OrderInChaos wrote: ↑Mon Dec 09, 2019 7:41 pm
I wonder if you could get FLETC to recognize courses or educational materials as CEUs, especially since you ground your stuff in federal gov't recs from Health and Human Services. Producing that and keeping it up to date, training departments in it is much more full-time than you'd want to mess with while doing all your crazy shifts and interrupted sleep, man!
Luckily for me (but not really for the overall quality of cert holders), the LE Fitness Coordinator program requires no formal upkeep. Once you go through the program, you're "good" (this is in contrast to other psychomotor instructor programs like control tactics or firearms). The program is more in-depth than your run of the mill weekend Personal Training Certification, but it's not really comprehensive enough to be meaningful for being an effective practitioner. From what I gathered it's mostly just a "checked box". The federal LE agencies have to have someone with the certification at their respective field offices to run the PEB, and the only reason my department coughed up the money to send me was because we have to have someone certified to keep our department's CALEA accreditation. Most of the folks in my LEFCTP class weren't sworn personnel with backgrounds in fitness; they were simply the most in-shape employee at their particular office and were told they were going. There were a few in my class who didn't do any type of exercise at all; I guess they just drew the short straw. That being said, the program was one of the best i've seen. Eight full days, with about half of that "lab time", in the gym actually training alongside the instructors, who were competent. The lecture material was good too, for an "entry level" type of program.
Before I was hired on with my department, there was actually a full time sworn Fitness Coordinator position. I would LOVE to have that job. We have just under 300 sworn personnel, so there's plenty of work that could be done to improve "mission readiness" department-wide. We actually had an annual fitness test back then too. All of that disappeared when our current administration came online. Now, we have a significantly undertrained, overweight, and out of shape department, and it's just a matter of time before it bites us bad (even ignoring the current level of "on duty injuries" and lost time due to "sickness', the majority of both being related to poor lifestyle). Oh well, in the meantime I'll just keep doing police work, helping out the handful of folks on the department that want to get better on my own time, and training everyone else through the side hustle. Influencing change on the department one person at a time is better than nothing.
