Building Effective PT for Service Members in Large-Group Environments

Life as a Small School Collegiate Strength Coach

So, you’ve been in Collegiate Strength and Conditioning for several years now. Whether you’ve been doing it as an Assistant or a Head S&C Coach, you’ve begun to feel the wear and tear and career burnout. In the back of your mind, you wonder where your next move is, and at the end of the day, if this is all worth it. Being a small school (D2, D3, or NAIA) Strength and Conditioning Coach certainly has its pros (gaining experience working with several sports, building programs from the ground up, and building positive experiences for student athletes that may have never been in a weight room before their collegiate career, to name a few).

However, there are some downsides to being a small school strength and conditioning coach at times. Whether you're an Assistant or a Head Coach, your staff is small, and you're spread thin trying to cover multiple teams throughout the day, semester, and school year. Your Athletic Department doesn’t give you a yearly budget for equipment. It’s been years since the weight room has been renovated, equipment added, or replaced. You need to work with what you have. These are just some of the challenges I faced on a year-to-year basis working at the small school level.

If your experience is anything like mine, working with several hundred athletes can be a challenge. Everything from learning to managing semester schedules to juggling multiple teams throughout the day can be a lot on your plate. As a coach learning organization, time management, session flow, and even equipment availability can make or break training sessions. Many of us have been thrown into the fire and been asked to figure it out on our own in these situations. ADs and sport coaches cannot truly grasp the nuances that are involved in our day-to-day jobs. Once you figure it out, you learn to thrive in any given situation and make it work as best as possible. With minimal equipment, meathead engineering can kick in, and you learn how to jerry-rig setups and create something out of nothing. You learn how to be creative with what you have. I know I made the best of my situation at my previous university. It wasn’t pretty, but it made me think outside the box and built a skillset I didn’t know would be a huge asset to my transition to the tactical setting.

Transitioning from Collegiate Strength & Conditioning to Tactical

In the Spring of 2021, I did some soul searching. Between a dual position as a sport coach and Assistant S&C Coach, as well as an adjunct instructor teaching 3 classes a semester, I was wiped out and needed to look for something new. Application after application, interview after interview, I just wasn’t finding opportunities elsewhere. I came across a virtual job fair describing the next big thing in strength and conditioning: Becoming a Strength and Conditioning Coach for the US Army. While I never envisioned working in a military setting at any point in my career, I decided to be open to the idea of moving forward with the potential opportunity. Fast forward, a few months later, I was offered a job as a Strength Coach at Ft Bragg, NC, and ran with it. I ended up moving halfway across the country without having any idea what I was about to get myself into. I had zero background knowledge of the military. No friends, no family to provide any insight to help me in my transition, walking into a big unknown.

Day 1, I show up at my unit at Ft Bragg. I’m introduced to the Human Performance staff I’ll be working with at the time, consisting of 9 other coaches, Athletic Trainers, Physical Therapists, and a cognitive performance specialist. My Program Director introduces himself and gives me the lay of the land. Walks me over to my respective unit and introduces me to my new Battery Commander. We take a walk through the footprint and finally get to see what’s known as a Beaverfit, aka a “Gym in a box”. This box includes a couple of benches, trap bars, barbells, benches, and kettlebells. In my mind, without trying to make any facial expressions, I’m having an “oh sh*t moment”, what did I walk into? I’m going to be training my Battery, an element of about 100+ Service Members, out of this thing. How the hell am I going to make this work? I have to train all these people and maximize the minimal resources I have access to.

It took a little bit of time to learn as much as I could to figure out how I was going to make everything work. With the skill set I developed at my last two schools, I was able to come up with a PT plan that allowed me to maximize the space and equipment we had access to. I had to lay out everything for the Command Team and Non-Commissioned Officers I’d be working with. Two lifting days a week, working with two platoons out of the Beaverfits, two run days with the other two platoons, and the fifth day alternating between rucking and “combat-focused” PT.

Parallels & Influence From Collegiate to Tactical

If you’re new to the tactical side, learning how each branch works operationally can be a challenge, especially if you don’t have much background in it like I did. Over time, you learn there are a lot of parallels in the military, specifically your chain of command. If you work with a battalion-sized element, you must think of it in terms of each company being its own sports team. Your Battalion Command team is essentially your Athletic Director (Battalion Commander) and Assistant/Associate AD (Command Sergeant Major). Your Company Command Team is essentially the Head Sport Coach (Commander) and your Assistant Head Coach (First Sergeant), and the Soldiers of each Company are your athletes. The important aspects of understanding this dynamic relationship with each Command Team are learning to work with them, understanding operations, learning the language, and getting a flow with the battle rhythms by getting embedded with each Company across the Battalion. The better the relationships you can formulate, the better you can educate Service Members in each respective formation, and with this comes better PT execution, utilization of your services, and overall success of your program and Human Performance Staff.

Similar to lower-level collegiate athletics, the training age of each athlete usually ranges from non-existent to a couple of years if we’re talking about an Olympic sport athlete. This is no different in this setting. The bulk of your Service Members will be 18-26-year-olds, but across the board, the majority of them have lower training ages. You are working with Service Members who mainly need general physical preparation (GPP), to be more robust, which will better their physical readiness and career longevity. With lower training ages, the programming is simplified. You don’t have to have any crazy training methodologies; you can stick to the basics, keep things in a linear progression, and coach them hard. Get total body training sessions in and make sure it includes pushing, pulling, squatting, hinging, rotating, jumping, throwing, carrying, and sprinting, distance running, and rucking in it.

One of the more challenging pieces to the puzzle when working in this setting is being able to work with minimal equipment, large groups, and sometimes even going against how traditional programs should operate. If you only have two squat racks and a group of 40, you’re not having everyone start on “Block A/1, etc.” to start the main lift. You have multiple stations going at once and maximize your equipment and resources (40-gallon water cans, heavy sandbags, skedco’s, and any other nontraditional pieces of equipment to utilize). I’ve had to run larger groups in circuit formats. Blocks A through D, about 10-15 people per group at about 12-15 minutes per station and circuit through. It’s not the most perfect setup, but it makes it very manageable. Let’s say you have a 4-6 week block, and in the interest of fairness, each training day, you start each group at a different block each lift day. Day 1, that group starts on Block A, and the next training day, they start on Block B and rotate through the rest of the session. Each training session allows them to focus the most energy on that primary block they start with. Whether it’s max strength, repetition effort, or conditioning, they get to hit it hard from the start. At the end of the day, it’s still a total body training session with a primary effort being focused on their first block. Occasionally, you have to throw them a bone, allow them to / even plan an event that you do not agree with and may even be counterproductive to your own program and/or any scientific methodologies, all for the sake of developing the relationship and continuing to influence them long term. This could be a weekly or monthly “tactical PT” event that tends to be treated like a WOD-type workout. There may be no progression, periodization, or method to it; it is just a session to see who has the most grit or bragging rights between teams. By all means, there is a time and place for these, and they go along way.

Being able to maximize your organization, time, flow, education, and everything else in a 90-minute coaching session is key to having a good PT session for these large groups that can vary in size from about 50 to 100+ people at a given time. Learning this in the collegiate setting before jumping ship to the military setting will save you time and headaches.

Below will be a weekly training sample for two total body lifts. Keep in mind your group’s training needs, abilities, equipment availability, and group size, as well as time constraints, etc. The outlined example is based on a traditional 90-min window from 0630-0800, basic gym-in-a-box equipment (Racks, bars, KB’s, Bands), and some decent training space near it. As mentioned previously, you can divide your large group up into 4 blocks as evenly as possible. One group may be able to start at the top, while another starts with the “Finisher” Block. Again, not ideal, but each group still gets to hit each block within the entire training window. Each block should be timed at 10-15 min (based on time constraints). Sets/Reps/Intensities will all be dependent on your group. For those larger groups, the other half is doing their running. These run/lift days can be flipped between the groups, and the 5th day of the week can be combat-focused PT based on the needs/wants of the group.

Weekly Training Example

Group A - Day 1

Group B – Day 1

Distance / Aerobic Focus

Group A – Day 3

Group B – Day 3

Sprint / Anaerobic Focus

Day 5 – All Groups

Combat Focus

As strength and conditioning coaches, we know the importance of sets, reps, rest intervals, exercise order, etc. Keep in mind you should always tailor a program for 80% of your formation or group’s capabilities and scale for the top 10% and bottom 10% accordingly. Given the circumstances, the goal is to maximize utilization and implementation, so your traditional programs may not be perfectly executed like in a traditional collegiate setting, but at the end of the day, your group is getting the basics down and can still make progress and be mission-ready.

Summary

I had to learn quite a bit on the fly, everything from military culture, language, battle rhythms, to the job each Service Member does, etc. Some of the most successful Strength and Conditioning Coaches in the tactical setting have had their success due to their experience at smaller schools. Coaches in these settings have had to deal with smaller weight rooms, minimal equipment, working larger groups, working with athletes of lower training ages, creating buy-in, building meaningful relationships, many of which these things aren’t as common in a Division 1, P5, or professional programs; as many of them S&C is just another requirement and expectation in these settings. I’m thankful for my small school S&C experience to set me up for success that has led me to successfully stand up two different Human Performance programs in two different units, at two different installations.