting the amount of exertion and affecting muscle function, skyrocketed up to 13 times the normal resting concentration. "It was impressive how committed these officers were to going flat out," Lewinski remarks.

Most dramatic--and alarming--was the speed at which exerters depleted their physical resources. On average, the officers spent 56 seconds hitting the bag, although some either quit or were called out as thoroughly exhausted after as little as 25 seconds. The blows they were able to deliver ranged from a low of 73 to a high of 274. The average was 183. The overwhelming majority of hits were fist punches.

Reviewing time-coded video of the action, researchers were able to count second by second the number of times each participant struck the bag. The average officer peaked at 15 seconds. After that, the frequency of strikes fell in a sharp and steady decline.

"The officers started out strong, driving hard with penetrating hits that visibly moved the heavy bag," Lewinski reports. "But by 30 to 40 seconds, most were significantly weakened. They were not able to breathe properly, their cadence dropped, their strikes scarcely moved the bag if at all, and they were resorting largely to very weak, slowly paced blows that would have had little impact on a combative assailant."

In effect, Blocksidge states in a paper he has written about the research, the exerters "delivering a concerted and sustained physical assault...'punched themselves out' " in a matter of seconds.

Perhaps surprisingly, this seemed true even of officers with a high level of personal fitness and fighting skill. Blocksidge offers this explanation: "Fitter officers delivered faster and more powerful strikes," expending greater effort and thus exhausting their presumably greater reserves in "roughly the same time" as those less fit and skilled.

MEMORY DEFICIT. The officers' exertion proved, for the most part, closely associated with incomplete and faulty memories of what they experienced. The exerters remembered "less visual and auditory information" and made "greater errors in recall" compared to the observing control group, Blocksidge reports.

Exerters and observers were asked to estimate within 90% the number of each type of blow delivered against the heavy bag. Exerters scored significantly better than observers in recalling the number of elbow, knee, and palm strikes they'd made. 89% of exerters, for example, estimated within the accepted accuracy range the number of elbow hits, compared to only 45% of observers.

"However, there were very few elbow, knee, and palm strikes made overall, so they tended to stand out in the exerters' memory," Lewinski explains. "But with the most common hits--punches--it was a far different story." 25% fewer exerters than observers were able to estimate accurately the number of fist blows. "The more exhausted officers were, the less accurate their estimates tended to be," notes researcher Hope.

Observers also were able to recall more by wide margins than exerters about the information that was shouted out during the bag blitz. Likewise, they were more accurate and more detailed in remembering information about the robbery crew.

As to the man with the drill who was encountered en route to the trailer, more than 90% of observers were able to recall at least one descriptive item about him, whereas nearly one-third of exerters did not remember seeing him at all.

Everyone remembered seeing the angry male in the trailer, but observers were able to correctly describe significantly more things about him, while making an average of half as many errors. And during the photo lineup, 54% of the observers correctly identified the suspect, compared to only 27% of the exerters. Typically, the tired officers expressed little certainty about the identifications they did make.

"As exhaustion takes over, cognitive resources tend to diminish," Lewinski explains. "The ability to fully shift attention is inhibited, so even some potentially relevant information tends to get screened out. Ultimately, memory is determined by where the focus of attention was during an event. The exerters were zeroed in on delivering blows during the bag blitz. Afterward, they typically had little cognitive resources left."

During the trailer encounter, however, the exerters were able to register threat cues. Here, in fact, their responses were virtually identical to those of observers. Six observers and 5 exerters remembered seeing no weapons at all. The most weapons noticed were 2, recalled by 4 observers and 5 exerters. However, 16 officers in each category remembered seeing one weapon, usually the largest (the carbine). (After noticing one, the researchers speculate, most officers may simply have quit scanning for more, having confirmed a potential life threat.)

"Fear conditioning through training," Blocksidge writes, apparently "enables simple processing" of threat and danger cues to continue on some level "despite the impact of exhaustion and anxiety." The ability to respond effectively to such cues, however, would be gravely degraded in an exhausted state, Lewinski points out.

IMPLICATIONS. As Lorraine Hope notes, "The legal system puts a great deal of emphasis on witness accounts, particularly those of professional witnesses like police officers." After a violent confrontation, Blocksidge states, "it is commonly believed" that officers are capable of recalling relevant particulars, "such as subject position, number of blows, time sequences, verbal comments, and the position of colleagues.... Policing is quite unique within the cognitive field, since officers are [expected] to operate in a dual-task mode of...taking action whilst remembering...information."

The gap documented by the study between what exerters and observers were able to remember means that in real-world conflicts "substantial aspects of visual details may remain [unnoticed] by active or involved witnesses while being noticed and attended by passive witnesses," Blocksidge writes.

"If investigators and force reviewers don't understand the implications of this study," Lewinski cautions, "an officer's memory errors or omissions after an intense physical struggle may unjustly affect his or her credibility. We think we have a lot of attentional resources working for us at all times, but in reality we don't."

In addition to illuminating memory issues, Lewinski is hopeful that the research findings will underscore the importance of tactical pre-assessment in deciding whether to engage or temporarily back off from potential physical conflict. "Officers need to read situations better before getting physically involved, knowing they have a limited capacity for all-out exertion," he says.

When a struggle does occur, he hopes the findings will help officers, trainers, investigators, and reviewers better appreciate the justification in desperate circumstances for escalating force in order to end a dangerous fight quickly. "The longer physical combat lasts," he explains, "the more at risk an officer is to the dire consequences of exhaustion. Very quickly an officer can reach the point of not having the energy or the ability to physically overcome resistance. Even a few seconds may make a difference between getting a suspect under control or the officer ending up badly hurt or killed."

Sgt. Jason Anderson of Winnipeg Police Service's Safety Unit, who assisted with the experiments, expresses gratitude for the study. He says it provides "data we can bring to court from a scientific organization using scientific methods and give the court the ability to properly assess these situations fairly."

Statistical details from the study, which was funded fully by the Force Science Institute, will be included in a report the research team is preparing for publication in a peer-reviewed professional journal.

[POSr]

Guys I also had another officer send me a study that was done (I think in Europe) where it took several police officers, both male and female, who ranged from decent shape to really good shape, and the test concluded that after approximately 60 seconds of an officer simulating fighting with someone they were pretty much done physically and mentally. Scary...

I teach Ground Avoidance and Ground Escape VIA PPCT and one of the stats that I use very often is that you use the same amount of energy fighting on the ground for one minute that you use to run a mile.

[jcioccke]

the same amount of energy fighting on the ground for one minute that you use to run a mile.

WOW I never knew that. Scary if you think about it.

[valetudo39]

If you want to get in shape for a grappling situation then you have to train in grappling preferably BJJ. Having good cardio is a plus but you still need to spar for at least 30 minutes at a minimum of 3 days a week.

However the one thing that tires a lot of individuals in a real fight is their lack of controlling their breathing. You would be surprised how many people hold their breath when fighting or struggling with a suspect. This lack of oxygen will cause a person to tire quickly.

As a BJJ instructor I always see new students holding their breath when trying to force a technique during sparring. I have to constantly remind them to breath while they are sparing. When I spar, with or without strikes, I concentrate on my breathing which allows me to reduce tension and upping the oxygen intake.

Combat Breathing, as it is sometimes called, can also be used to control your anxiety and the adrenaline dump that you encounter during a fight with a suspect or in a vehicle pursuit.

[Se7en]

If you want to get in shape for a grappling situation then you have to train in grappling preferably BJJ. Having good cardio is a plus but you still need to spar for at least 30 minutes at a minimum of 3 days a week.

However the one thing that tires a lot of individuals in a real fight is their lack of controlling their breathing. You would be surprised how many people hold their breath when fighting or struggling with a suspect. This lack of oxygen will cause a person to tire quickly.

As a BJJ instructor I always see new students holding their breath when trying to force a technique during sparring. I have to constantly remind them to breath while they are sparing. When I spar, with or without strikes, I concentrate on my breathing which allows me to reduce tension and upping the oxygen intake.

Combat Breathing, as it is sometimes called, can also be used to control your anxiety and the adrenaline dump that you encounter during a fight with a suspect or in a vehicle pursuit.

I think the breathing would definitely be part of my issue, too. Sometimes I don't even realize I'm holding my breath, for whatever reason. Combat breathing?

Thanks "Goodwitness" that was the article I was talking about. Long read, but good.

[valetudo39]

I think the breathing would definitely be part of my issue, too. Sometimes I don't even realize I'm holding my breath, for whatever reason. Combat breathing?

Thanks "Goodwitness" that was the article I was talking about. Long read, but good.

Yes Combat Breathing or Tactical Breathing. There is a bunch of information on it. Most martial arts teach a form of it, hell even in Boxing they teach to you breath out every time you throw a punch...........check this article out.

http://www.policeone.com/training/articles/1271860-The-adrenaline-dump-Its-more-than-just-breathing/