Wilderness Medicine Updates
The podcast for medical providers at the edges, bringing you digestible updates at the growing edge of Wilderness Medicine, Wilderness EMS, Search and Rescue, and more.
Wilderness Medicine Updates
Ep. 26 - Physical Training for Mountain Rescue Professionals with Rob Shaul of Mountain Tactical Institute
On this episode of Wilderness Medicine Updates, host Patrick Fink shifts focus from the science and literature of wilderness medicine to practical fitness tips for search and rescue personnel, ski patrollers, and outdoor rescuers. Patrick interviews Rob Shaw, founder and head coach of the Mountain Tactical Institute, about his specialized training programs for various types of mountain athletes, including those in industrial and tactical roles. They discuss the nuances of preparing for seasonal work, the distinct fitness demands of ski patrollers versus search and rescue members, and the importance of chassis integrity and mental fitness. Rob highlights minimal equipment training plans that can be effective for mountain professionals and recreational athletes alike, and offers a special discount for the show's listeners. Additional topics covered include Rob's nutritional recommendations and the concept of the 'quiet professional,' someone deeply committed to the craft of their work.
Offer
Are you involved in mountain or wilderness rescue? Rob is offering the first 50 listeners who reach out to him a 20% discount on a training plan. Send your rescue or professional credentials to rob@mtntactical.com to secure your discount.
Links
Training Plans Patrick Likes:
Mountain Base Fitness Greek Heroine Series
Backcountry Ski Preseason Training Plan
Exercises Discussed:
Rob's Resources:
Ideal bodyweights for mountain athletes
Mountain/Wilderness SAR Fitness Assessment Training Plan
Resilience vs. Discipline vs. Perseverance: Why the Distinctions Matter in Mental Fitness
The 8 Core Attributes of Mental Fitness
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Wilderness Medicine
00:46 Guest Introduction: Rob Shaw from Mountain Tactical Institute
04:38 The Evolution of Mountain Tactical Institute
06:58 Training for Mountain and Tactical Athletes
11:43 Fitness Demands for Ski Patrol
19:13 In-Season Training and Professionalism
24:47 Fitness for Search and Rescue Volunteers
25:10 Integrating Training with Da
As always, thanks for listening to Wilderness Medicine Updates, hosted by Patrick Fink MD FAWM.
Connect with us by email at wildernessmedicineupdates@gmail.com.
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Welcome back to Wilderness Medicine. Updates the show for providers at the edges. Here's your host, Patrick Fink.
Patrick Fink MD:Thank you for that. Welcome back everyone. I have an exciting show for you today. We're gonna do a little something different and move away from the science and literature of wilderness medicine and focus on some practical information. For those of you who might be participants in search and rescue, might be ski patrollers may have a role as a rescuer in the outdoors. I am excited to bring for you. I'm excited to bring you a show with Rob Shaw. Rob is the founder and head coach at Mountain Tactical Institute, MTI used to be called Mountain Athlete, and it's a gym based in Jackson, Wyoming. They address the fitness needs of mountain athletes, particularly the guides who are working in Jackson, who are going up and down the Teton Mountains every day of the summer and winter. Rob took that business and grew it to meet other mission specific demands. What do we mean by that? I mean the needs of specific groups like military personnel preparing for special forces selection or police officers who need to maintain job specific fitness, different from firefighters, different from recreational mountain athletes. So Rob has done a great job of segmenting these training populations out there and delivering training content that is specific to them. I have no affiliation with Mountain Tactical Institute. I don't get money from Rob for doing this show. I found MTI myself, when I was trying to address my own fitness needs. I was looking for mountain specific fitness programming and that's what led me to Rob and I've enjoyed doing his training programs, many of which are equipment, minimal and achievable at home. When I do this training, I feel stronger in the mountains. I feel like I have greater reserve and I enjoy what I'm doing more, and I hope that that's something that you could enjoy as well. I also really appreciate that Rob has two different ways to pay him for his training. You can subscribe and get a daily fitness programming delivered to you for different fitness domains, but what I like, what I prefer is that you can make a one-time purchase, buy an affordable training plan from Rob and have that plan for life. Use it annually to prepare yourself for specific needs or specific goals, and they have a great app to walk you through that training plan day by day. It. We dive into a lot of topics here. How to prepare yourself physically for seasonal work, be that ski patrol or wildland fire, how to address the fitness needs of a search and rescue member, or ski patroller, who's in season, who has part-time role in search and rescue, or works in a non-physical job for the rest of their life. I hope that you'll listen to this with an open mind. Rob gives nutritional recommendations for industrial athletes. We discuss professionalism and training craftsmanship in your career and more. I think you can get something out of it. I know that fitness and nutrition are things that people have a lot of opinions about that are closely held, like religious beliefs, but I think if you come to this conversation with an open mind, you'll find if nothing else, some useful concepts to take back to what you're already doing. Maybe Rob's chassis integrity concept connects with you or you find his nutritional information beneficial or. You become interested in the usefulness of the sandbags for training for industrial athletes, and you take that back to your own training. So be sure to listen through to the end of the podcast because Rob has been kind enough to make an offer to the listeners of this show who are in search and rescue, ski patrol, or other such professional or semi-professional roles. Now without further delay, here is my conversation with Rob Shaw. I hope you enjoy. Rob, thanks for joining me on the podcast. I'm excited to have you on here because I've used your training plans previously. I've gotten a lot of benefit out of them and I now find myself in a position where I'm moving into medical direction roles and can encourage folks that I work with to start branching out thinking about preseason training. I want to, give my listeners who I think are predominantly search and rescue and ski patrol folks. A framework for thinking about the fitness demands of their job and how they should be addressing those. bet that there's a pretty wide variety of folks out there in terms of some are doing nothing, others are probably, deep in the world of CrossFit. I think your background is perfect here, and we'll dive a little bit more into the mission specific thoughts. let's just start with an introduction from you. Where are you coming from with Mountain Athlete and how did that become the Mountain Tactical Institute?
Rob:So I was in, my, mid late thirties, uh, sold a company and, uh, before I had sold, I'd always been a gym rat. Grew up, uh, small town of Wyoming, and, did some time in the military. I was in the Coast Guard, went back to my small town, started a business,. I'd always been a gym rat, not much of an athlete. The mountains were my gym, you know, a 20 mile loop, no problem. Those types of things. There was real no commercial gym there. And, this, uh, physical therapy place had like a universal machine of one rack and a bunch of treadmills. And I, I'd go in there train that the owner started noticing that, you know, people were kind of watching what I was doing. And so I took like a weekend course got a cheesy, uh, personal training, certification. And so started teaching, courses I had all, pretty much all soccer moms, but these are like some badass soccer moms. I'd have'em go out and, uh, you know, we'd get out in the summer. There was an irrigation ditch above the place. I, I'd make'em swim against the current irrigation ditch, run downhill, do burpees, pick up lock. They just loved it, you know, they just ate it up. And so Jackson's a little bit north decided to go up. Jackson and I, I wanted to work with mountain guides and on the mountain side. So I started Mountain Athlete. I thought it'd be interesting. Had no idea really what I was getting into, because I was bringing to it everything I'd learned studying for, strengthening conditioning. the existing strength and conditional literature for, mountain athletes, was pretty much non-existent. I remember reading the rock climbing books and they were talking mostly about mental stuff and hand movements all that stuff didn't work, started experimenting in the gym. That's where we kind of got, you know, my first season, training for, dry land ski stuff. I had my athletes doing lots of dead lifts, lots of back squats. Oh my God, their legs were so strong. Then they came back from the first day at the lift and they were all pissed at me because they got smoke skiing. I'm like, how is this possible? Well, it turns out when you ski, you, don't use concentric strength, moving your legs up or coming up from the squat. You're, you actually, your body is. Bouncing down the hill, gravity's bouncing down the hill. And it's your job, your legs, to stop your ass from hitting the ground every time you bounce. So you gotta decelerate, and that's called eccentric strength training. Totally messed that up. Made the same mistake with, uh, rock climbers. Um, gotta learn a lot. That season started, uh, you know, designing specifically for mountain athletes. Pretty much had to vent everything. All my rock climbing theory came from me'cause all the books are terrible. You know, no one developed or found leg blasters to start training eccentric strength for skiers. I got really good identifying the fitness demands of an activity and designing programming specifically for those fitness demands. And, uh, 2009, Obama did the Afghanistan surge. We were getting our asses kicked in Afghani. Served in, I think there were six 8,000 troops there, surgeon 30 more thousand. And guys, uh, going down range Afghanistan, were getting smoked, doing mountain patrols because a, you know, we're running and rucking on flat stuff. So I developed a plant called Lee Afghanistan, pre-deployment plan. Give it away to thousands of guys. I remember, I, I lost count at 13 battalion commanders. He did their entire battalions. And, uh, that kind of kicked us over into the tactical side. And pretty soon those guys were asking for plans for ranger school and special forces selections. And then, on the mountain professional side, rangers, some SAR professionals, wildland Fire, started getting requests for programming. Generally, I start designing programming when I get a request for it. And so, uh, it kind of builds organically but the overall theory that we developed, identifying the fitness demands of the activity, the exercise that trained those fitness demands, we can't train for every fitness demands, just the ones we can train efficiently in the gym. Um, identify end of cycle goals, pretty much program backward to get to those goals. Start the progression and hammer down. For example, our mountain, base fitness programming has a significant bias towards uphill endurance. Just about every mountain sport starts with a hike uphill. And so we do a lot of running or, step ups or uphill hiking under load in our mountain base fitness. They still train relative strength and work capacity, all their stuff, but there's a bias towards, uphill endurance. The military athlete, instead of hiking uphill, they rock. They run the, for their work capacity, they'll do sprints repeats, which is similar to movement under fire, sprint, get down, up sprint again, someone's shooting at you. So there's just all these types of different things that we do. We're always constantly testing and evaluating and improving. And, that's the story of MTI.
Patrick Fink MD:It is, an impressive progression from beginning in Pinedale. You touched on this briefly, but I think it's a useful concept to think about. How do you think about the different types of athletes and the relative demands for those? I'm thinking about an industrial versus a recreational athlete or a tactical athlete. How do you parse those out
Rob:Um, it's, it's real easy to do this to, to see a difference on the mountain side. Like I have ideal body weights for, different athletes based on height and, the mountain athlete body weights are lower than the tactical athlete body weights. Tactical athletes, generally have, uh, higher strength demands. Their packs are heavier. Let me just give you an example. A, you know, like a, a professional rock climber or a recreational athlete, he's an alpine climber or, uh, wants to compete in ski mountaineering. Races really don't need much upper body strength, right? And so there's no use putting a lot of upper body mass on him, I don't know if you've ever seen a, tour de France, competitor for of those cycling races with their shirt off? I mean, I mean it's total spoon chest. Yeah, right. So, any extra upper body mass is just, extra weight they gotta carry around. So there are some significant differences, but if you are a, what I would call an industrial athlete, someone who, is getting paid, to do a specific job, they're not competing in a sport. The, the fitness demands you're gonna face are not as identifiable as they are for a schema racer. Schema racer can get down. I mean, for a specific race, I know exactly how much vertical, exactly how much downhill, you know, idea of how long the race is gonna be, all that other stuff. If you go out on a,, SAR mission and it's supposed to be a simple, you know, say a couple snowmobiles got lost, it could turn into a multi-day event. You know, um, your pack's gonna be heavier'cause you gotta carry extra gear in. Like your med bag, right? That shit's heavy. So the, the strength loads for industrial athletes, the, I mean, the packs are heavier, period. So that means they have more strength. Plus you might get there and then you gotta lift, you know, the sled off the guy or pick him up you know, all that other stuff happens. So industrial athletes need to be stronger, which means they need to be heavier because the strength is muscle and the session to weight, they need to do more strengthening. We need to give more emphasis to their midsection strength. The main difference from my perspective is the events are not as predictable. Every rescue's a little bit different or could be different, it could turn into something crazy and you have to be prepared for it. So the, what you're preparing for is less known, which means that the, the fitness training needs to be a little more comprehensive and a little more general than it would be for a specific event.
Patrick Fink MD:So if you were a SAR member or. Professional ski patroller coming into an upcoming season and you're thinking to yourself, well, I'm, I'm a very active person. I go out, I ride my mountain bike all the time. I trail run, I carry my kids around. Where are the deficits gonna be for the professional role in comparison to just what someone accomplishes recreationally.
Rob:I, I can't tell you that on, on the mountain side, there's, there's not really a tradition, uh, strength conditioning preparation for skiing. There are some exceptions to that. The hardest athletes, hardest working athletes, and most dedicated professional athletes I've ever worked with are world Cup ski racers. Those guys get after it. I mean, they are, you know, they're fit and they train in the gym hard, and it's part of that culture. But if you're a ski patroller going in, and let's say, I mean, ski patroller is a, you know, seasonal job. Let's say your summer job is, you know, as a ranger or working construction, whatever it is. You're not gonna have the eccentric leg strength or strength endurance to handle ski. You're just like anybody else. But here's the difference. A recreational athlete who doesn't prepare for ski season gets up there and on the third day of the first week, decides to take one more run even though his legs are smoked, you know, pops his ACL'cause he gets lazy or falls down or whatever. And then the ski patrol has to go up and execute, the rescue and bring him down. Um, the difference is that the ski patroller, if, if that person goes into the season and he's not, or she's not ready, fitness wise for that event, well now they have this other person depending on'em to get down the hill. And if they're also tired and smoked, it's just a cascade of issues that could result in, something that should be simple. Um. Turn into, something that could be bad, not just because a ski patroller wasn't professional about their fitness before they started their professional job. If you're a professional, a mountain professional, you need to be professional by your fitness and prepared for what could happen on day one. And, if you're not, then been unprofessional by your fitness
Patrick Fink MD:well, and you, you stand potentially not just to lose your ski vacation, but your livelihood for the winter. If you go out with an injury in the, in the early weeks.
Rob:Yeah, absolutely. That's, that's another component though. I don't think a lot of people understand that I worked lots of mountain guides. They're not salaried, right? They're contract workers, and, a knee can take out an entire year of earnings for a mountain guide. So yeah, it's certainly something to be, considerate about. We do know that the best way to be durable for a specific sport or event is to be supported, specifically fit for that event, right? So we have our athletes on the tactical side, we'll have'em run with ruck. Because if you go to ranger school they have a 12 mile ruck with the, like 60 pounds and before that they're getting smoked. So a lot of those guys, you know, they gotta run the last six miles to make the, to make the time or they are part of it. They've never done that before. Um, you know, they, they're asking for injury. So yeah, you need to be ideally, um, prior to training, know what it feels like and be fit for it.
Patrick Fink MD:So you saying that you can just do the sport I can get fit for skiing by just skiing a lot.
Rob:Absolutely. What I mean by that is, uh, the problem is that you can't ski year round, right? So, it's different from day one versus middle of the season. Ideally, you come into it and you're fit. Now certainly if it's in the middle of the season, you're skiing every day. Your legs are pretty fit for skiing, but that's the middle of a season. Right. So, unless you're, going down south to or New Zealand every year, and I did have a couple guides who do that. They're crazy, eternal winters. I wouldn't want that. Uh, but uh, yeah, they, you know, they would just ski year round and uh, they have to worry a little bit about overuse injuries and stuff like that. But, you know, getting injured from a, you know, ski injury is not that big of a concern. So that's something that comes up. I take, I can tell you it's a lot more fun to just ski, to get fit for skiing than it is to do leg blasters. And our touch up to intervals, they suck. But you're not gonna be fit to day one of the season. It's gonna take time to do that. And, you cannot escape the work. You're gonna have to do the work one way or the other. And so from my perspective, if you're a mountain professional, who gonna ski hill? If you're not fit for skiing when you arrive day one, uh, that's very unprofessional. And if you're a professional competing athlete and you're not fit from day one. You're gonna get smoked. You're not professional about your sport, and someone else who comes in fit is gonna, you're not gonna get the podium.
Patrick Fink MD:So let's take this and make it specific to ski patrol and just dive in there first. And then I'd like to dig into search and rescue as well. So, the demands on ski patrol, as we've already highlighted, is that it's, it's a full-time job with various demands. It's strongly seasonal. There's kind of two sets of demands that I can imagine there. There's the preparation for season and then there's the in-season maintenance. Let's consider preparation for the season. How far in advance of starting in that setting would you recommend that someone starts preparing and training for that role?
Rob:Uh, depending on the training time, at least four weeks. And, six weeks would be best to be really fit for the, when the season starts, our, our dryland programming is primarily focused on, eccentric lake strength and, what I call leg lactate tolerance, or the ability just to take long days on the hill. If you think about, a full day of skiing, there are individual parts that are strength, you know, short, explosive, demands, but it's it's really a strength endurance effort, right? At the end of the day. Um, there's a lot of impact on your leg. So it's an endurance effort and it takes time to develop strength endurance. You just can't, do it quickly. So those are the two things to be focused on. Um
Patrick Fink MD:But
Rob:also,, because of the heavier pack, and the upper body, strength that might be, I mean, ski patrolers, you know, they're doing their, opening, closing lots of, like, they're carrying shovels everywhere, right? They might need to dig people out of, uh, you know, digging somebody out of a avalanche is a, core upper body work capacity, full on effort, right? Their multimodal work capacity needs to be high. They need to have some upper body strength. All of these things aren't necessarily needed for a ski racer or a free skier, but they are for a ski patrol or if their packs gonna be heavier, so their midsection needs to be stronger. So all those things ideally come into the season. Some of those things might carry over from their. Summer fall work job, you know, if they're a ranger, hiking or rucking, or they're working construction or something, some of those things might transfer over, but what won't trance over is the eccentric leg strength. There's nothing, nothing that really changes for that.
Patrick Fink MD:So if someone has not completed a dry land training program before, what, what would they expect that program to look like? What kind of movements? What kind of equipment is this something they can complete at home?
Rob:Yeah. Our dry land ski programming is a limited equipment plan. It doesn't require a weight room. One of the things we always try to focus on is always to simplify So there's two major components. The focus of our dry ski training is, eccentric leg strength, which train you for bouncing down the hill and a leg lactate tolerance, which is just a way to train, be able to put off, having to stop. And then if you do, stop, be able to recover really fast. Two days a week you're doing leg blasters and two days a week you're doing, what we call just touch, jump, touch intervals. And, uh, we're just training those two things. And the plan is focused on those two areas. It includes some core work, it includes some, upper body stuff, but the focus is there. That's, that's where the focus of skiing is. And so we really focus on those areas. So it's pretty much the same thing every week. Only harder as you go through the programming, you're doing more and more leg blasters. You're touchdown chopped intervals. You're doing more work, less rest, more work, less rest. And, uh, it's no joke. It, it, it hammers you. Um, but ideally, you know, when you get to the season, you're ready to go.
Patrick Fink MD:For our listeners who aren't familiar with some of these exercises, I can put a link to, I know you have videos for a lot of your exercises. We'll include the leg blasters in there so you can get a sense of what we're talking about. Do you know offhand what equipment is needed for that program, if any?
Rob:The equipment for, our Dry Land Ski Pro is a, 12 to 15 inch box, a 60 pound sandbag for men, 40 pound for women, pair of, dumbbells and a pull up bar and a foam foam roller. So it's a really a limited equipment program.
Patrick Fink MD:When you get into the season. Obviously you cannot train five to seven days a week in the same manner that you can during the preseason. For someone who's working as a professional ski patroller and is working on Hill five to six days a week, do you see any role for training during the season or any preventative maintenance to be done during that time?
Rob:Yeah, we actually have an,, in season, training plan for skiing. And we have it set up for both recreational skiers and mountain professionals and so the, you know, during the in season, the, the mount professionals, the ski patrols, they don't need to be doing leg blasters anymore. I just looked at our, in-season dry line ski training for mountain professionals. It's two days a week and it's heavy strength and chassis integrity work in the gym. It's not doing leg blasters or mini blasters. We're just trying to keep the, the overall strength and, midsection strength for, durability. I do find that stronger athletes overall are harder to injure if, if they do get injured, to recover faster. Um, so just having total body strength is a way to make yourself more durable?
Patrick Fink MD:That leads me to one more question before we turn our attention to search and rescue, which is say the patrollers summer job was RAF guide. They've been sitting on their butt and doing pulling motions all summer. Very not sports specific to ski patrol. Do they need to develop any kind of base fitness, aerobic fitness before jumping into a dry land program, or is it scalable enough that they could start on week one of your program and survive it without injury?
Rob:It depends on how much time they have to get ready for the season. I program for the fitness demands of the event or the sport, not the incoming fitness of the athlete. The fitness demands for ski patroller are the same for every ski patroller. It doesn't matter what your summer job is, how old you are, how small you are, if you're a woman, if you're a man, how fat you are, right? The fitness demands are the same, and it's up to the athlete to meet the fitness demands. So if they get done with their drafting, you know, let's say they. You know, a typical mountain town person, Ben's a mountain town, right? You know, they'll, they'll, they'll take and they'll do the rafting, and then they'll go take, you know, a few weeks off and go to Mexico surfing or something, and then they'll come in and they gotta go to ski patrolling. And if they only got six weeks, you gotta jump into the, the dry land program and just suffer. Um, you're gonna be sore, it's gonna suck, but, uh, that's on you. This is what you need to do. Get ready for the season. If you're professional, you're gonna be ready for the season. So there's no shortcuts. You're not special, you know, you make your own decisions and that's just the way it is. That's just part of being professional about your fitness. I get these questions all the time, you know, like, you know, I had a, a question from a, um, 50-year-old firefighter, um, recently So I don't like high impact stuff. I'm like, well, you know, your, your bunker gear weighs 70 pounds. I mean, you know, I, I generally do use steer stepper instead of running, what do you have to sprint in your gear? You know what I mean? This happens a lot on the first responder side, but we call legacy athletes. You know, they've kind of gotten away with not having to do anything their whole career. Now they're older, they think they can still do it. Yeah. There's no, there's no slow fire for a 50-year-old, you know, firefighters, you know what, if you have to drag somebody out who's 200 pounds, which could be, I mean, I weigh 150 pounds, put, uh, seven five pounds of bunker gear on me. I'm at 2 25, right? And she drag me out, you know, not, not not doing, uh, body weight squats. He's gotta be doing high impact, you know, heavy stuff. So, yeah, that's something that, that comes up. Some people get away with it, their youth, um, and they, you know, they get away with it'cause they're young. But, I think you'll find the most, the most professional people. Are doing some type of fitness training. There's a link between people are professional about their fitness and the way they treat the rest of their job. So I wouldn't never trust a, an unfit mountain guide. I would never trust his equipment, right? Is he replacing his carabiners, right? Is he replacing his ropes? How are his rope skills? How are all those other, you know, technical elements? Is he training those and up to speed those? cause clearly, you know, fitness is a primary component of, ski patrolling and mountain guiding. And if he's let his fitness go, what else has he let go on the technical side, right? So if he sees a ski patroller, he is unfit, how's his, first aid skills, right? I would question it. There's a link between them. I mean, the, there's a reason that the most high speed, military guys, you know, generally navigate towards the Special forces units, where there's the biggest fitness demand. They attract just certain people who are, are professional about all elements of the work.
Patrick Fink MD:They're in my relatively limited experience, two groups of people in professional ski patrol. There are people who are career patrollers, and there are those who are there as a bridge to some other world, usually in medicine, whether that's paramedic and fire or going into, medical professions like nursing or, or doctors. I think both stand to benefit from training, right? Because both need to meet the demands of their job. But really, I think probably the career patroller is the one who has the most on the line. In terms of being able to preserve their function over the long term and be able to perform their job year after year. As you put it, a 24-year-old me can get away with a lot more the 37-year-old me in terms of lack of preparation, just showing up and winging it. I have to put in a little bit more maintenance these days to maintain strength, what you call chassis integrity. Those, those features, so you can actually show up ready and not get hurt.
Rob:It's interesting, you'll see again, especially at first responder, but even in military units, you know, I've, I've met Senior Green Brasi are fat and outta shape, right. Because they, they think they get older and they, you know, I'm never gonna get in that situation or whatever.
Patrick Fink MD:Let's turn our attention now to search and rescue, which I'll, I'll outline a little bit how I think that that's probably different and then we can work through it. I think your average search and rescue participant is more, it's volunteer. It's part-time for them. They have a day job. They're not professionals and most of their call outs are gonna involve, as you said, hiking with heavy packs, carryouts, litter transports, unknown demands. So I would think the training objective there would potentially be more muscular endurance, injury resistance. But the biggest challenge is probably integrating it with their life, with their day job. So from your perspective, what would be the key physical and mental demands of the search and rescue role that you would be wanting to target with your training?
Rob:Yeah, that's interesting. I've never actually been asked to, to design a plan for a volunteer, mountain sar, member I just did one for a, a part-time SWAT team. Um. We'll, we'll get on that. Yeah. But, uh, right off the gap or at the top? Uphill endurance under load so we're just doing step ups probably with the heavy pack, heavy pack rucking. I assume that those packs are 45 to 55 pounds heavy. Um, 35 at, you know, at least. But yeah, probably that heavy, the worst thing to do is, you know, be a, a SAR team member and go out there and have to be rescued because you're out, you're unfit. Chassis integrity, would be dominant. A lot of injuries can occur if you're just smoke from hiking uphill. Right? Probably, as a preseason thing, um, working some leg blasters just to train eccentric strength if you don't have, a spot to hike up and downhill. As I got older, I started, packing, water uphill, to train. And then I would jump to the top and, and come down and load it. Just'cause the impact on my knees and in Jackson at Snow. I know you can ride the lift down, but that, you know, that that downhill can impact you, but you still need that strength. Have you ever done our step up? Were step ups before? Yeah, they're total, total drudgery.
Patrick Fink MD:Yes,
Rob:I'm training for a, a hunting season here. I did over a thousand this morning, you know, and I got, you know, the news on podcast. But it, they fucking work. Step ups are the most efficient way to train uphill. And, and you don't need any equipment. He needs a pack in a box and, uh, podcast and, uh, you just gotta grind. You need to probably do some step up or some, leg blasters and, chassis integrity, midsection work. And, like in the dry line ski program, the dumbbells are used just for, exercise we call Scotty Bobs, which is, uh, pretty much a pushup in a row with dumbbells. It's a great, very efficient two for one, pretty damn hard t for one upper body exercise, it's just really efficient, really quick. And you can do in between leg blasters and I can get a T for one in there. So. Yeah, it's not, not complicated. It's just, it's just hard, you know? So ideally, the ideal standard is like a thousand step ups at 45 pounds. In an hour or, or 50 minutes, I think the best guy is under 40 minutes. I think my best time's like 50 minutes. Twight, he used to say, if you can do 2000 vertical in 45 minutes, I think it was unloaded would be his standard for, which isn't, that isn't a push. And I've actually done that myself.
Patrick Fink MD:achievable.
Rob:yeah, that's pretty achievable. So I'll develop an assessment for a part-time sar. The, the tricky part for part-time sars, it is part-time, they don't know when the call is coming. They have the other job or activities going on. Maybe the other training, maybe they're a Ironman triathlete or something, and they're not doing step ups. So, I guess it depends on how much importance they put on their part-time work. And I think maybe they rely on the, the full-time people, if there are any, to be able to, fill in the gaps fitness wise, that's a tricky one.
Patrick Fink MD:If you're showing up to a star, call out, you have an obligation to, to perform, but also your goal is to avoid injury. You don't want to impact the day job or you're gonna have to have to leave the SAR on the side. So, in addition to, just work capacity as a, as an insurance against injury. Can you speak a little bit to the chassis integrity concept and how that ties into both the demands of the role and keeping people healthy on the job?
Rob:Yeah, chassis integrity is a, kind of the midsection training, methodology that I developed. It came about after I had, uh, stepped away from my own, programming and just did some stuff myself. Did a lot of body weight, chest integrity, mostly ground based stuff like we always done, you know, crunches and all that crap. Went back to the gym. Load up some heavy front squats and my midsection collapsed. It wasn't very strong. Even though I was crushing situps. Uh, so the idea is the, the midsection is like a barrel of muscle. Um, it's this barrel of muscle that connects the legs to the upper body, and a lot of the torque comes from the upper body. You know, if you imagine pulling somebody or, you know, moving something heavy from one side to the other And the midsection, has some roles. Um, part of it is movement, you know, extension, picking up something heavy, but sometimes a lot of rotation, strength, but also just an isometric, bracing core strength, a lot of times anti-rotation. Prior to development, chass integrity, we'd always had our core. I trained different movements. We had'em like fire movements, so flexion, isometric, rotational, extension, but they were, a lot of'em were ground-based movements, like sit-ups and stuff. And, uh, what Chass Integrity did was I started doing the bulk of our midsection exercises, from standing or kneeling so that the midsection had to work, in conjunction with the lower body and upper body. That's, that's the integrity, right? It had to maintain the integrity of the system between the two. And I thought it would be, if we're gonna train for that, why don't we just fucking train for it? So, we also started using a lot of sandbag stuff., There's something about a 60 pound sandbag that is so much heavier than a 60 pound dumbbell or a 60 pound barbell. I don't know what it is, but a 60 pound sandbag is a fucking lot heavier than a 60 pound barbell. It's bulky and it's in the weight and it's awkward and all that, all that stuff helps work that midsection in a much more functional way to what you're gonna pick up in the field, whatever it is. Our chassis integrity not only trains strength, but these are endurance terms that train strength endurance. And so, for a SAR athlete, if they have a long approach or something and they're really tired from the endurance effort, everything else is, you know, that's why mountain endurance comes first. For mountain sports, you know, uphill movement under load has to come first. That's the most important thing. But after that, the chassis integrity, is probably the next important because, it helps you be strong in, in these ways that are just so awkward that for almost any rescue mission, there's gonna be some type of lifting that is gonna be awkward. And if you don't have that strength there, you're just asking for a low back injury, pretty much. Right? But even. More important than injury prevention is just function. You wanna be able to get that person from one side of the body to the other, from the ground to the gurney or whatever it is. And, the chassis integrity work helps you do that. It's amazing how much, uh, how much work you can get in with the sandbag and, uh, some simple, you know, it intricated exercises. To train that midsection for functional strength.
Patrick Fink MD:The difference between the barbell and the sandbag is obvious to any parents out there who know how much heavier a 45 pound child is, than a 45 pound dumbbell. People are, are awkward, heavy, hard to move, and the sandbag is much more analogous to that work.
Rob:Yeah, you know, a, a chainsaw is a lot different and awkward, more awkward than a barbell two, right? So there's almost no,, piece of, equipment out there that's heavy or whatever. You're lifting on a star mission that is gonna be as easy to grip and move around. As a barbell, it's all gonna be awkward.
Patrick Fink MD:So star work can often be sort of exhausting, thankless, sometimes dangerous. You have emphasized mental toughness for industrial athletes. What strategies do you have to cultivate that kind of resilience and build a training culture that can carry over into the field during long rescues?
Rob:Yeah, I like to call it mental fitness. I've been doing a lot of thinking about, mental fitness, recently, I had some experiences, where I had, some world class optimists come into the gym years ago, and we just put'em through a short work capacity, effort, maybe swings or sprints or something. And it seemed like they were mentally weak. And, uh, and they're like, oh, I mean, I, I've never been on a Himalaya alpine climb, but they're out there climbing a 40 below. I mean, these guys are, they're tough. You know what I mean? So I, I take a step back and then it turns out the next time they came in a couple days later, similar effort, they did a lot better. So, I learned from that, and I've seen it in my own life, that mental fitness is, mode specific. So if you're familiar with the mode, if you're familiar, what it feels like, you're gonna be more mentally fit. So, you haven't been putting in your step ups or your uphill grind and you're, hiking up 3000, vertical feet to direct you some guy, then your mental fitness is not gonna be strong. Being more physically fit makes you more mentally fit, right? For that mode. You know, it can be mentally fit in a, in uh, physical stressor, you know, but it comes with a hard conversation with your wife, not be very mentally fit, right? So, it's more specific. The other thing is that it can be built like you're talking about, I'm, I'm thinking about how we could actually train mental fitness in a more conscious way. I just wrote, something, a little bit ago I developed eight, uh, core attributes and mental fitness, you know, like perseverance, resilience, discipline, mental endurance, which is, you know, being mentally sharp, you know, after 24 hour, you know, like you in a mercy room, right? You know, you're coming off a 12 hour shift. I hope you're mentally sharp at, you know, 1145 and my kid comes in, I just recently wrote about the difference between resilience, perseverance, and discipline. Um, and they're linked together, but there's, you know, significantly different. Perseverance is what you did getting through medical school it's grinding slower, no progress, or it's a long way off. It's still sticking with it. Discipline is doing everyday stuff regardless of comfort. You we think about discipline as the big stuff, but it's the, the small stuff. It's training when you don't want to train or, doing leg blasts when you're sore? and resilience is recovery from big setbacks. You go to work tomorrow and get fired'cause you fuck up, and then you gotta go out and find another job resilience is more difficult to get exposure to, but perseverance and discipline are, are things that we can, I think that, what we have learned is that it takes exposure. It's just like physical fitness, where if you don't train it or get exposure to it, it'll degrade. I've heard this from guys who've been through special forces selections, right? After the selection. They're in for 15 years and they're not as mentally fit for physical stressor as they were when they were going through you. You just haven't been exposed to that type of stress. So exposing yourself to that type of stress and pushing yourself. Physical fitness is a great way to do that, but it's not everything. I've seen too many athletes, professional athletes, who like me, love to train. You can hide behind fitness training. In other words, you can, uh, you know,, be a SAR guy and, uh,, what you really need to work on is your navigation and, your communication skills and your frigging first aid stuff. But instead you get in the gym every day and you just hammer step up. We need to be working on other stuff.
Patrick Fink MD:you're good
Rob:Right, that's the problem. By following someone else's programming it makes you do stuff that you're not necessarily good at. So being pushed in those different ways, and it takes a true professional. To have the discipline to go back over basic first aid stuff, to make sure they're solved in the fundamentals. And then also identify, the holes in their game, their whole game, and target those and work on'em. It takes a real professional to see that. Not only see that, but, but, uh, a craftsman to when they find that, get excited about it.'cause they get to learn and improve in that certain way. That's sort of true. Craftsman is.
Patrick Fink MD:That's fantastic. I want to open up a small can and just have you tell us what your nutritional recommendations are. I'm sure 90% of the listeners will disagree with some part of it,'cause that's how nutrition always goes. But what's, what's your line on nutrition for athletes?
Rob:Yeah, first thing, we, we actually have on a, on a website, ideal body weight space on height. And, uh, it's pretty lean. What we do know about all physical, uh, performance is that the, the most lean athletes are generally the best athletes. I think part of that is they can move faster because they're carrying around, less body fat. But it could also be because you get to a low body fat, you have to be disciplined and that transfers over to the other areas of their, professional or their sport. But our nutritional guidelines are pretty simple, cut all refined sugar, everything. The more you can cut, the better, especially in condiments. Don't drink calories, no fruit juice, really cut back on all fruit. Primarily eat protein, and, leafy vegetables. If you're under 40, you can cheat one day a week. Cheat like a mother gross yourself, you know, ice cream doesn't matter. You'll find that if you stick to this diet for a while, you don't cheat as much'cause you just feel like crap after, after you cheat. But if you're over 40, you gotta cut your cheat days, significantly if you have one at all. Of alcohol, don't drink beer or wine. If you're gonna drink, I'm not a tea toler. Drink hard liquor'cause there's less calories. And, uh, no caloric restrictions. I found that if you're hungry, you can't stay on a diet. Get all that crap outta your house, if you can.'cause we're all succumbeded to, uh, temptation. But if you're younger under 40 and you're able to cut all sugar, we actually did a mini study one time where we had, one group of athletes, follow those recommendations and another group athletes just cut sugar. And the group athletes who just cut sugar, lost as much body fat. as group athletes. But overall, If you're able to cut all refined sugar and, also cut bad carbs, which are bread, pasta, all the good stuff, right? I could eat that all day. Um, but that's the worst for you. Focus your diet around protein and a few leafy vegetables. Don't drink calories. You will shed body fat.
Patrick Fink MD:Great. Well, I, I wanna be respectful of your time. We're coming up on an hour. I want to hear your explanation of what you mean when you talk about a quiet professional.
Rob:Yeah. This is an idea that, I've thought about for, for many years. The idea of a quiet professional is a person who, we know'em, um, a few organizations, identify and celebrate by professionalism. The military doesn't. The, these are the people who are key to the organizational function. Oftentimes, they're not in leadership, uh, because they put the mission first over their own ambition or promotion, and they'll see something that needs to be done on the mission of the fall in those roles. They're the craftsmen, they're the people who, um, I, I've done a lot of thinking and work about the craftsmanship ethic, which is really interesting and liberating. If you, if you love your work, um, and that's where you're, you know, continually improved. Always chasing excellence. No, you'll never get it and are excited when you, when you find out that you've made a mistake.'cause you're, you get to learn something, uh, right. And, uh, what, what really drives you is just learning more about, about the work. So they, they put mission first. They're, they're humble. They're wise in the sense that, wisdom takes work. Everybody has experience. Just'cause you're experienced, you know, it doesn't mean you're, you're wise. We've all met bitter, 75-year-old, old people, right? And if you're bitter and you're 75 years old, I mean, you're not wise. You clearly didn't learn something. No one likes to be around those people. And no one wants to be that person. You didn't figure something out, right? Wisdom takes work. It takes reflection. It takes forgiving yourself. It takes commitment not to make a better decision in the future, but it's really unpacking the mistake you made or what you did well, humor and humility. Those two are brothers. Right, seeing humor and stuff and, uh, being humble, embracing the suck. Not in a, you know, wear it on your t-shirt way, you know, like a CrossFit athlete or a Spartan competitor. Everything's hard and, a quiet professional knows that, adversity is coming. Like if things are going easy, I get a little suspicious. I'm like, uh oh, I know it's coming. Uh, but when it arrive, it's not like you resent it. It's like, ah, there you are. I knew you're coming. You know, this is gonna make me better. I'm gonna learn from it. Or another thing to, you know, to move, to move through. So it's kind of all those different things together. The quiet professional in your world, you know, is probably that, one solid nurse that you know, who has turned down promotions because they're really good at what they do and they like what they do right? They just like learning there. Or they're, they're that one person in the organization who is really key and you don't know until they're gone, all the different stuff that they did because they're not looking for recognition. They're doing this stuff that, isn't glamorous often. Dirty. If you see something wrong, fix it no matter if it's your job or not, right? Usually it's not your job.
Patrick Fink MD:What I like to do in the, the er, I don't think I meet the full standards of the quiet professional, just to be clear. But, As an example, is getting blankets for patients like that is totally below the level at which my license lets me operate. And it's a hundred percent the patients and the nursing staff want to see from a doctor. And it's the kind of thing where you could think you're above that and. message does that, does that send to people?
Rob:Yeah. I think, I think it is. I mean, like the only, uh, quiet professional was like Jesus, right? The rest of us are, you know, kind of, it's, it's an aspirational goal and you always fall short. But it's a, it's a worthy aspirational goal. It's not a career advancer. In my mind the greatest element to it is the idea of pursuing craftsmanship. In whatever, occupation you're working in, because it is so enriching if you can transfer over from resenting the work because you have to do it or whatever. Just the idea of craftsmanship and embracing that ethic, it's a very liberating, you end up, being, a happy grinder, you know, before you're like, a grinder can be a happy grinder because you're, you're learning stuff more, you're, you're not as bitter, you know, you like grinding with a, you know, smile. It's pretty cool.
Patrick Fink MD:It's'cause you're there for a different reason at that point, right? You're not trying to advance yourself. You enjoy the process more than the outcome.
Rob:The process, the journey. You like it when you, you fuck up.'cause you, you know, you need to learn something or you, you see, uh, you know, someone points out a mistake in your work. It's just a very liberating way to be, to think about your work. And it can be applied to any job. You don't have to be a word worker to be a craftsman. It can be, you know, somebody like me who's, you know, pretty much designs strength, condition programming or someone like you so is up. So does up hurt people. Right. You know, every, every stitch could be better. Right. Like you've seen, I, I'm sure I'm, I'm sure you've seen, uh, you know, another doctor, uh, do a job you do all the time and go, wow. You know, that that's a piece of art right there and you can aspire to that. Right. That's kind of cool, isn't it? Or a nurse who has incredible bedside manners or, or, or a doctor who talks down. A scared parent,
Patrick Fink MD:Right.
Rob:right? They have incredible skills. Those are, that's all part of craftsmanship.
Patrick Fink MD:Mm-hmm. Well, thank you Rob. I appreciate you taking the time to talk with us and get into the nitty gritty about some that maybe you haven't thought about before, like the, the Volunteer SAR member. People wanna learn more about Mountain Tactical Institute, where should they find it?
Rob:Mtn tactical.com, I answered dozens of questions every day. Just rob@mtntactical.com and, uh, happy to answer questions. I always like learning and I learned something today. We gotta develop a, volunteer SAR fitness assessment and training plan. It's great. I love, I love assessments. It makes the coach identify what's important, right? And you have to make choices. You know, we can't, we can't train for everything. So it, it'll be a really good exercise for me.
Patrick Fink MD:That's it for this episode of Wilderness Medicine Updates. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Rob. I know we got into the weeds on a couple different topics, but I think it's useful information and if it piques your interest, I would really encourage you to try one of his training plans. We're talking, uh, 35,$40 investment. It's not a lot of money and like we touched on in the show, he uses equipment. Minimal plans for a lot of this, so you can get by with having an 18 inch step of some kind of sandbag, a pair of dumbbells and a pull up bar. And with that, you can get some full body fitness that is going to make you feel better out in the mountains, make you safer, make you more resistant to injury. As I mentioned during the intro, Rob has been really kind in offering a discount to listeners of this show. So the first 50 listeners who are search and rescue or patrol professionals or what have you, who reach out to Rob. Can get a discount 20% off the purchase of an MTI training plan. So reach out to rob@mtntactical.com. Again, the email is rob@mtntactical.com. Send him a copy of your credentials, be that your search and rescue membership, your professional membership, your NSP, your icar, your county credentials, whatever that may be. Rob wants to offer this to people who are getting out there and doing the job. The plans are still affordable. If you're just a recreationist who can't, take advantage of Rob's generous offer. But I will put his email down in the show notes along with everything else that we talked about. If you're not familiar with the leg blasters, the Scotty Bobs the the touch jump. Touch intervals. You can find links to those things down in the show notes. Rob has also developed a assessment, fitness assessment and training plan for search and rescue professionals. After our conversation, the link is in there. The assessment is pretty cool. You perform a number of tasks back to back, to back to back. Keep track of how well you did on each of those. And then there's a scoring system to tell you how you're doing. There's targets for both, professional and part-time members, so take a look at that. If you're involved in search and rescue, I don't think you'll find anything quite like it anywhere else. You'll also find links in the show notes to the eight core attributes of mental fitness, the difference between resilience, perseverance, and discipline. Links to other things mentioned in the show like Rob's ideal body weights for different types of mountain athletes and his nutritional recommendations. So again, I hope that this was a valuable conversation to you. I'm interested in your feedback on the show. If you liked it and you want more of this. Content that is directed towards the profession of being outside and delivering high quality care in the outdoors, please do let me know. As with everything, every episode, I love hearing from you, my email is wilderness medicine updates@gmail.com. Whether you just want to pass along feedback, you have ideas for guests, or show topics that you want me to address, reach out to me there and I'll get back to you as listeners of the show. I really value your time. I want to make sure that I'm bringing you content that is useful to you in the next couple of months. You can look forward to a conversation that I had with Laura Mclare from Responder Alliance about psychological trauma sustained by the rescuer and by professionals and how to mitigate that and have a long and happy career in the outdoors. But I'm also gonna be getting into the core content like I did last year for. Avalanche Resuscitation gonna dig into the core content of cold illness, hypothermia, and resuscitation of that as the beginner of our winter season. So I hope that you're gonna look forward to that and that that'll be valuable to you as well. If you want to kick back and give some support to the show, this is a passion project. I don't make any money on it. I just spend a lot of my time on it. So if you like it, please share it with someone who you think would benefit from hearing this episode. Another member of your search and rescue. A friend that you go out into the mountains with who's always one step ahead of you or a little bit stronger. Or your partner who's a little slower and could use a little bit of help, a little bit of training share with someone who's gonna like to hear from Rob and will benefit from learning more about chassis integrity. That's it for this episode of Wilderness Medicine Updates. Until next time stay fit, stay focused, and have fun.
