There is a lot more to PSP than you think. Find out how a team of scientists along with physical and mental performance specialists are keeping soldiers on the battlefield.
This podcast is for and about soldiers of the Canadian Army.
Its primary goal is to provide them with useful information through thoughtful and open discussions that reflect their mutual interests and concerns.
Though soldiers are our primary audience, the topics covered on this podcast should be relevant to anyone who supports our soldiers or who has an interest in Canadian military matters.
[Fast paced music plays]
Patrick Gagnon: In the Army, your body is your vehicle. It’s everything. So, if you don’t train properly, if you don’t take care of that body, unfortunately, you won’t be able to do the job for as long.
Captain Adam Orton: Hi! I’m Captain Adam Orton with the Canadian Army Podcast. When people think of the staff at PSP, or the Personal Support Programs, they think of people running fitness plans in gyms, or maybe helping you get fit during basic training. But there’s actually a lot more science going on in the background than you might think. And there’s a whole cell dedicated to doing the science of soldiering. Here to talk to us a bit about it is Patrick Gagnon who is the National Manager at the Human Performance Research and Development Cell at PSP. Welcome to the podcast.
[Music ends]
Patrick Gagnon: Thanks, Adam. Glad to be here.
Capt Orton: Yeah, so my first interaction with your cell was during the development of the Force Combat Evaluation, which is a specific fitness test for the Army. And I was a part of the trials and I got to see a lot of how science was happening in the background. And I realized that PSP maybe did a lot more than what most of us thought was providing fitness routines and training and stuff. There is actually a lot of science going on back there. So tell us a little bit more about your team and what they do.
Patrick Gagnon: So, our team is comprised of scientists, people in exercise physiology, biomechanics, and mental performance, and so on. And we look at different tasks in the military. We deconstruct them, we tear them apart to understand what their energy costs are, what the movement patterns are, what muscle groups are involved, and so on, to really understand what’s at stake. And how do we best train, how to best prepare for those tasks for our soldiers to be ready for them? So, our team essentially designs new fitness standards—new fitness tests for the military. It can be for the entire CAF, or could be for specialty occupations. We also do assessment centres, or selection processes that are used to pick out the best candidates for a specialty. We do trainability studies. So, we understand how to best train; how to best prepare people for specific requirements of operations, and ensure that we reduce injuries and maximize training output. Essentially, we’re trying to bring science to operations.
Capt Orton: So how did you get started on all of this?
Patrick Gagnon: It started off as mainly developing fitness standards. So, at the time, in 2007, 2008, our mandate was to create a replacement for the former CF Express evaluation. That test was good for its time. We were probably ahead of our time, you know, for the mid eighties, because we were following some legal mandate to make sure that whatever standards were being applied to the Canadian Forces were deemed to be bona fide occupational requirements—which is a term in the Canadian Human Rights Act, that basically stipulates that an employer cannot discriminate on its employees or kick somebody out for fitness unless that fitness standard is directly linked to the job. And so that’s the premise on which we started. So twenty-five years later, I think methods have evolved the philosophies behind fitness and the operations have also evolved. So it was a good time for us to revalidate what the fitness requirements were for the military.
Capt Orton: Right. And so the Express Test was the old standardized test that everybody had to do. What did you do to develop the new test?
Patrick Gagnon: Project FORCE, at the time, was a big undertaking. We went to multiple different bases, interviewed multiple people—more than a thousand people were surveyed. We got into focus groups to understand what were the essential tasks that any member of the Canadian Forces had to do. From that point on, in 2008, 2009, 2010-ish, we went to Canada Command as well as SEFCOM—because those were the two force employers—and we asked them: “What does it take to deploy people to deploy CAF members on to different theaters?” And, from those lists of roughly four- or five-hundred tasks, they boiled it down to probably twenty tasks. And, from there, we measured those tasks—we went in the field, reenacted those scenarios, measured, instrumented CAF members doing those scenarios in an operational setting. And we were able to come up with the physical cost of doing those tasks. Something like carrying a Jerry Can over a certain distance to refuel a generator. So we would take people, measure their heart rates with a GPS, measure all the distance they covered, measure the weights, the drag forces—all that stuff that is involved in the physical task of doing this. And then, once all those tasks have been measured, either in the laboratory setting or in the field, we were then able to boil it down to: what does it cost? And if the aerobic cost of one test, one task was X and the other one was Y, we took the most physically demanding one and kept that one. So by a process of elimination and combination of tasks or concentration of tasks. So, some tasks had some components that were quite easy. But some others were more difficult. We kept the most difficult tasks. So, at the end of the day, we had six tasks that represented what it meant to serve in the Canadian military.
Capt Orton: And what were those tasks?
Patrick Gagnon: There was a vehicle extrication. There is a stretcher carry, a pickets and wire carry—which is like building a fence. There was a sandbag fortification task, a picking and digging, just like if you’re digging a trench or an ablution facility, and also breaking ground with a pickaxe and then skip to cover task, which means that you're going to cover under fire, for example. Those six tasks are simulations. They’re quite onerous in terms of time and equipment. So obviously, testing the Regular Force and Reserve Force using a test that requires so much space, equipment and time was not logistically possible. So then we created a proxy test or a predictor of those common military tasks.
Capt Orton: Can you explain how those six tasks translate to the current Force evaluation?
Patrick Gagnon: So, the Force evaluation is comprised of a pre-screening—make sure that you’re healthy enough to do the test—a waist circumference to look at body composition. And then it’s followed by four test items. The first one being a sandbag lift, which is lifting thirty times a twenty kilogram sandbag up to a level of one meter as fast as possible, followed by a twenty metre rush, which is changing body position every ten meters, going into prone position, getting back up, sprinting. So it’s really a mobility test—very close to pepper potting where we call that.
Capt Orton: Up-he-sees-me-down.
Patrick Gagon: Exactly. And then the third test items would be the intermittent loaded shuttle where you’re doing twenty metre back and forth trips with a load of twenty kilograms that you have to carry, interspersed with twenty metres back and forth of unloaded walk. So it’s roughly a four-hundred metre course, that you’re running as if you’re carrying material or a kit around.
And the final task is a sandbag drag, which is replicating or measuring your ability to drag a casualty on the ground. So that test, as a yearly test, is giving us a really good indicator of your ability to serve in the Canadian Armed Forces from a physical perspective. So, it does screen out the people that are really not fit for the military. In the past, with the Express Evaluation, we had people that did well on the test. But unfortunately, when brought to the field, they were not very good. And vice versa, we had people failing the test. But in the job, were doing very good. In science, we call that type-one, type-two errors. In this case, with the Force evaluation, we’ve really diminished those errors of measurement by the people that are failing the force evaluation are also the people that are struggling in their day-to-day operational job. And that’s what we wanted to make sure is that the measurement that we were using to identify the people that shouldn't be serving the CAF is now much more accurate than it’s ever been.
Capt Orton: So, one of the critical aspects of military living is injury prevention. Because if you injure yourself—especially lower body stuff, if you’re doing large-scale exercises—that can put you down for a long time, what have you guys done in that field?
Patrick Gagnon: It’s definitely one of our priorities right now. A few years ago, now, the balanced strategy was published, which is the new physical performance strategy for the Canadian Armed Forces. And, in that strategy, it has four priorities—which is physical activity, performance, nutrition, injury prevention, and sleep. So increasing those aspects are going to increase the overall performance of our organization.
In injury prevention, one of the first things that we did as a major project was work with the Canadian Army Advanced Warfare Center in Trenton where they were running the Patrol Pathfinder Course. For those of you who know what this course is, it is a very gruelling and physically demanding course, where the external loads are quite extreme, and the attrition rates of that course were quite high—to a point where the Army was concerned about, you know, whether or not this is a capability they wanted to retain. The work that we did with the Patrol Pathfinder was simply to go in there, embed ourselves with the course, and follow trainees throughout the course, to monitor everything that they would do. So in terms of how much weight they were carrying, what kind of terrain they were walking, what kind of distances, the temperatures, the wind speeds—all the aspects or variables, it could increase or decrease the physical performance. After following a course we were able to map out all the physical demands, but also the loading pattern on how much and how quickly did we overload those trainees with weights or distances. And by simply mapping this out, and showing this to the directing staff and the leaders of the Advanced Warfare Center, we’re able to come up with some recommendations on on how to maybe pair the training differently, or change the schedule—modify the schedule to put in some rest days and some recovery days so that we didn’t injure people. And that really made its way. But also finding out that people that were coming on course had very different patterns of what they had done previous to coming to Trenton. So things like they were going on a jump course, a couple of weeks before going on Pathfinder. So the overload was already there. And they were broken sometimes when they were getting off the plane in Trenton. So we wanted to make sure that we went upriver a little bit and finding out what people had done prior to coming on a course like this. So some of the recommendations and the interventions that we did was create a checklist for people to apply for Pathfinders so that their courseware were all done with, that they had ample time to recover before going on course, and also the right physical preparation, working with local PSP staff that we’ve trained and we’ve briefed on what the Patrol Pathfinder Course load would look like in terms of physical fitness. And therefore, increasing one’s chances of surviving the course, basically.
Capt Orton: How would you draw the line between something that’s operational and training in terms of providing that space for rest and relaxation? Because, you know, you’ll hear the argument that we need to push people hard during training to create environments that are similar to operational environments, so that people can become adapted to that. But if you’re giving a lot of extra rest and time in there for people for recovery, some people might make the argument that that's not a realistic environment. What would you say to that?
Patrick Gagnon: Good observation. I would kind of argue that we’re not necessarily changing the difficulty of the course. What we’re changing is sometimes the sequence. And by just changing the sequence, we’re now giving the body a way to recover, without changing the overall activity of the course, if that makes any sense. You know, instead of loading the first couple of days on a course, and having to go to a hundred pounds on a rucksack, it’s a bit more progressive. So, we’re changing maybe the navigation portion of the course a bit earlier or a bit later, and doing the water component of the course here, so that it becomes unweighted or less impact. So it’s just rejigging the schedule, so that it makes a bit more sense, physiologically. And tactically, hopefully, we’re working with the directing staff to make sure that we’re not changing the overall outcome or the output of the course, while still maintaining the rigours of it.
Capt Orton: Yeah, I mean, conceivably, under those conditions, as well, is that you can build people up to get to that level, so that when they hit the operational level—you know, somebody’s gonna get hurt, having it happen on course under supervised conditions is definitely better than having it happen in an operation where you don’t necessarily have access to all the resources to help somebody recover too.
Patrick Gagnon: And part of the issue is also trying to improve the education level and awareness level of the soldiers as they’re getting ready physically, so that we are teaching them the right way of maintaining their bodies as their primary tools for the trade. You know, in the Army, your body is your vehicle—it’s your load carriage. it’s everything. So, if you don’t train properly, if you don’t take care of that body, unfortunately, you won’t be able to do the job for as long. So, ideally, going to those gruelling courses and instilling the proper methodology to train goes a long way. As opposed to hoping for the best that they survive the course and then going to the unit and repeating what they’ve been taught, which was just go hard all the time.
Capt Orton: So obviously, the Army has had its own kind of mission-specific requirements. Much like the Express Test, there used to be the Battle Fitness Test, which involved, like, a ruck march and a couple of other activities. What Army-specific stuff are you working on?
Patrick Gagnon: So you mentioned earlier, your experience with Force Combat. Force Combat was our first real good kick at the can with a project for the Army itself. When we rolled out FORCE Evaluation, we knew from the get go that it was going to be a test that was meant to apply to all CAF members as a whole. So, we had started to work on what could look and feel more Army, but still using the test items that were developed for FORCE. And that’s where the creativity came in. So, we looked at everything that had been done in Afghanistan in terms of after action reports. We did some surveys and interviews. We also went to Wainwright and looked at dismounted operations to look at what were the distances that were people covering. Were they still thirteen kilometres—which is an old Battle Fitness Test? Turns out what our research gave us was the distances were shorter, but the weights were higher. So what we did is start to play with our test items to come up with a change in the FORCE evaluation that would better reflect a dismounted operation scenario. And so, when we tested that out, we went to Gagetown with some subject matter experts that would tell us how dismounted operations would go at a section level. And we measured, again, those scenarios. And we matched the circuit of Force Combat to equate to what the energy expenditure would be of those urban scenarios, urban combat scenarios. So that was quite interesting. And certainly, we’re very confident now that people that are doing FORCE Combat, at a certain time range, are very well prepared and ready to face the rigours of dismounted operations outside the wire that as we’ve seen in Afghanistan in the past.
Capt Orton: And, having done it both in the trial capacity and and after that, actually doing it as part of training, I thought it was a pretty good gut check. It’s definitely a step up from the regular FORCE Test. And, you know, if you’re pushing yourself, it’s a challenge. It’s not easy.
Patrick Gagnon: No, definitely not. And I was one of the first guinea pigs to try obviously— well, whatever we do in the lab, we tried first on us. And when we looked at the heat trials, we swallowed temperature pills that were sensors in our gut, basically, that would tell us what our body core temperature was. And we would walk at thirty plus degrees for a long time with the same weight and just see how our bodies reacted. So there’s a lot of research that went into this. We also piggybacked on the University of Ottawa thermal regulatory lab to do some more heat study. So, whatever we came up with for the Army was not only safe and relevant for them, but really adapted to our weather in Canada. So the policy that followed Force Combat was also predicated on evidence-based information to make sure that the timing of the test and what the conditions in which the test should be conducted were also kind of regulated.
Capt Orton: If you consider, operationally, sometimes people are advantaged in different ways. Those who haven’t seen me, I’m six foot four and that guy, ruck marching is easy for me; fitting into armoured vehicles is not. Where does that kind of dynamic fit into your research on the human dynamic side?
Patrick Gagnon: Interesting question. Definitely something that we’ve looked at in the past and still currently doing that. It also comes up often with a gender issue. Whereas, is something more difficult for women or for men? Oftentimes, it’s a body type issue. So as you mentioned, if you’re six foot four, and you’re having trouble going into a certain vehicle, or some place, somebody smaller may not have the same difficulty. When you’re dragging a casualty is probably easier for you than it is for somebody who’s five-foot two and one-hundred and ten pounds. Those are the most pressing issues, I would say.
Looking at the impact of body size on gait, for example. Gait meaning, the way you walk and the way you biomechanically or mechanically move your body across a certain plane. Certainly, ruck marching is a good example of where we’ve tried to make some inroads. In the past, whenever we did ruck marching, the military would prescribe a certain pace. And that pace would be dictated mainly by whoever was in front. And typically those were males.
Capt Orton: Leader legs, also.
Patrick Gagnon: Exactly. And, what you find with some of the research we did on FORCE Combat showed us that if, for example, somebody who’s shorter than five foot four, if you go faster than a certain given pace, you start breaking down mechanically—meaning that the knee and the back are now stressed at a much higher level, which causes what we call the cardiac drift, which is the energy expenditure of your heart rate. And basically your heart rate, goes up much higher than it would normally for a steady state walk. So we’re getting people—just because the pace is slightly too fast for them—we’re artificially increasing the stressor on their body, for no reason.
Capt Orton: So, basically, because the stride might be too long, they’re mechanically no longer being efficient.
Patrick Gagnon: Exactly.
Capt Orton: Which is causing a significant increase in energy expenditure as a result of that?
Patrick Gagnon: Therefore, not really, operationally relevant. So when we did the study on dismounted operations, we found that the pace at which people were walking to a combat site, for example, or a battlefield was not as important as making sure they got there still able to fight.
Capt Orton: Yeah.
Patrick Gagnon: So we saw that also, with the Special Forces seeing that the paces were much slower than what we did with the former battle fitness test, which was 5.33 kilometres an hour. We didn’t need to go as fast, especially with a load on, to be more combat efficient. It was actually the opposite. We’re carrying more load, we should go a little slower. So with Force Combat, we kind of limited that to, you got to go your five kilometre between fifty and sixty minutes—which ensures that we didn’t go too fast, but not too slow either. So that fifty minutes is for the people who are faster. Sure, if you can have that stride and you’re comfortable in that stride, go, do it in fifty minutes. But, if you’re shorter, doing it in sixty minutes is also acceptable—and probably more wiser to make sure that you preserve your body to be able to do the tests. afterwards, which is why again, the FORCE Combat sequence is a ruck march first, followed by the test to make sure that you’re still able to carry out the most important tasks of a soldier—which is being able to fight and carry and drag. And not just walk.
Capt Orton: So, we’re talking a bit about basically physical performance. Do you guys do any work in the mental performance areas?
Patrick Gagnon: For the CAF itself, right now, we’re doing very little in mental performance. What we’ve done, though, is starting to work with our Special Forces community to develop those capabilities. So, with our SOFCOM operators, we have, within my team, some mental performance research officers and research assistants that developed new ways of dealing with—when you mix physical performance with mental performance, we’re essentially applying a sports psychology lens to military operations. So we’re using stuff that works on Olympic athletes, we’re now transposing them onto our tactical athletes or our soldiers in the field. Things like using tactical breathing or visualization before you go to a close quarter battle house where you’re meant to decipher friend from foe and, and make the right decisions while being at a very high elevated heart rate. Because you’re actively engaging in a firefight. Right? That work has also led to innovations with the Air Force where we have a mental performance coach, if you will, with the Flight School in Moose Jaw with our pilot trainees, where they’ve seen that the workload and the stressors that were placed upon the pilot candidates was quite high and the failure rates were sometimes difficult to swallow. So, now bringing somebody with that background was prepping them—almost like a sporting event. And that’s led to really positive results. So those types of examples of how we’re blending in the physical and the mental performance are making their way. We’re not quite ready to do it for the conventional Forces, but it’s definitely in the books for the future.
Capt Orton: So, what else do you have in development right now?
Patrick Gagnon: Another major initiative that we’re working on in conjunction with the Health Services is a women’s wellness program. It’s a major investment into ensuring that women and diverse individuals within the CAF are properly looked after to also enhance their performance. Things like, what happens to women that have been prenatal and postpartum? So after they give birth, when they come back to the CAF, when their mat leave is done, how do they recover? How do they prepare physically, to make sure they can come back to the job without injuring themselves or coming too hard, too fast into the test, for example. So we’re doing some major initiatives and hiring some people to look after those specific issues that are linked to women’s performance with regards to nutrition, physical activity, sleep, and the different phases of their career as well. So women entering menopause, for example, may have some different needs in terms of physical preparation and nutrition than what they had when they came into Basic Military Training. Also, the recruit coming into the CAF may have different needs than a male recruit. So we’re looking at those issues and making sure that we have some answers to prevent them from getting injured—because that’s one of the leading causes of women leaving the CAF is they get injured earlier. And therefore, what can we do from a PSP perspective and a health perspective to help them stay healthy and have longer careers within the CAF? So that’s a major initiative that we’re undertaking now.
Capt Orton: So, for somebody listening right now, who maybe wants to take full advantage of what PSP does and what the human performance cell does, what would you recommend to them? What can they do?
Patrick Gagnon: Try them. Honestly, across the country, usage of PSP staff and PSP resources is very disproportionate. We have bases where PSP is embedded with units and they know them by first names and they’re in there, in the hangers, on the ship’s deck and everywhere, and other bases where they tend to not even go see them. So they have their own gyms on their unit lines and basically do their own thing. There’s a resource and richness to go and check out PSP. I remember an old group in 5 Brigade that I was privy to when we were briefing on the FORCE project, where a study had been done on injury prevention at the brigade and showing the prevalence of injuries when PSP was involved in leading PT versus when it was run by just anyone in the unit. And the numbers were completely astonishing. So, the presence of somebody who actually does that for a living—being able to plan and lead PT—is important and does save injuries and save costs to an army unit. So, I would say to the units that haven’t tapped into their PSP resources, try them out. We have bases where we send PSP on courses. We’ve sent PSP on deployment. We send PSP on everywhere. Our researchers have been on ships, on helicopters, on boats, on ribs, everywhere—we go where they go. And we measure what they do to make sure that we understand fully the nature of their job to be able to support them with the right training, the right approach, and the right mental performance, the right strategies and even nutrition strategies to make sure that they have a long and healthy operational life in the Canadian Armed Forces.
[Music starts]
Capt Orton: All right. Well, thanks for being here and giving us the inside scoop on what’s happening in the deep—in the labs at the PSP side.
Patrick Gagon: Thanks, it was my pleasure.
Capt Orton: That was Patrick Gagnon, who is the National Manager of the Human Performance Research and Development Cell at PSP. If you want to know more about what PSP does, you can check out their website at CAF connection dot ca and the address is in our show notes.
I’m Captain Adam Orton for the Canadian Army Podcast. Orton out.
[Music ends]