Chris Bartels is currently the coordinator of health performance at the New South Wales Police and also works with the Sydney Roosters as head S&C for their Academy program. Previously he was a Senior Strength & Conditioning Coach with the Royal Australian Air Force Human Performance Optimisation team located at RAAF Base Richmond. and supported the Australian Defence Force Diving School at HMAS Penguin. Prior to this, Chris had amassed over a decade of experience across law enforcement, educational and high-performance sporting organizations. Chris also hold’s a Master’s in High Performance Sport from the University of Technology Sydney and is an Accredited ASCA Elite Level 3 S&C Coach.

Quotes

“An explosive device might be identified as being on the side of the ship. And these divers will go down and instantly I'm thinking, all right, they're going to try and remove the mine off a boat. But it's not the case. They’ll actually go down there and drill into the explosive device to try and flood the system so that it doesn't go off and these sorts of things can happen in the dead of night”

“Senior instructors that were responsible for the phases of the divers would come to those meetings and get feedback around each of the divers, their readiness to perform, their fatigue, anything related to muscular soreness, and your basic five point wellness questionnaire.”

“it's around about a million dollars to train one single diver. So if you're getting towards the back end of a course, and it's gone for 11 months and all of a sudden the diver succumbs to an injury, they'll have to repeat that phase, and that's money tied up or potentially and depending on the injury, that's money lost.

“whilst we communicated jump height to the divers, we looked at our RSI as a readiness tool and we were actually testing at the back end of the week. Now gold standard would obviously be on the Monday, but we dealt with the dates that we were given... So the conversation always stemmed around, right, this was the cost of the week”

“Pull -ups are a big cultural thing with the clearance divers.”

“the PTI then came on this journey where they realized that if they were gonna introduce a session, there was obviously gonna be an increased level of soreness versus having a bit more of a consistent structure to the sessions on a more regular basis that soreness is going to go down and you're going to allow those divers to actually experience some improvement”

“we can give them 10 minutes of what they want to then give them 50 minutes of what they need. It's a good trade -off”

SHOWNOTES

1) Chris’ background as a swimmer and progression in tactical strength and conditioning

2) Challenges faced by Navy clearance divers and addressing vocational drop-out

3) Implementing an athlete monitoring system with Navy clearance divers

4) Strength and power assessments relevant to clearance divers and categorizing divers in “force” or “fit” buckets

5) Traditional physical training for Navy divers, “finning” and influencing PTIs

6) Targeting shoulder and hip resilience and identifying high risk phases in navy diver training

7) Recommendations for using sport science technology in a new environment

8) The strategy of giving people what they want and the strategies of negotiating