High Relative Strength:

The First of Four Critical Fitness Demands Tactical Athletes and Mountain Professionals Must Train

By Rob Shaul, Founder

Mountain professionals and tactical athletes face a wide and unpredictable range of physical demands. From short, violent efforts to long-duration grinds, they require strength, endurance, work capacity, and chassis integrity.

A patrol officer may need to sprint after and tackle a suspect early in a shift, then spend the next six hours combing steep, uneven terrain for a missing person.

A direct-action special operations soldier might conduct a close-quarters raid one week, and two weeks later be inserted ten miles from a target to conduct a long reconnaissance with an 80-pound pack.

A park ranger may pry open a crushed vehicle door and drag a family to safety one day, then climb thousands of vertical feet the next to reach an injured climber.

The variability of these mission sets makes physical preparation complex. Mission-direct fitness programming can’t train capacities –  strength, endurance, speed — in isolation. Variable misson sets demand a body that can do many things well, often back-to-back.

At MTI, we’ve identified four mission-direct fitness demands that cover roughly 90% of the real-world physical requirements faced by tactical athletes and mountain professionals:

• High Relative Strength
• Sprint-Based and Multi-Modal Work Capacity
• Chassis Integrity
• Job-Specific Endurance

Any foundational fitness program designed for this population must train all four. This article — Part 1 of 4 — focuses on the first and most misunderstood: High Relative Strength.

Defining Relative Strength and Why It Matters

Despite what shirtless tactical influencers model, tactical athletes are not powerlifters or bodybuilders. They don’t need to bench press 2.5 times their bodyweight to move themselves and their load — and sometimes another person — through the real world.

Relative strength is the best measure of strength for this work. It refers to strength expressed per unit of bodyweight — how strong you are relative to what you weigh. This is different from absolute strength, which is simply the maximum weight you can lift, regardless of your size.

Relative strength matters because most job tasks involve moving your body and your load through space — sprinting, climbing, dragging, carrying — not lifting static load. The lighter and stronger you are, the more effectively you perform.

The Trap of Chasing Absolute Strength

MTI’s “Base Fitness” programming trains strength and our our progressions include classic percentage-based models used by powerlifting and Olympic lifting coaches. The difference is in how much of the training calendar we dedicate to strength compared to other attributes.

To reach your genetic ceiling for absolute strength, you’d train strength four to six days a week and do little else. Endurance and work capacity training would actively blunt your strength gains. You’d get stronger — in the gym. But outside the gym, you’d get slower and gas out faster. 

That trade-off is unacceptable for mission-driven athletes. Sacrificing endurance and work capacity to chase absolute leaves you unprepared for any mission that requires sustained movement or repeat efforts — which is most of them.

There’s another cost to overemphasizing strength: mass. Hypertrophy-focused training increases muscle mass, which means increased bodyweight. That weight isn’t free. Try sprinting or climbing steep terrain with a 20-pound weight vest — unnecessary mass slows you down, reduces explosiveness, and adds stress to your knees, hips, low back, and ankles.

This is why MTI’s Base Fitness programming — the day-to-day training platform for tactical athletes and mountain professionals — dedicates no more than three days a week to strength during a strength-emphasis cycle, and typically two days per week in most cycles. This allocation makes room to train the other three mission-direct attributes: work capacity, endurance, and chassis integrity.

Yes — training strength just two days a week while concurrently developing other attributes will blunt your peak strength potential. That’s a trade-off we accept. Because again, we’re not training strength athletes. We’re preparing professionals for broad, unpredictable physical demands.

How Strong Is Strong Enough?

At MTI, we define “strong enough” using our Relative Strength Assessment. This industry-standard assessment includes a scoring system with “Poor, Good and Excellent” categories. Meeting a “Good” score on the assessment standards prepare tactical athletes and mountain professionals for roughly 90% of mission-direct strength requirements without compromising other critical fitness demands.

For male tactical athletes, the “Excellent” benchmarks are:

• Front Squat: 1.5 × bodyweight
• Bench Press: 1.5 × bodyweight
• Hinge Lift (Deadlift): 2 × bodyweight
• Pull-Ups: 15 reps (bodyweight)

These numbers won’t impress a powerlifter — and that’s the point. They represent the sweet spot where you’re strong enough for nearly every operational requirement and still light, fast, and durable.

Mountain professionals often come from endurance sport backgrounds — Nordic skiing, running, climbing — and tend to avoid the weight room. Left to their own devices, they undertrain strength. Tactical athletes, on the other hand, often come from collision sports like football or hockey, and overemphasize strength if left unchecked. Both approaches create imbalance.

Most of us default to training what we’re already good at or what we’ve always done. Professionals don’t have that luxury. You must train what the job demands, not just you enjoy.

Strength as Foundation, Not Obsession

Strength is foundational — but it’s not the mission. Mountain professionals and tactical athletes don’t need to be powerlifters. They need to be strong enough to move themselves, their gear, and sometimes another person under real-world conditions. Anything beyond that is wasted capacity that drags down other, equally critical attributes.

High relative strength allows you to climb faster, sprint harder, drag further, and carry longer — without carrying excess weight or sacrificing endurance and work capacity. It’s the baseline on which everything else is built.

In Part 2 of this series, I’ll look at the next mission-direct attribute: Work Capacity — the ability to repeatedly deliver high-intensity efforts under fatigue.

Want More?

The MTI Relative Strength Assessment
The MTI Relative Strength Assessment Training Plan