Most officers are familiar with the concepts of combat (or tactical) breathing, but there are two more types of breathing you should add to your arsenal. These types of breathing exercises can make you healthier, enhance your performance under high stress, and prepare you for a fight for your life.
1. Relaxation/Sleep Breathing
Shift work, court dates, and family obligations all prevent us from getting a good sleep.
When you lie down to go to sleep use the belly breathing technique familiar to you from tactical breathing — breathe in for four counts through your nose, then exhale out of your mouth for four counts. Each time you exhale, focus on relaxing your body.
Continue increasing the depth and length of the inhalation and exhalation until you have reached a slow 10 count inhale and 10 count exhale. Maintain that rate until you fall asleep. Doing this each time you go to sleep will condition your mind and body to go to sleep faster and easier.
The exercise can be used both as a relaxation technique and a sleep technique. Relaxation and sleep are absolutely vital to good mental and physical health.
2. Startle-Response Gasp
Fellow trainer George Williams — of Cutting Edge Training — has been advocating this method during training for some time, but I don’t see many officers using it.
Remember that fear triggers one of three responses: freeze, flight, and fight.
The freeze response has developed in animals because predators are drawn to motion. Staying still can cause a threat to fail to identify you as a threat and pass on by you. While this response is useful for survival it isn’t the best choice for police officers. Knowing that the response is engrained in your DNA, Williams developed a method of transitioning from the freeze response to the fight response.
What does sudden fright — the type that officers experience when they’re suddenly assaulted by a suspect who is close to them — look like? It looks like a “startle reaction,” simultaneously eliciting the following:
• Your eyes go wide and your pupils dilate to gain as much light as possible and jerk your head to face the source or direction of that surprise or threat.
• You gasp, taking in a sharp intake of air. This is the body preparing for flight or fight. Most people will hold their breath following the initial gasp (remember: stillness).
• Your body moves, orienting your chest to that threat as you take an athletic stance (much like a linebacker, with your dominant-side foot back a bit), your body has a slight lean forward from the waist. Your body actually drops a bit, lowering your center of gravity.
• Your hands tend to come up to face level, palms out, your non-dominant hand slightly forward
• Your shoulders rise, moving up and forward while your chin sinks a bit to better protect your extremely vulnerable throat and neck.”
By mimicking the startle response to a threat we can cause the brain to create a mild adrenaline response. A fast inhalation (gasp) combined with a simultaneously raising the shoulder up and forward, and lowering the body allows you to trick your mind into thinking it is experiencing a Startle Response, which is then followed immediately by the appropriate trained response.
Next time you are on the range for firearms training, imagining the face of the last person that you dealt with that posed a serious threat. Next, imagine their actions that would require a deadly-force response. With that image in your mind, respond to the turn of a target or a call of “threat” by the range officer by responding with the above described startle response gasp and as you move off line the line of attack, draw and hit the target with your rounds.
The mind then is trained to associate a deadly force threat with movement off the line of attack, and appropriate deployment of a firearm as a survival response, rather than freezing.
Try both methods to enhance your overall capabilites. Train hard, breath well, and stay safe.
