The Performance Effect

Over a 100 years of tactical training and ‘use of force’ experience & expertise amongst these CERT trainers.

Working with Corrections Officers across NZ to maximise their physical, psychological and professional safety.

An awesome team to work with.

Chris

Does your organisation use bicycles for professional purposes? Our you using bikes to patrol in an urban or rural setting? Are you a bike-park patrol? Are you in a security, safety or enforcement role and deployed on bikes?

If so, come and chat to us at CERT.

Cycle Patrols - A Professional Use of Bikes!

“It’s just like riding a bike, isn’t it!/?” - A statement or question I’ve often heard in the discussion about cycle patrolling. Well this couldn’t be further from the reality.

An organisation wishing to provide a cycle patrol response should consider whether their employees are competent in the following areas:
1. Riding in on-road environments including complex roading infrastructure and understanding the ‘Road Code for Cyclists’.
2. Riding in off-road environments including trails, tracks, pathways and having competent ‘urban MTB’ skills.
3. Understanding organisational or workplace operating procedures and national laws or regional bylaws.
4. Knowledge and understanding of operational skills including patrolling techniques, defensive tactics and carrying & use of equipment.

I recently witnessed a ‘Security Company’ deploying staff on bikes to patrol a well-known annual event. I watched with interest to see 4 people wearing their company branded shirts riding what appeared to be their own bikes, with no obvious understanding of patrolling procedures, rules or skills and helmets poorly fitted. In my opinion, not only a poor image for that company, but a failure of their duty of care.

Bicycles have been used for patrolling pretty much since they were invented in the 1800s.

In the early 1900s the Automobile Association Cycle Scouts were formed in Britain in response to the zealous police enforcement of driving restrictions (Pic 1).
The group organised teams of cyclists who offered roadside services and through a combination of signals and salutes, assisted drivers to stay safe on the roads and avoid punitive penalties.

During WW1 and even in WW2 whole battalions of soldiers were mobilised on bicycles, including front line troops and medical corps.

Bikes carried all kinds of gear from rifles to stretchers and medical equipment (Pics 2, 3, 4).

Police officers have used bicycles for patrolling since the inception of the earliest police forces (Pic 5).
In the late 1970s and early 80s I used to patrol on a steel framed BSA with Sturmey-Archer gears and dynamo lights, still wearing uncomfortable conventional police uniform (Pic 6).

Other emergency services have followed suit, such as ambulance or paramedic patrols (Pic 6A).

Then in the early 2000s I was asked to develop and deliver a formal Cycle Patrol course for British Police Officers, using modern MTBs and functional cycle clothing (Pics 7, 8, 9).

Cycle patrols exist today in all forms across the world, including in MTB parks, trail networks and cities (Pic 10).

They are there to assist in keeping others safe, for education purposes and enforcement of laws or bylaws.

In 2019 I was invited to develop and deliver an Ebike Patrol Course for New Zealand Police Officers - the next iteration of patrolling, now E-powered (Pic 11).

And now, with the backing of CERT Group I have further developed a Cycle Patrol course for any organisation (or individual) who wish to use bikes for professional purposes (Pic 12).

It is increasingly more important that organisations make sure the correct knowledge, understanding, skills, attitudes and behaviours are developed for their employees, particularly if they are customer facing such as patrolling on a bike.

Contact me for more information:
[email protected]
or
[email protected]

Chris

The last week has been Mental Health Awareness week.

12 years ago a dear friend, colleague and mentor took his own life after an amazing career.

One of the strongest, knowledgeable and giving colleagues I worked with, and someone who was dedicated to the safety of his fellow officers across the globe.

Rest In Peace, my friend.

Police Remembrance Day in NZ.

The feather from the extinct Huia bird represents fallen officers & staff.

Rest In Peace.

Queen Elizabeth II 1926 - 2022.

I am very proud of serving and the Oath I swore to her.

Rest In Peace Ma’am.

Work - Not Work Story!

Cycle Patrols & Work Place Bike Users.

20 years ago I was serving as a police officer in the UK. I had specialised as a PTI and was responsible for a number of different officer safety programmes.

A decision was made at senior management level, that any and all operations required relevant training.
One such programme was to put officers out on bike patrols.
A great initiative which would enable more interaction with the public, break down barriers and assist officers to cover considerable distances through our towns and cities; often faster than the police vehicles.

It became my job to research, design and develop a 2 day police cycle patrol course, which I revelled in...........My hobby and work suddenly combined.

I developed the course and content to include; on-road cycling skills, urban MTB skills, patrol techniques and bike related defensive tactics.

We started with no gear and rubbish bikes (see pics), however we soon procured police bike uniform, a fleet of Marin hard tail MTBs (perfect for urban patrol) and other safety equipment. I even had all the bike tyres lined with Kevlar tape to minimise punctures from broken glass and other objects on the rough city streets.

And built indoor ‘urban’ ramps, steps and obstacles in order to train in a safe environment.

I engaged with a National MTB qualification provider to formalise a certification and subsequently trained dozens of officers and trainers. It was great fun, and had huge benefits on a number of levels.

I also frequently deployed as a cycle patrol myself, to ensure I had operational competency.
Another upside was the local media wrote positive articles about the subject and our patrols. The pic of me in the police branded bike helmet was taken for a press article about the programme.

A consequence of this programme was that other police forces followed suit and the certification became a national requirement. I was very proud of that.

Many years later (2019) a cool thing happened when I was asked to design and deliver a 2 day training course for the New Zealand Police Ebike Trial.
Again another great programme pretty much reflecting the content of 20 years previously, however updated for modern ebikes and modern patrol techniques, gear and equipment.
I delivered training across NZ and up-skilled their (NZP) trainers. This was very well received by the officers involved and a very fulfilling job to do.

I have identified a need for other organisations, who use bikes for professional purposes, to enhance staff safety with relevant training.

Of course some would say “it’s just like riding a bike”, however - it isn’t, as a modicum of skill is required by the user, and the employer has a duty of care to provide relevant and suitable training.

Stemming from this previous work, thought has also been done on the development of a programme for those who may wish to be volunteer cycle patrols out on our trails or bike parks. For these groups or individuals there is so much more to consider than just being a good bike rider.

Watch this space for more on this subject, as a partnership with a national training provider develops; with the intention to create the next iteration of the programme for cycle patrols and work place bike users.

If you want more info then check out The Cycling Uncovered Project

Chris

‘The Quiet Eye’.

I’ve shared this before and believe strongly that sports coaches should break tradition and look for different approaches to their learning and thus how they think in terms of their coaching.

Thinking outside of the box! A great article and very useful information for sports coaches looking for the ‘edge’.

https://www.tierthreetactical.com/gunfighting-and-neuroscience-why-using-your-front-sight-might-kill-you/?fbclid=IwAR2Hg75xyuyU3QPVuBRvkbC0b5J9pxIiicfa5821ISVzrQXWbZ9TdM1suHg

Gunfighting and Neuroscience: Why Using Your Front Sight Might Kill You - Tier Three Tactical Success in a gunfight doesn't depend on how well you shoot. It depends on how well you see. Unfortunately, everyone in the tactical and self defense communities trains endlessly on the mechanics of shooting, while completely ignoring the more important aspects of seeing. In this article we will revi...

‘Unlocking Potential’

The below link to a short documentary was recently shared through the Dyslexia Foundation of New Zealand.

And here is one of my favourite quotes, believed to be attributed to Albert Einstein:
"Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

It’s taken 50+ years for me to understand how and why I see the world in the way I do:

Why do I problem solve in the way I do?
Why I find reading long documents and small close print difficult?
Why I love sports and the physical education world?
Why I still get anxious in and around traditional education environments?
Why I can create concepts, ideas and different approaches, and challenge traditional methods of coaching or education?
Why I somehow know how to lead, present, coach and build relationships well?

I wasn’t ‘diagnosed’ at school in the 60s & 70s and struggled academically throughout my school life.
I would pretend to read the books the teachers gave us, and state I had finished without reading a page. 🤭
I covered up stuff and I copied work off my peers when I didn’t understand. 🤫
Maths classes were completely alien to me - just scribbles and nonsense that I couldn’t comprehend (and still can’t). 😳
I hated exam time and left school with zero quals. 😬

There was no support.
However I managed to stay in school until the age of 16 probably due to having a stable family upbringing. I was then fortunate enough to join the police service straight from school as a cadet, which sent me along the right path. It could have been a different path for sure.

However I also nearly didn’t make it through police college due to the exam threshold required to pass the course. If you failed 2 written exams during the 10 week initial course you were sent to a remedial unit. A third fail would mean being removed from the course and losing your job.
I had failed two and was on the edge of failing again, however my trainers fortunately recognised that I excelled in the practical & physical application of policing and somehow I survived.

I had a successful policing career however was always put off taking any promotion exams probably due to my perceived lack of ability to read/write.
Written exams are a nonsense to me because I learn by doing, experience, watching others, reading what excites me and exploring.

I have subsequently succeeded as a sports coach, coach developer and educator without any formal qualifications, and thrive when I’m training or developing others.

I love what Scott ‘Razor’ Robinson does and his ‘way’ resonates with me a lot.

I fully support what this foundation is trying to do and this documentary is excellent. Thank you Elliot Jones and the Dyslexia Foundation of NZ for sharing.

Chris

https://www.facebook.com/100067878769525/posts/387600053512617/

We've all been waiting....

UNLOCKING POTENTIAL by Elliot Jones

is AVAILABLE TO WATCH NOW... LINK TO WATCH IN COMMENTS BELOW

It’s been awesome to be part of the wider fi****ms safety programme in NZ over the past 15 years and do my bit to keep New Zealanders safer.

Initially working as a Tactical Fi****ms Instructor for New Zealand Police assisting to protect the protectors, 4 years contracting to the New Zealand Mountain Safety Council as a Practical Fi****ms Instructor, assisting Firearm Safety Training Ltd to deliver a great programme and more recently training New Zealand Police Fi****ms Vetting Officers through CERT.

Another day ‘back in the boots’ for CERT delivering training to NZP Fi****ms Vetting Officers in Invercargill, and another cool venue.

The Bill Richardson Transport World museum and events centre.

Even the bogs are cool. 😁

...........Manipulating Training Environments for Reality...........

I love working in the adult education space and particularly training, mentoring and developing coaches and trainers.

However I’ve always struggled with ‘role-play’ training.
For me personally it doesn’t really work. I find it uncomfortable, so a block to learning, and I guess it is the same for many adult learners.
Subsequently if our participants feel uncomfortable then they are not in a safe learning environment and therefore as trainers or coaches we are failing them.

We need to design and provide training that they can make sense of, caters to their needs and is real to them, or at least triggers a learning experience relevant to them as individuals. That’s a keystone skill for coaches or trainers in any physical training environment.

The term ‘training for reality’ is not new. It’s been around for decades in law enforcement and military circles.

Strangely, the world has changed:
When you enter the term ‘training for reality’ into a search engine, the response is mainly about augmented environments, virtual reality training and other such ‘e’ learning alternatives.

Very little, if anything, comes up about how to manipulate a training session to get close to the actual thing you are training for. To me that is strange, counterintuitive and frustrating.

Having spent over 3 decades face to face coaching and training people to deal with everything from their first sports race through to those confronting life threatening situations by the nature of their work, I understand the importance of ‘real’ training sessions.

There will be people out there that hated my sessions, questioned my motives and methods, or thought I was on some big ego trip when I was pushing their limits.
However I battled for years to bring better and more realistic training to those in law enforcement, in the hope that one day my efforts might save an officers life........Who knows? Maybe it did.

In the law enforcement world it is near impossible to re-create a real incident in training. This is due to a myriad of factors that need to be controlled.
For example learning how to apprehend a violent, drug fuelled, deranged and rapidly escalating offender, will always end up with someone being hurt, often seriously. So training for this type of scenario can only get near to reality, and not reality itself.

The problem, of course, is that people will potentially act and do differently when confronted with a real ‘fight or flight’ situation, particularly if the training they have received hasn’t reflected anything close to that reality.

However there are ways to manipulate a training environment, to replicate survival stress levels, push a trainees physical skills, force errors of judgement (i.e. learning), create cognitive dissonance, take the learner to near physical exhaustion (the reality of a life threatening encounter) and then try to complete a complex task when all their fine and complex motor skills have diminished.

One method of manipulating a training environment is to use a constraints framework or constraints led coaching approach:

This is where you constrain or alter the environment, the task or even the trainee. Creating imperfect movement, non-dominant limb use, confined spaces, equipment failure, noise distraction, transition drills & skills, time pressure, chaos & confusion and unfamiliar situations; all in an effort to build a capability within a trainee where they know what to do when they don’t know what to do.

But also being mindful of leaving the trainee with a positive learning experience, after potentially many failures (learning experiences).

This requires skilled, dedicated, knowledgeable and experienced trainers who understand human performance in volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (V.U.C.A) situations.

You CANNOT replicate this type of training across some form of ‘e’ learning - it’s not a game; it’s understanding the unpredictability of a dangerous human that can only really be learned by the hands on experience, and not through an augmented reality machine.

The same applies to sport coaching:
When coaching athletes the only real way to experience competition or racing is by competing or racing. Or at the very least the training sessions are manipulated to replicate all of the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity of racing or competing.
Otherwise the training is fake and won’t transfer to ‘game day’.

In my view a great coach or trainer should manipulate any and every opportunity they can to achieve that outcome. Constantly looking to adapt, change, vary, front-load or unload any session plan.
Noting the flexibility required, as any written pre-plan probably hasn’t survived first contact.

And always remembering to leave athletes with a positive learning experience at the end of a session, however great or small that positive experience is.
This all requires a skilled coach.

Enjoy your coaching or training delivery; be flexible, be adaptable, be creative and manipulate your training environments accordingly.

Contact me if you have a coach or trainer development need.

Foggie