Need For Speed Hot Pursuit 2 Trainer

[Placido Teofilo]

Oneof the coolest parts of any police academy is when you get to train for pursuits on the emergency vehicle operations course, or EVOC. EVOC is where you learn to drive fast, do those James Bond-like turns and reversals, and maintain positive control of the car under the most adverse of conditions.

Contrast this with the driver training model used in the United Kingdom (UK). Entry-level student constables get very little driver training, as they might not be driving at all. If they do drive, they will likely be in compact, underpowered vehicles intended solely to get the constable to where he is going, with few special features or emergency equipment. High-performance and prisoner transport vehicles are operated by advanced response drivers only.

After at least two years of exemplary service, a constable can apply to become an advanced response driver. This entails completing a 15-week training program that combines classroom, closed track, and open road experiences. Several exercises are conducted on open public streets that are often congested, with the student driver moving the vehicle at emergency-level speeds while giving a running commentary on his thought process to the instructor in the passenger seat. The fact that the citizens of the UK tolerate the police running pursuit training exercises on their streets is testimonial to the level of trust and cooperation the police enjoy with the public.

Computer-based driving simulators are often available to regional academies and some larger agencies. However, they can also be expensive. A few training agencies have tried to make these mobile facilities by setting them up in large trailers or making the equipment modular.

The simulators are valuable for their ability to replicate most any driving condition, and no matter how many times the student officer wrecks the car, a reset button makes everything whole again. Because the simulators cannot produce G-forces and many of the other environmental conditions of real high-performance driving, they have limited application. They are useful for training on policy and thought processes in a risk-free environment.

For example, the instructor can set up conditions where department policy might permit a pursuit to be initiated, and then change the environment slightly so that the pursuit is prohibited under those circumstances. Similarly, the instructor might insert a situation that calls for the pursuit to be terminated, and see if the student recognizes those conditions. Simulators are also excellent for practicing radio communications under realistic conditions.

When agencies do this, they frequently reserve the occasion for pursuits that went badly, or resulted in some high-profile outcome. To discard the less-spectacular pursuit is to waste a teaching opportunity. By discussing and emphasizing the aspects of the event that went well, in addition to those that were less ideal, reinforces good tactics in a realistic environment that is relatable to everyone.

Although the trend on pursuit policies seems to be to restrict pursuits more than permit them, one of the best ways to improve police officer performance in car chases is to allow the officers to do them. The first time anyone performs some high-risk tactic, it often goes wrong. The moves are unfamiliar, and the actor can be so preoccupied with getting it right that they lose focus on the task.

Tim Dees is a retired police officer and the former editor of two major law enforcement websites who writes and consults on technology applications in criminal justice. He can be reached at tim@timdees.

My path into the strength and conditioning industry was led first by my love for sports growing up. I started young and found that athletics was something that I excelled in and truly enjoyed. I remember my coaches telling me that if I wanted to be great, I needed to make the weight room my priority and take my training seriously. Through this, I found that I actually enjoyed training, and between both the physical and mental challenges, it helped me to grow as a young man, as well as an athlete.

I hold a Bachelor of Science Degree in Health and Exercise Science, as well as a Masters Degree in Education, both from CSU. I currently hold the Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist (CSCS) from the NSCA. While working in collegiate athletics, I also held the SCCC certification through CSCCA, as well as the USAW-L1.

I hope that they gain more from me than just their increased productivity on the field or court, and I hope that I can give them the tools to succeed whatever path they choose in life. Relationships are the cornerstone of my program, and I hope that they can learn lessons in the weight-room that they can take with them the rest of their lives.

We believe that comfort is the Enemy. Pushing beyond comfort in the gym, will transform the rest of your life. As a member of the pursuit community you are committed to transforming your body and mind through sound coaching, training and nutrition.

They have played a big role in shifting the training emphasis away from a singular pursuit of heavier and heavier weights and towards the inclusion of explosive dynamic effort type exercises for athletic populations. However, despite this positive effect, I believe the application of these speed zones, the terminology they include, and the generalised use of fixed values as a universal truth for VBT is no longer advancing the practice of velocity tracking in the weight room.

If you currently use the velocity zones in your training to great effect, please don't let me stop you! Any way you find for channel some emphasis into intent to move is a good thing but I believe there are better ways to get your athletes lifting faster. There are also much better ways to use velocity based training as a way to calibrate your programming and improve the training outcomes.

It's time to revisit these zones and create a new, more practical set of training zones for use within VBT and training in general. So if you are a sports scientist or coach settle in as we dive deep into the many angles of the velocity zones.

This is part one of what will ultimately be a four part series on the velocity zones. In this article the focus is on the history. How the zones got their names, where the absolute velocities came from and how they were intended to be used.

Coaches and athletes are modifying their strength training to align with these fixed velocity zones in the pursuit of specific strength qualities which are based on a poor interpretation (and possibly a poor literal translation) of broader program design principles and a classification system of the Olympic weightlifting exercises.

This is a form of training specificity whereby coaches can aim to rectify a given weakness in an athletes load velocity profile or place emphasis on a key attribute for a given sporting requirement. For example by squatting at 0.8m/s you will target the development of strength-speed for that athlete.

To fully understand the velocity zones it helps to look back at their history. In fact, the history of VBT is very much intertwined with the history of strength and conditioning as we know it today. Let's start in the 1950s.

These athletes had become so well developed in fact, that the coaches were working without precedent; athletes hadn't been reached this level of performance before. The USSR coaches were running out of training methods to throw at them. They were well beyond the point of the law of diminishing returns.

Verkoshansky was decades ahead of his time. So much of what we take for granted as established science and training methodology today can be credited to his ground-breaking research and practice in athletic development.

Most famously, he worked out that the stress applied to the legs when dropped from a height was greater than what you could achieve in the weight room with standard strength exercises. He termed this new approach to power training the shock method. Today this is largely credited as one of the first scientific explanations for modern plyometric training and the stretch shortening cycle.

Verkoshansky was a prolific writer and researcher, and while many modern S&C coaches are familiar with the shock method, the drop jump, and the plyometric origin story, what is less well known was his work on the concept of special strength training (SST).

SST describes the training and programming required for when an athlete has reached such an elite level of physical condition that they need to further specialise their training on the special qualities of strength that are most relevant to success in their given sport. An idea we now refer to as the SAID (Specific Adaptations to Imposed Demands) principle. He described seven qualities of strength covering maximal strength, high-speed strength, explosive strength, starting strength, reactive ability, local muscular endurance, and maximum anaerobic power.

The terminology might be a little different today, but we still use the same concept in modern training. It is one of the first things you are taught in PE or a personal training course: Strength, power, endurance, speed, etc the qualities that make up the modes or types of fitness all need to be factored in when training.

Verkoshansky continued exploring the SST concept in Supertraining, a seminal piece that contains basically the entirety of an undergraduate and masters degree in strength and conditioning. It's heavy going but I strongly recommend this book for anyone who wants to earn a living training humans!

In Supertraining, Verkoshansky explores the difference between "speed-strength" and "strength-speed" as elements of SST, but not as they are currently interpreted in the velocity based training space. He positions them as differentiators of qualities needed across the entire spectrum of a training program, almost as a way to broadly classify on the needs analysis for a sport and its training plan:

Roman's 1986 book The Training of the Weightlifter, is largely the modern inspiration for revisiting the idea of using velocity as a metric in modern strength training. It is also directly credited by Bryan Mann as the inspiration for the use of speed-strength in the terminology used for the modern VBT speed zones (see Velocity Based Training for Football).

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