Developing Fitness Tests for Selection into Special Ops

Often I receive emails from military and law enforcement personnel concerning how fair a fitness test is and does it accurately measure someone’s fitness level.  For instance, here is an email from on police officer who is seeking candidates for his department’s SWAT Team:

I am about to open up tryouts for a few SWAT Team positions and am trying to develop a fitness test that will help the Team select the best candidates to attend our training program.  Any suggestions?

There two things most military and law enforcement groups try to measure:  Basic Fitness / Health and Physical Potential to Succeed in Advanced Training.

Basic Fitness / Health - The reasoning for the basic fitness test is to ensure a certain level of health and well-being which will have an impact on job performance, decreased sick days, and a better mental attitude in a stressful environment.  Training for a cardio test of a 2 mile run or a 12 minute swim test would require people to exercise regularly and help with cutting extra fat off their bodies.  The strength, muscle endurance, and flexibility will help with injury prevention from doing odd jobs that may require lifting.  Remember, the goal is to create healthy people in the public service work force. 

Standard fitness tests used today usually are good indicators of one’s health, not necessarily an indication of satisfactory job performance.  Basically, the run, pushups, sit-ups test most groups perform will give a selection board only a minimal amount of information, but it is still a valid test to assess with current fitness standards scores.

However, Physical Potential to Succeed in Advanced Training testing can offer more insight if graded the following method:

First, these tests should be more directed toward strength, endurance, speed, and agility in a job related method if possible.  For instance, if you are a SWAT Team with many water sources in your jurisdiction or a military Special Ops selection team, here is an example test and grading method:

Swim – 300 – 500m swim with fins

Agility test – there are many examples to choose from but the Illinois Agility Test, stair climb with gear, a 120yd shuttle run, or 300m run with hurdles / obstacles would suffice

Max Pushups in 1-2 minutes or body weight bench press – max reps

Max Situps in 1- 2 minutes

Max Pullups and / or rope or caving ladder climbs

1 mile run with gear

This type of test will help assess some level of tactical athleticism and can be altered with a variety of different tests, but the interesting way to grade this type of test will help with the selection process of your Spec Ops group.

See example below:

One way to create a good fair scoring system is to create a test that has some form of cardio / upperbody / speed / agility / lowerbody set up so you would score it like this:

Cardio + Speed & agility run - add both up in seconds  (sample test)

Example 1.5 mile run in 10 minutes = 600 seconds / points + a 300m sprint with obstacles to weave / jump thru done in 60 seconds = 60 points) - there base score is 660 points...