VALOR Blog

Did you know that your hormones can affect your physical wellness? Take some time to peruse the Hormones and Your Health blog to learn more about how your hormones play a big part in your physical wellness.

As a law enforcement officer, you require high levels of physical fitness and readiness. The foundational building blocks of becoming functionally fit are rooted in nutrition, as proper fuel for your body is required for health optimization and peak performance on the job. In the ever-changing world of “fad diets” and “extreme workouts,” how can anyone make sense of what works? In this blog, I am going to discuss the “diet” side of weight loss and overall health optimization by introducing the roles of calories and hormones.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but I will add to this powerful quote: visible actions are priceless! Actions do speak louder than words. Far too often, images in the media have shown inappropriate actions of men and women in uniform. In January, we saw powerful images of an officer from the Sunrise, Florida, Police Department (SPD) taking appropriate action to intervene when another officer from SPD needed help controlling his emotions in the field. Even though the rank on his sleeve and physical stature were both larger than Mount Everest, she stood on her oath, values, and beliefs.

As officers, we see the good, the bad, and the ugly. We live by the adage “to protect and serve.” But how much attention are we paying to building community relationships and trust while we protect and serve? Do you ever have the chance to focus on building relationships within your community? Sometimes building relationships can be harder than protecting and serving because it takes time and patience, but it is also very rewarding.

I started playing sports when I was eight years old and continued to play through high school and for a short time in college. After college, I served more than three years in the military and then went into law enforcement. Throughout it all, I believed that I had to appear strong and invincible if I was going to be accepted and successful.

The term tactical is often polluted. Some product vendors will tell you that if you want to sell something to law enforcement, call it tactical, paint it black, and put Velcro on it. We can wear tactical gear and conduct our operations but are we consistently thinking tactically and strategically on a daily basis for officer safety?

In order to survive, early humans needed to be highly attuned to threats to their survival. That made knowing whether it was a rock or a lion behind the bush very important! Our ancestors learned behaviors that became hardwired in the brains of their descendants in order to avoid danger and stay alive. This phenomenon is known as the “negativity bias,” which is alive and kicking in our brains today and can affect how we navigate life.

In law enforcement, we experience things that are incredibly difficult to handle, including felonious assaults. A tremendous amount of time is spent teaching officers how to survive felonious assaults. The goal is always the same: you go home. However, surviving is only half of the battle.

Stress is an inherent part of life, especially in the field of law enforcement where we face uniquely demanding challenges on a day-to-day, and often moment-to-moment, basis. And while not all stress is “bad,” the constant, unrelenting activation of the fight or flight response can negatively impact our physical, mental, and emotional well-being and change the way we move through life.

Some of us in law enforcement are skeptical when something new crops up. Our first reaction may be to doubt its usefulness or value. With the unfamiliar and untried, sometimes we need to hear what something is NOT before we can be open to hearing what it actually is. This can be true for the word meditation. It can sort of freak people out. So take a breath and stay with me. My mission is to debunk some common misconceptions surrounding mindfulness meditation.

My previous blogs focused on ensuring that our training reflects how we need to perform under stress and the phenomenon of auditory exclusion. The final post of this series emphasizes taking training scenarios to their logical conclusion.

Officers may not want to talk about emotions or feelings. That’s certainly not to say that there aren’t officers who will talk about their emotions; but these conversations may be few and far between This blog, written by a retired officer, discusses the importance of emotions with the hope of normalizing them.

In a previous blog, I discussed an active shooter training exercise that I was involved in with a local police department. A second training issue I observed involved an interesting phenomenon: auditory exclusion.

This blog will address something that arguably, we all know is good for us, but that we dread starting or just never get around to: the frightfully simple practice of meal planning.

I have always taken the following saying seriously: “The way you train is the way you will perform under stress.” I personally can attest to the fact that it is true. I can recall one instance in particular in which I was in a ground fight...

To put it simply, it is a human need to strive and improve. The act of setting goals isn’t just about ourselves.

The City of Sidney and the Sidney Police Department realized years ago that it was important to maintain physical fitness standards for officers. To implement a standard, the City and the union (officers) collaborated to look at national standards for officers and conducted internal testing to develop a physical fitness testing process.