Police officer recruitment process

Hi, I'm Tom Hig, and we're part of the operational training team here on police HQ in Nettleham. And today we're going to demonstrate a few techniques regarding the fitness test.

So, this video is going to give you a few hints, tips and basic techniques on how you can improve the fitness test, also known as the dreaded bleep test.

So, whether you're thinking of joining as a special, a regular or you're currently serving and you're just looking to improve your performance, then this video is for you.

So before I show you some techniques and give you some training tips, I just want to dispel a few myths. First of all, a lot of people tell me they train for the bleep test by going to spin or running on a treadmill. This training is good, however it doesn't incorporate any form of turning, which is crucial to the fitness test itself.

Secondary, not many people know this, but if you don't set the gradient at least 1.5% on a treadmill it's actually the equivalent of running downhill. Why is that? Well, the treadmill has a motor, it does some of the work for you, meaning you don't actually propel your body forward like you would do naturally. So by setting the gradient to around 1.5% it would counter this and stimulated you running on the flat.

One final thing which is becoming more and more common is the amount of officers who are incredibly anxious before the fitness test. This anxiety increases your heart rate, it puts a massive amount of adrenaline to your body and can actually fatigue you before you've even started. So how can you combat this? Well don't laugh, but something as simple as downloading the [bleep test] app from the Google Store or wherever if you have an iPhone, and just listen to it whenever you have a spare five minutes. It will actually help you massively. When listening to it you can also visualise yourself comfortably making the line each time to bleep sounds. And when you combine that with the tips and training methods that I'll outline next, when it actually comes to do the test for real and hear the sounds of the dreaded bleep it actually won't feel so bad, there won't be so much of a shock. And ultimately, you'll feel a lot more confident.

Okay, let's have a look at the first tip I'm going to give you. It's really easy, and anyone can use it. This is simply to slow down before the line and not actually on the line itself. The harder you have to stop the more energy that's required. We want to keep as much energy in the legs as possible. So, by coming off the gas four to five metres away from the line will allow you to naturally slow down before you get there. The idea here is to save as much energy as possible in your and so you can use that to accelerate away from the line, as opposed to break. Just like approaching a set of traffic lights when they're on red, if you're accelerating all the way to it and then slammed on your brakes last minute, it will require a lot of energy. However, if you slow down naturally by coming off the gas, there's a good chance only minimal force will be used by the brakes. And this is the exact same principle you can apply with the bleep test itself.

So now we've understood how to slow down before the line, let's have a look at the turn itself. You might notice when Rebecca reached the line she wasn't facing forward and her foot doesn't want to come around 90 degrees so it's pointing in the same direction as the line. By turning your body as you're about to step over the line brings the foot around naturally in the same direction as the line. Again, this cuts down on the braking aspect. It saves energy, is more efficient and it allows for much smoother transmission during the turns.

The key point to this is if you are going to turn left then it is your right foot that should be on the line and vice versa.

So we've demonstrated a few techniques and tips, let's look at how we can train for the fitness test and incorporate all of this together.

You can pretty much do this anywhere, outdoors, indoors. All you need is about four or five metres, which is 13 to 16 feet off the top of my head. Now we look at training to reach level 5.4, as this is the minimum standard required to join, which you have to maintain on a yearly basis. You can apply this training method irrelevant of ability so long as you know how many shuttles it is to reach your desired level.

So to reach level 5.4, believe it or not, is just 3 minutes 36 seconds. I know some of you might be watching thinking "no that's not right, it feels like at least 10 minutes". I'm sorry, it's only 3:36. I've even timed it myself.

It's also a total 35 shuttles, across a 15 metre hall. So the formula I'm going to give you is a 25% formula. This is 25% of the number of shuttles it takes to reach your goal, which indicates to reach over 5.4 works out to just under nine shuttles. You then do this six times through, which works out at 54 shuttles in total, which is 19 more than what's required on the day itself.

So nine shuttles, quick break, get your breath back and you're going to do this six times through. Ideally, you want to be doing this two to three times per week. And the key point here is it's important to practice turning on each leg, because you may not always be lucky enough to land on your strong leg.

Once you can manage this comfortably and feel ready to progress to the next stage there's options that you've got available to you. You can either increase the number of shuttles you are doing. So instead of just doing nine shuttles, you could do ten, 11, 12. You can increase the amount of sets you do, for example instead of just doing six, you could do seven, eight or nine. And if you feel super ambitious, you could even incorporate a squat or a squat jump after to each turn to add some real strength to your legs.

So by utilising these tips, techniques and training methods in this video, it will massively help.

Happy training guys. Smash your goals