Lessons From Special Forces Operators for Elite Team Sports Training: How to Make the Whole Greater Than the Sum of the Parts

Abstract

This methodology paper describes the design of a holistic and multidisciplinary human performance program within the Belgian Special Forces Group, the Tier 1 Special Operations unit of the Belgian Defense. Performance management approaches in the military draw heavily on sports science. The key component of the program design described here is its integrative nature, which team sports training might benefit from. The basic rationale behind the program was to bridge several gaps: the gap between physical and mental training; the gap between the curative or preventive medical approach and the performance enhancement approach; and the gap between individual and team training. To achieve this goal, the methodology of Intervention Mapping was applied, and a multidisciplinary team of training and care professionals was constituted with operational stakeholders. This was the first step in the program design. The second step took a year, and consisted of formal and informal consultations, participant observations and task analyses. These two first stages and their conclusions are described in the Method section. The Results section covers the next two stages (three and four) of the process, which aimed at defining the content of the program; and to test a pilot project implementation. The third stage encompassed the choice of the most relevant assessment and intervention tools for the target population, within each area of expertise. This is described extensively, to allow for replication. The fourth and last stage was to “test drive” the real-life integration and implementation of the whole program at the scale of a single team (8 individuals). For obvious confidentiality reasons, the content data will not be reported extensively here. Implications for wider-scale implementation and tie-back to sports team training are presented.

Living on the edge: How to prepare for it?

“…According to human factors models, a human error is the result of a systemic dynamic of interactions between a real time action and past latent conditions in the larger organization system and a failure on one level can impact events on the other level (Reason, 1990 ). In other words, human behavior and performance training should follow a systemic approach as has been recently described in a training program for elite Special Forces militaries (Pattyn et al, 2022 ).…”

Enhancing operational rations for Special Operations Forces: A qualitative analysis and roadmap for product improvement

“…Based on the observations of the operators and operational rations developed for the Special Forces, characterized by greater nutrient completion (Pattyn et al, 2022), it is suggested that the adequate profile can be achieved with a product containing the following specifications presented in Table 3.…”

Smart is the new strong: An investigation of the contribution of physical, cognitive, anthropometric, and personality variables to success in a Tier 1 special forces qualification course.

“…This might explain why attrition for qualification courses—for which personnel must pass rigorous selections—is still very high: These courses mix training and selection purposes, giving candidates crucial skills and knowledge (e.g., transmission equipment and procedures), while increasing environmental demands and physical stress (e.g., sleep deprivation). In Belgium, attrition for this course lies around 80% (Pattyn et al, 2022). Similarly, older reports describing, for example, the U.S. Navy Basic Underwater Demolition/Sea Air And Land course (McDonald et al, 1990) report an 81% attrition rate.…”

“…Specifically, this study identifies which candidates—after having already been selected for the qualification course—will become successful “operators” after the 6-month course, and further identifies which physical, cognitive, and personality competencies explain this success. This was not a conceptually or hypothesis-driven research, rather an opportunistic investigation: While developing a program for human performance management for operators right from the start of the qualification course, which has been reported elsewhere (Pattyn et al, 2022), the question arose post hoc whether actually comparing the baseline data between the succeeders and the dropouts would identify potential predictors of success. In the process of answering this question, we cast as wide a net as possible, by retrieving the selection data collected prior to their actual acceptance in the qualification course, as well as the operational performance measures—the ones cleared for disclosure—collected by the unit during the training.…”