"Be Prepared" is the motto of the Boy Scouts, and it is a theory that firefighters the world over should ascribe to. As a firefighter, being prepared means placing yourself into a Ready Position, being prepared for the physical and psychological stresses that you will face each and every day. The Ready Position is an idealized state of Personal Condition. Personal Condition is a term that is used in a variety of ways in the psychology/sociology communities to represent what a person "brings to the table".
For my purposes Personal Condition will be defined as "a firefighter's ability to respond to the psychological and physiological stresses of firefighting as governed by his training, experience, and belief systems." Regardless of how prepared we are on any given day, or given response, we all have a Personal Condition. For the Fire Service Warrior, the Ready Position is "the state of readiness where a fireman is at the peak ability to emotionally, cognitively and physically perform offensive operations on the fireground." When you are in the Ready Position you are prepared for the known general conditions that are present at every emergency response and for the unknowable specifics that you must process on your arrival. If the Ready Position is our ideal condition we will call the opposite end of the spectrum unprepared. Along the way we hit milestones in our readiness. Each one of us falls somewhere along this continuum on any given day. Our goal must be to strive for the Ready Position every day, and on every call.
Physical Readiness
For the Fire Service Warrior the "easier" state of readiness to achieve is that of Physical Readiness. I use the term easier with tongue firmly in cheek. The level of physical fitness that is required to prepare for the physiological stress of the fireground is anything but easy, but compared to the demands of forging mental readiness it is simpler to track and measure.
I've said before, firefighting is combat. Like combat, firefighting requires us to engage in physically and psychologically stressful tasks. The effects on the body are multifold. The exertion of firefighting is equivalent to the metabolic effort engaged in by Navy SEALs and professional Boxers. To effectively combat the effects of physiological and psychological stress firefighters should maintain a level of physical fitness that is commonly associated with elite athletes.
Firefighting is not the same as running marathons however. A significant portion of what we are called upon to do demands strenuous muscular effort. Forcing doors, pulling ceilings, raising ladders, advancing hoselines, and carrying victims all require muscular strength and endurance. In order to properly prepare for the physical challenges, a fireman needs to couple strength training with metabolic training.
Training for the Physical Battle
In order to develop the strength required for firefighting we need to examine the kind of work we do as firefighters and what types of exercises will be most beneficial. As firefighters, we perform motions that are rarely mimicked by isolation exercises. Our efforts require the use of multiple muscle groups working together. Let's examine the act of pulling a drywall ceiling. Essentially you can "pull" or "push" using a pike pole to bring the ceiling down. If you take a minute and think about what hurts when you finish pulling several rooms of ceiling you being to realize you are using a significant number of muscles, including the "quadriceps, hamstrings, glutes, abdominals, torso rotators, lower back stabilizers, deltoids, trapezius, triceps, biceps, and muscles of the forearm and hand (grip)". These muscles are being used at the same time and in the eccentric, concentric, and isometric movements. This "simple" act of pulling ceiling requires the Central Nervous System to coordinate all of these movements, and you need to have sufficient strength, endurance, and flexibility to perform the action.
The need to develop effective physical fitness in the Fire Service has been recognized. The International Fire Chiefs and the International Association of Firefighters have partnered to create the "Wellness-Fitness Initiative" (WFI) to promote physical fitness and mental wellness. An outgrowth of the WFI movement has been the Candidate Physical Ability Test (CPAT). The CPAT is designed as a screening tool to see if prospective candidates have the basic physical ability to perform essential fireground tasks. The "Peer Fitness Trainer" program is another means that the Wellness Fitness Initiative has developed to promote physical fitness. Peer Fitness Trainers are certified by the American Council on Exercise as Personal Trainers with a specific background in the fitness methods advocated by the WFI.
Outside of the "official" fire service fitness programs, there are fitness "movements" that have caught on in the fire service, law enforcement and military community. One in particular is CrossFit. CrossFit is a fitness philosophy and community founded by Greg and Laura Glassman. Their fitness methodology can best be summed up as "broad, general and inclusive" and is marked by their fitness prescription of "constantly varied, high intensity, functional movements." To accomplish this goal the CrossFit community advocates training in functional lifting using power-lifting and Olympic-lifting movements, gymnastics skills, and interval type training. They also use their trademark "Girls" and "Hero" workouts, which are generally couplets and triplets of movements involving both strength and "cardio" movements performed for time. Fire Departments and firemen around the country are using CrossFit's methods and work-outs to prepare for the physical challenges of the job.
There are many methods out there for getting fit; the key is picking one that focuses on the skills of the fireman: lift, carry, pull, push and chop; with the intensity that mimics that of the fireground. While developing the fitness level of a Navy SEAL, a Boxer, or an Olympic Cyclist may seem extreme, the facts support our need to do so. One of the roadblocks to getting firemen to train the way they should is the fact that an exercise program that is sufficiently intense to prepare you adequately for the rigors of firefighting HURTS. Squatting, Pressing, and Dead Lifting weights heavy enough to develop the strength needed to grasp the SCBA harness straps of a downed firefighter and drag him from a building is going to be hard work.
Maybe you feel like you don't need to have the strength to drag a 300# firefighter from a building unaided. You're wrong. You should be able to at least BEGIN to rescue your partner if he or she suddenly becomes incapacitated inside a structure fire. Yes, you are going to call a RIT Team, you are going to have help eventually, but you cannot just sit there and wait. Beyond the possibility of having to rescue your partner there are the very real physical demands that "normal" operations place on our bodies. Published literature has shown that firefighters performing fire ground operations during interior structural firefighting commonly reach heart rates of 164bpm to 183bpm.
This is a significant work load. The fitter you are, the greater work capacity you have; the greater your work capacity, the more controlled your heart rate and breathing will be while performing strenuous fireground tasks. In short, the fitter you are the more likely you are to survive on the fireground.
Measuring Your Progress
You need to be able to perform to a standard that measures your ability, be it the Candidate Physical Ability Test (CPAT), the CrossFit work out of the day (WOD) Fran, or a program of your own design. Numbers don't lie. You can measure the success of your fitness program by recording defined parameters over the course of time. Test yourself: hop on the treadmill in full turn out gear, with your SCBA, and walk at 4 miles per hour, until your low air alarm activates. How many minutes were you on air? What was your resting heart rate when you began? What was your heart rate one minute after finishing? Now, engage in your planned exercise program for six weeks to eight weeks. Retest yourself. Did your numbers improve? If they did you are on the right track, and if they didn't you are probably not working out efficiently. However you measure your efforts the key is to see progress. By using the research into the metabolic energy that firefighters typically expend as a yard stick you can evaluate your personal level of fitness against a standard and determine if you are preparing for the challenges of firefighting.
Mental Readiness
Firefighting challenges us mentally as well physically. In discussing hoe we prepare for the mental aspects of firefighting we are grouping two key areas of psychology under one umbrella. We must be prepared for the impact of stress on our cognitive abilities, as well as our emotional health.
When you consider the environment that firemen operate in there are two primary "action states". You are either "at rest", around the firehouse or conducting a non-emergency routine assignment or you are "working", engaged in mitigating an emergency that is putting someone's life in danger and may kill or injure you. I'm going to restate for the sake of understanding that I am addressing fireground operations for the most part. For many departments EMS, and Fire Prevention are the bulk of their daily duties, with "still alarm" type incidents, rubbish fires, auto fires, and the like, filling in the rest of the day. Few departments are responding to a structure fire every day, and those that are generally see that duty spread across various companies. This reality should emphasize our need to think about how we prepare for the mental challenges found in firefighting. That preparation will carry over into being prepared for any eventuality.
One of our challenges in preparing for the mental impact of emergency response is that we do not have a set-aside time to "put our game face on". We rapidly shift from one state of being to another when a call is dispatched. Being mentally prepared, therefore, must be continually strived for.
To be ready for our "Action State" we must have a solid foundation in Situational Awareness and Fireground Tactical Decision Making. These skills cannot be underestimated. Utilizing a mental model like the Boyd Loop focuses you as you Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. This system helps you control how your brain processes information. The most effective way of confronting a difficult situation is to have a procedure to fall back on. In the fire service we have procedures and guidelines that tell us when we are going to perform maintenance on our apparatus, what tool we will take based on our riding assignment, and checklists for how to call a MAYDAY. You can choose to incorporate the Boyd Loop into your personal condition as a way of gathering and interpreting information on the fireground. By doing this regularly you will have a mental model that you can use if you suddenly find yourself in a truly life threatening situation, like a sudden change in conditions that may lead to disorientation.
Challenges
The mental challenges that we find on the fireground come from several sources. First we have the anxiety brought on by behaving in an abnormal fashion. It is not "normal" to run into a burning building, and our brains recognize this. Secondly there is the stress associated with confronting traumatic circumstances. The reality of being a firefighter is that you will deal with people in their worst moments, you will be faced with the dead and the dying, and you will have to untangle broken, mangled, and maimed people. It is imperative that we develop a means of forging mental readiness for these potentially difficult situations.
Preparing for the effects of fear induced anxiety requires an understanding of how our body responds to psychological stress. When we face a life threatening situation our body engages the well known "fight or flight" response. This is the body marshaling resources to protect itself and causes a shift from parasympathetic to the sympathetic nervous system. An uncontrolled SNS reaction can lead directly to a chain reaction of negative consequences that impair the cognitive function, and the ability to use your senses to gather information from the world around you. Controlling your breathing, as a biofeedback technique, can help slow an anxiety induced elevated heart rate and allow you to regain your cognitive function.
Preparing for the emotional challenges of firefighting is another important aspect of mental readiness. From personal experience and non-scientific observations of literally thousands of firefighters, police officers and military members around the world I have come to the conclusion that how an individual views him or her-self is the key factor in coping with the emotionally stressful elements of our profession. We each view the world through a prism that gathers outside information and compares it to our view of the world. In Boyd Theory his is a synthesis that occurs in the Orientation phase. For the sake of clarity I am going to use the term Life Stance to describe the synthesis of philosophical and religious learning that you have to frame your concept of life.
Stoicism
Stoicism is one way, practiced by warriors for thousands of years, to deal with stressful situations. Stoicism is "indifference to pleasure or pain." The idea of the stoics was to accept that there are things we cannot control and to not be affected by them. Epictetus, a stoic sage whose teachings were recorded by his students, says in The Handbook, "Some things are in our control and others not." He goes on to say "Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions". His meaning is that we do not get to choose if we will be 6'2" or 5'3"; we do not get to control if we are born into wealth or poverty; we have no say in how others will interpret our actions.
We do have the ability to choose how we will respond to the actions of others, and to the circumstances we are faced with. Say you are assigned to the first due Truck Company on the scene of a structure fire in a single family home. In the bedroom just off the fire room you find the unconscious body of a 7 year-old girl. You notify command and remove her from the building to a waiting EMS unit. After the fire you find out that she was pronounced dead at the hospital. How will you choose to respond? Some people will shrug the situation off as "unavoidable" or "not my fault" others will become emotionally stressed by the situation.
Epictetus would likely say: "Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things. Death, for instance, is not terrible; else it would have appeared so to Socrates. But the terror consists in our notion of death that it is terrible." In other words the death of the girl should not affect you, unless you had personal control over it. Did you perform your job within the scope of your training and to the best of your ability? Were you physically and mentally prepared for your assignment? Did you know your riding position, tool assignment, and role based on Department Standard Operating Guidelines? If you can answer yes to these questions then there is little likelihood that you had control over ANY of the circumstances that lead to the young girl's death. The zealous stoic would say that you should be unaffected by this; it was not within your control. The ideal of stoicism is very different from the reality of human emotion and interaction. Anyone who is emotionally healthy will be affected by the death of a seven year-old. Even though children die everyday the normal person will see this as a "bad", "upsetting", "unnatural" occurrence. The reason for this is we see children as being innocent, incomplete, and full of potential. The death of a young child seems wrong to us because that child hasn't had a chance to become something greater. These are all reasonable reactions. The key is to have developed a "dimmer switch" that helps us not become emotionally handicapped by our reactions to the daily horrors we face. Our training, experience, and or life stance all impact our ability to handle the emotional stress of our position in a healthy way.
Training is perhaps the "easiest" starting point. Our training occurs in three key ways: formal classes, company level, and individual study. Formal classes are the prevue of state regulatory agencies and fire departments. An organization can provide personnel an introduction to the emotional realities they will face. The adage "forewarned is forearmed" is entirely appropriate. There are departments that have veteran firefighters who have been burned, or injured, present their stories to recruit classes during Fire Academy. This is valuable because it takes the abstract idea of the dangers of the fireground and makes it real for the new recruits. An introduction to the psychological challenges that may be faced should occur during recruit training to enable the individual to begin forming a coping system. Training should detail common reactions to psychological stress, unhealthy behaviors to watch for, and offer strategies for coping with the emotional challenges of being a first responder. When it comes to dealing with emotionally challenging situations that occur during normal operations we can work with our people informally on a Company level. Having veteran personnel share situations like our example, in "kitchen table" sessions offers newer members a chance to learn from the experiences of more experienced members. When we look at preparing for the psychological stresses of firefighting we need to study ourselves and by ourselves to adequately prepare. Knowing yourself means having a clear understanding of how you respond to stress. As individuals we can study stoic philosophy, read about choice theory, or find another means of preparing for the expected stress of our position.
Experience is a more elusive tutor. I can't remember who first told me, "Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted." Truer words have never been spoken. You do not know how a situation will affect you until you have been through it. You build the foundation for how you cope with each successive exposure. Consider for a moment the stereotypical "inner-city fireman" who, because of repeated exposures to emotionally stressful circumstances, without a healthy coping skills, suffers "burn-out". What happens? He begins to hate the job he once loved and dreads having to go to work. Our experiences both in and out of the fire service lay a foundation for how we respond to stress.
Your life stance can be any religious, spiritual, or philosophical system, or combination of them all, you live your life by. It may be something that you were raised with, or it may be something you have chosen for yourself. Regardless of how you came by the prism you view the world through, you have one and it is uniquely yours. Understanding how that foundation impacts your thoughts and your response to stress will allow you to choose how to use that system, to live a healthy life style.
Choice and Self-Control
Most people will say that they just react and that they cannot do anything about it. This is where the lessons of the stoics can help us develop a means of controlling how we respond to emotionally challenging situations. You can choose how you will respond. The choices you make in response to the events that impact you or the way you are treated are 100% within your control. You can choose to relinquish control over your thoughts and your emotions by allowing yourself to react to the things that others do or say, but that is a choice. Rather than "react" we as individuals need to respond to the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" in a thoughtful and constructive manner.
At some point in each of our lives we have heard a co-worker, friend, lover, parent or partner say, "You make me feel (fill in emotion)", we have probably said it ourselves. The reality is that no one can make us feel anything, nor can we make anyone feel a particular emotion. I can MAKE you feel pain if I pick up a baseball bat and hit you in the head, but I can't make you feel worthless as a person. We choose to feel hurt or sad or worthless based upon the credence we give the words, or actions, of another person. That is a tremendous amount of personal power that we relinquish when we allow others to hold sway over us like that.
Choosing how you respond to an individual's words and actions directed specifically towards you is one step on the road of mastering your personal condition. Our example of the young girl is the next step in choosing how we will respond. This a circumstance where responding in a sympathetic manner is appropriate: you can acknowledge that the family of the girl must be devastated, while accepting that you are not responsible for her death. You did your job to the best of your ability to rapidly locate and remove her from the structure. You transferred her to the best available medical treatment. You acted in accordance with the accepted practices of your organization and within the scope of your training. You can "choose" to feel personally responsible, or you can accept that people everyday die. Some people die in horrible ways like suffocating in a fire, others "peacefully" in their sleep. Some people die as children, others live to be over a hundred years old. You have no control over who dies when, unless you specifically commit an act that kills them.
The Ready Position
In order to be in the Ready Position you must master both your physical and mental condition. Mastering these two primary components of your Personal Condition requires thoughtful analysis of yourself. The Swiss Psychologist Carl Jung is credited with saying, "One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious." This applies to how we approach our own physical and mental readiness. You have to understand your strengths as well as your limitations in order to maximize your abilities, and be prepared for the challenges of the fireground. Once you understand your personal condition you can see where you are along the path to the Ready Position. Then the real work begins. You will not get to the Ready Position by working on your strengths, but by focusing on your weaknesses. Diligent effort, focus, and study will prepare you for the physical and mental challenges you will face daily on and off the job.
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