Police Fitness: An International Perspective on Current and Future Challenges

Poor officer fitness can lead to decreased occupational task performance, injuries, increased
absenteeism, and a variety of negative health sequalae further adding to the challenges
of staffing law enforcement agencies. Optimizing the physical fitness for both serving
officers and new recruits is critical as their loss is, and will increasingly be, difficult to
replace. However, maintaining and recruiting a physically fit workforce faces several
challenges. For serving officers, shiftwork is known to decrease motivation to exercise
and negatively impact sleep and diet. Additional factors impacting their fitness includes
age-related declines in fitness, increasing obesity, long periods of sedentarism, and negative
COVID-19 effects. Concurrently, recruiting physically fit recruits is challenged by declining
levels of fitness, reduced physical activity, and increasing obesity in community youth.
Ability-based training (ABT), individualizing physical conditioning training based on the
existing fitness levels of individuals within a group, offers a potential solution for delivering
physical conditioning to groups of applicants, recruits, and officers with a range of physical
fitness capabilities. Law enforcement agencies should consider implementing ABT during
academy training and