By Rob Shaul
This idea sits underneath everything we do at MTI, and it took me longer than I’d like to admit to fully understand it.
Early in my coaching career, I treated gym performance as the primary indicator of success. Strength numbers went up. Work capacity events were completed faster. Athletes looked fitter. On paper, everything appeared to be working. And yet, in those early years, I began receiving feedback that didn’t line up with what I was seeing in the gym.
Once athletes moved into the field, the mountains, physical fitness tests, or selection environments, problems surfaced. They were fit—but not fit in the ways that mattered most for their mission or event.
They fatigued sooner than expected when exposed to well-known event demands. PFT scores didn’t reflect the effort they had put into training. They struggled when endurance volume increased. In some cases, they were so beaten up by training itself that they couldn’t focus on technical practice—practice that mattered more than fitness ever would.
That disconnect forced a hard question: what exactly is gym training for?
For clarity, when I use the term “gym training,” I’m not referring only to time spent inside a weight room. It includes all programmed fitness training—running, rucking, endurance work on roads and trails—anything designed to improve physical capacity.
Tactical and mountain athletes are not fitness athletes. They are not evaluated on their deadlift, their metcon completion time, or how exhausted they look at the end of a session. They are evaluated on whether they can do the job under fatigue, in imperfect conditions, and continue doing it over long careers.
More importantly, the consequences of being unprepared are real. A tactical or mountain athlete who is not properly prepared for the fitness demands of a mission can be injured or killed. Their inability to perform can get others injured or killed.
Even outside of combat or operational settings, the stakes remain high. Poor preparation for a high-jeopardy fitness assessment can result in a failed test, a missed promotion, or the loss of a key assignment. In tactical selections, being unprepared for the fitness demands almost always means not getting selected—and often months or years before another opportunity exists. The same is true for demanding training courses, where failure can have lasting career consequences.
The cost of poor fitness programming is far higher for mountain and tactical athletes than it is for civilians.
Complicating this further is the fact that being generally fit and being prepared for a specific event are not the same thing. Many tactical selections are endurance-dominant events, yet many athletes prepare for them by lifting heavy and avoiding endurance work. They arrive strong, confident, and underprepared—and fail accordingly.
Professional preparation means more than working hard. It means preparing for the specific fitness demands of the task ahead.
Once I accepted that all that mattered was outside performance, gym metrics lost their centrality. They didn’t disappear, but they became secondary. The only reason to care about anything done in training—inside or outside the gym—is if it improves performance where it counts. If a training element doesn’t transfer, or stops transferring, it doesn’t matter how popular it is or how satisfying it feels. It needs to change.
That shift was liberating.
No longer was I bound to strength and conditioning convention. Training modes could be mixed. New progressions could be developed. Classic exercises could be questioned without defensiveness. The focus narrowed to a single standard.
All that matters is outside performance.