Episode 2 - How Understanding the Nervous System is Relevant to the Tactical Community

In this episode, George and Matt discuss how being able to make some sense of the nervous system can help enhance performance and resilience, specifically for the tactical professional.

In doing so, the guys dive into the role of the autonomic nervous system and consider how the stress response requirements have changed in humans over the last 1000 years.

Matt explains that for a lot of this to make sense, we need to consider the response to both acute and chronic stress. For instance, from a performance enhancement perspective, we need to identify what ‘state’ might be optimal for the completion of a given task (e.g. long range shooting) and then learn how to bridge the gap from our current state, to that desired state.

George then unpacks how Heart Rate Variability (HRV) can be used as a tool for quantifying state, thus providing a baseline from which to experiment.

Everything we do here at SOFLETE is based on adding value to our community, so if you have any ideas, requests or questions, please feel free to reach out to us- either through SOFLETE social media or contact George and Matt directly via [email protected] or [email protected].

Please see below for a few resources, linked to today’s episode, that you might find useful:

How to measure your BOLT score (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Scy-_hWLAr0&t=47s)

Unplugged by Brian MacKenzie, Dr A Galpin & Phil White (https://www.amazon.com/Unplugged-Technology-Upgrade-Performance-Consciousness/dp/1628602619)

An interesting read on an evolutionary perspective of stress (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1560227/)

NSCA’s Essentials of Sports Science (https://www.nsca.com/certification/cpss/essentials-of-sport-science/)