Rethinking PT as a Key Component of Resiliency Training
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The status quo of unit-led PT has been cited as a risk factor in military suicides by the Suicide Prevention and Response Independent Review Committee (SPRIRC), but that need not be the case. PT is a unique opportunity to enforce protective factors and eliminate risk factors.
Early mental health returns on H2F have been impressive, for instance, with the Army reporting a 22% drop in behavioral health profiles in brigades that fully adopted the program. This is hardly surprising considering how quickly unit-led PT can devolve into something counterproductive to physical readiness. Apart from curtailing sleep windows, resilience to suicidal ideation wanes when soldiers realize they are doing purposeless, repetitive tasks divorced from their supposed purpose (becoming elite tactical athletes and forming resilient units). In many units, half-hearted, isolated, and improvised workouts catering to the weakest soldiers are a daily affirmation that their life and vocation have lost any comprehensive meaning. Battalions and Brigades should look hard at what PT MoEs and MoPs should look like and try to find ways of using that practice to treat all soldiers like elite athletes and social animals.
A PT program focused on cohesion and real-world physical and psychological readiness should have certain characteristics. It should be conducted at an appropriate echelon to support organic fitness coaches with multiple ability groups and data-driven training plans (probably at the company or battalion level). It should incorporate strong psychological incentives for individuals and teams that offset the current set of incentives that encourage warriors to be injured and not get better. A command team could permit a PT schedule of sports or individual PT for the top percentile of PT test scores, schedule regular competitions with serious rewards for individual and collective, and enforce a second workout after the duty day with performance coaches for a bottom percentile.
Finally, PT is an opportunity to organically integrate therapeutic practices into the battle rhythm. Weekly, if not daily sports or team activities may be one of the most effective resilience innoculations available to a unit commander. A growing consensus supports the idea that humans have a psychological need to perform engaging physical activities together and that it serves a particularly strong function in trauma healing. Partially as a consequence of the global pandemic, there has been a great discontinuity in sports and rituals of all kinds, and deliberate reincorporation is needed.
About the author- First Lieutenant Gregory Wall is the S2 at Regimental Engineering Squadron, Second Cavalry Regiment. He holds a bachelor’s in Slavic Literature from Princeton University and a certificate in Cyber Awareness.