Adam Scott, MS, CSCS
This week we released our Assessment of a Midsize, Urban, Midwestern Fire Department. This report applied the Fitness Culture Assessment we developed for tactical units to a Midwestern, urban/suburban fire department. The assessment included: An online survey, 3-days of on-site observations, and personal interviews with firefighters and leadership.
The department we assessed finished with a score or 47 out of 100. Which placed them in the Low category. Our assessment was designed to gather information regarding five constructs of fitness culture: Fitness standards, physical training programs, personal responsibility, leadership, and cultural perceptions. To do this we assessed and compared actions and attitudes of tactical athletes and their leadership.
Our next step is to take our assessment to units which we think have a high fitness culture. These units will likely have: enforced fitness standards; fitness training programs which are planned, organized and run as a unit; individuals who view fitness as a personal responsibility; leadership which promotes fitness and leads by example; and attitudes which bolster the importance of fitness.
Does your unit’s fitness culture fit this description? If so, we’d appreciate being able to apply our fitness culture assessment.
The key for us is establishing and differentiating between high and low scoring units.
Being able to assess units which have high scoring fitness cultures will help us identify key factors which separate units with strong fitness cultures from units with weak ones.
Knowing the details of these key factors – both attitude and actors, will enable us to better help units who want to strengthen their fitness culture.
Questions? Want to help?
Please email adam@strongswiftdurable.com