Soft “Wellness” Programs Are Robbing Tactical Units of Mission-Direct Fitness and Operational Readiness

Army H2F “Combat Mobility Yoga” at JBLM, Washington. DOD Photo.

By Rob Shaul, Founder

Too many tactical organizations – military, federal law enforcement and first responder –  have implemented broad, well-meaning “wellness” programs and initiatives as a pathway to improved performance, resilience, and longevity.

Across military branches and first responder units, these programs now include mental health, stress management, sleep hygiene, nutritional education and in the Army’s H2F program, “spiritual guidance” and “mental resilience.”

Fitness is also included in these programs, but seems to be equally weighted. And that’s a problem. 

But while the “Wellness” intentions are commendable, the consequences are not. These soft wellness components are not enhancing readiness. They are actively diluting it by siphoning off  limited training time, resources, and command attention from fitness training.

Mission-direct fitness is the only truly measurable and irreplaceable component of tactical performance and should receive at least 80% of all operator performance, resilience and durability resources.

Fitness is measurable. Fitness is testable. Fitness can be mission-direct. Soft “Wellness” is none of those things.

Fitness is the only element of H2F that has consistently shown objective results. For example, a 2025 study published in Military Medicine found that soldiers rehabilitating through H2F-integrated care were evaluated an average of 33.8 days sooner and had significantly better outcomes than those in traditional clinics. This is positive, but it’s also telling: the only clear data supporting H2F effectiveness comes from the physical therapy side of the program, which is the part closest to strength and conditioning.

Meanwhile, the program’s non-physical domains remain largely unproven. Despite the investment in staff and doctrine—including embedded sleep educators, dietitians, mental performance coaches, and chaplain-led spiritual readiness advisors—there is no peer-reviewed evidence showing that these efforts have improved combat effectiveness, prevented mission failure, or increased survivability. That data simply does not exist.

More concerning, however, is how the focus on these wellness domains is displacing actual fitness training. The Army has allocated nearly two dozen personnel per brigade to manage H2F programs, the with half of them focused on wellness rather than performance. Recently, the Army even moved to replace athletic trainers with additional strength coaches in some units, not because fitness was being overemphasized, but because the athletic trainers were being underutilized. The physical training itself was being neglected.

This misallocation of effort is not confined to the Army. Among fire departments and law enforcement agencies, wellness programs are increasingly framed as inclusive, progressive, and politically palatable. But what they rarely are is effective. A firefighter may receive sleep education, stress counseling, or a nutrition seminar, but still be physically incapable of performing the job when it matters most. A law enforcement officer may attend a mindfulness workshop, but if he cannot sprint, fight, or drag a casualty under stress, then wellness has failed to deliver readiness.

In these professions, the body is the primary weapon. It must be conditioned, hardened, and tested regularly. It must be trained under load, stress, and fatigue. 

Key to the “wellness” theory is that operator performance suffers if all these non-fitness areas aren’t addressed. And from the outsider, this seems perfectly reasonable – the soldier operating on 2 hours sleep must be impacted somehow. The firefighter with a shitty diet can’t be performing to his potential. The policeman working his way through a exitensional or spiritual crisis will have difficulty putting his full attention to the job task at hand. 

All this may be true – but there’s the deal. 

The soldier can, and many have, operated effectively and lethally on little sleep – if he is physically fit. 

The firefighter with the shitty diet? I’ll take a tactical athlete who trains hard and eats poorly any day over one who eats perfect and trains poorly.

Spiritual crisis? The best mental health pros universally say the first step in improving mental health is to get exercise. Good fitness training transfers to better and resilient mental health. 

There is an uncomfortable reason why wellness gets prioritized over fitness: wellness doesn’t require accountability. No one fails a sleep seminar. No one gets removed from duty for spiritual unreadiness. There is no minimum standard for mental performance. Staffers are hard to fire for performance. As a result, wellness programs are easy to approve, easy to expand, and easy to hide behind. They create the appearance of action without the discomfort of measurement.

Fitness, by contrast, is binary. You can run the ruck time, or you can’t. You can carry the load, or you can’t. You meet the PFT standard, or you fail. Fitness exposes weakness, which is why its importance is often diluted.

Wellness, when implemented correctly, can support performance. Sleep, diet, and mental resilience all contribute to recovery and adaptation. But they are not substitutes for physical training. The problem is not that wellness exists, but that it has distracted from what should be the main focus – mission-direct fitness.

Outside of injury recovery, the non-fitness domains — nutrition, sleep, mental, and spiritual readiness — produce almost no hard data. The Army publishes guidelines. It distributes sleep hygiene PDFs. Chaplains run “purpose and meaning” sessions. But there’s no controlled, peer-reviewed study showing improved marksmanship, ruck time, sprint capacity, load carriage, or mission durability as a result of these efforts.

What’s more, wellness initiatives in the civilian world mirror this trend. Large-scale randomized trials (Harvard, UChicago, Oxford) have shown:

• No significant improvements in job performance, absenteeism, or health care costs from workplace wellness programs
• Minimal or no change in clinical outcomes (blood pressure, BMI, cholesterol) despite increased access to wellness services
• Low engagement with soft wellness interventions like meditation, sleep tracking, and stress counseling

What has developed is institutional inertia and entrenched staffing constiutencies in the non-fitness components of these wellness programs. Powerful fiefdoms have arisen – most recently demonstrated by the Army’s failure to cut athletic trainers from H2F staffs.

As well – do we really need “experts” for many of these wellness components?

• Good nutrition just simply isn’t that complicated – avoid sugar, mostly, and limit “bad carbs.” Begin each meal with protein

• Sleep? Turn off the screen, turn of the lights, and go to sleep at the same time each night. Aim for 6-8 hours if possible.

• Durability? By far, the best think any tactical command can do for it’s operators is get them physically fit for the mission-direct fitness demands of the job.

• Spiritual stuff? Shouldn’t this be individualized – and the member reach out on his/her own? Seems like a minefield for any command to step into.

• Mental Resilience? Again, just about the first think anyone can do for their mental health is clean up their diet and get some exercise.

If tactical units want to improve readiness, survivability, and mission success, fitness must be first and foremost. That means dedicating protected time for physical training, hiring professionals to develop programming, enforcing fitness standards with real jeopardy, and measuring outcomes in the field.

Implementing professional mission-direct, fitness programming in the Big Army has many challenges – and I’ve documented several here: 8 Obstacles to Implementing Functional Fitness in the Big Army. And while from afare I’ve applausded the Army and increasingly first responder and federal LE hiring of strength and conditinoing coaches, these initiatives are always diluted by includsion in more broad “wellness” programs. 

Fitness is hard. Fitness is uncomfortable. But fitness is the only domain that consistently, reliably prepares tactical athletes for the demands of their job. It cannot be replaced. 

Right now, the appropriate focus on fitness is being diluted by soft wellness efforts.

Want More?
First Reponders: Don’t Conflate Wellness with Fitness

Why The Army’s Holsitic Health and Fitness (H2F) Will Fail

A Fitness Culture That Doesn’t Educate or Empower Soldiers: The Probem with H2F, the Army’s Holistic Health and Fitness System.