You Caught Them. Now What? Fitness, Capability and the Guard Select Physical Standard

Picture it. A shoplifter bolts through the doors with an armful of stock. You go after them: across the car park, down the side street, 300 metres flat out. You close the gap. Then they stop, and turn around.

Your lungs are burning. Your legs have gone. You can barely get a sentence out, let alone a clear radio call. And the person in front of you has decided to fight.

You caught them. Now what?

That moment is why the Guard Select Physical Standard exists. Not to sort the fit from the unfit, but to make sure that when you choose to act, you've already done the most important assessment of the night: an honest one of yourself.

Your PCA starts with you

If you've done the Guard Select Academy, you know the Perceived Cumulative Assessment (PCA). It comes from New Zealand Police use-of-force policy (it gives you no police powers), and it isn't only about the other person. Police policy lists your own age, size and physical ability, your training and skill level, and your exhaustion as part of the picture.

"Consider your own abilities versus the potential abilities, size, and strength of the subject." NZ Police, Use of Force Overview

You can't weigh up something you've never measured. That's what the fitness test gives you: real numbers about your own engine, instead of a guess made on adrenaline.

And your PCA keeps changing as you move. The guard who arrives at the end of a 300-metre sprint is not the guard who started it. Breathing, heart rate, judgement and memory have all shifted, so your assessment has to shift with them.

If you go down, you can't help anyone

TENR (Threat, Exposure, Necessity, Response) has one overriding principle: safety is success. Exposure is the potential for harm to people, and that includes you. A guard who becomes the second casualty has turned one problem into two.

That doesn't mean standing back and doing nothing. There is always a place for you to slot in:

• Contain. Keep eyes on, hold a cordon and stop it spreading.
• Call it in. 111 for Police, then your control room or backup.
• Protect people. Move bystanders back and keep exits clear.
• Treat the injured. First aid saves lives while others deal with the threat.
• Observe and record. Descriptions, direction of travel, times and plates.
• Guide responders in. Meet Police and ambulance and point them to the scene.

NZ Police's own TENR guidance asks whether it's appropriate to delay a response, and puts it plainly:

"Remember that caution is not cowardice, and there may be good reasons to cordon and contain the subject while awaiting the arrival of specialists." NZ Police, TENR: Operational threat assessment

Choosing the right role isn't backing down. It's professional judgement.

Age and experience count too

Capability isn't only what your body can do. Age changes the engine, and experience changes the driver.

That's why the run and press-up targets are scaled by age, using the NZ Army's own age groups, so every guard is measured against a fair target for their age. And it's why experience counts for as much as fitness on Guard Select. In one study of police officers under pressure, when a suspect pulled out a phone instead of a gun, rookies fired 61.5% of the time. Experienced, highly trained officers fired only 18.5% of the time.

The experienced guard who reads the room early and talks someone down may never need to run at all. That's capability too. An honest PCA counts both: what your body can do today, and what your experience lets you avoid.

A fitter body buys a clearer head

Here's what the research says about bodies and minds under pressure.

• Fit people react less to stress. Across 33 studies, fitter people had a smaller heart-rate spike under psychological stress, and their heart rate settled faster afterwards (Forcier et al., 2006).
• Stress narrows your senses. Of 157 officers involved in shootings, 84% said sounds faded, 62% saw events in slow motion and 52% lost memory of part of it (Artwohl, 2002).
• Exhaustion blurs your memory. Officers who hit a heavy bag until they were breathless made twice as many recall errors and were half as likely to pick the suspect out of a line-up (Hope et al., 2012).
• Anxiety pushes you to act. Under anxiety, officers in a shoot/don't-shoot test were more inclined to shoot, including at people who were surrendering (Nieuwenhuys et al., 2012).
• The good news: it can be trained. In a small pilot trial of 12 officers, those taught to control their stress response made more correct use-of-force decisions than officers who weren't (Andersen and Gustafsberg, 2016).

Fitness doesn't make you bulletproof. It gives you margin: a calmer heart, a clearer head and enough left in the tank to make a good decision, write an accurate report and get home.

Six ways to think clearly under pressure

1. Breathe out longer than you breathe in. Try cyclic sighing: a slow, deep breath in through the nose, a short second sniff to fill your lungs, then one long, slow breath out through the mouth. In a Stanford trial, five minutes of it a day lifted mood and slowed breathing more than mindfulness meditation. On shift, try two or three before you approach.
2. Set your limits before the shift. Decide now: "If someone runs, I stay on the radio and keep eyes on. I don't leave my post." A decision made calm beats one made on adrenaline.
3. Ask one question before you go. If I get there, can I finish this safely? If the answer is no, contain and call it in.
4. Train tired. After a hard minute of effort, practise a radio call, describe a person or read back a plate. Pressure you've rehearsed is pressure you can handle.
5. Talk first. AWOCA (Ask, Why, Options, Confirm, Act) buys time and settles most situations before anyone has to move fast.
6. Write it down early. Stress and exertion erode memory, so note times, descriptions and what you saw as soon as it's safe.

Measure it. Then own it.

The Guard Select Physical Standard is voluntary. It never decides who gets work, and plenty of excellent guards will never need it. It's four tests you can do in any park: a 2.4 km run, press-ups, a vertical jump and chin-ups. Each tier comes with a free four-week plan you can do without a gym.

• Foundation. A point on every test. You know your baseline and you have a plan. +1 on your Guard Select Score.
• Operational. A strong, balanced result across all four tests. +2 on your score.
• Response Ready. The top tier, witnessed by another Certificate of Approval holder. +3 on your score.

Every tier shows on your profile for clients to see. More importantly, it tells you the truth about your own capability, and knowing the truth is what keeps you, your team and the public safe.

Response Ready isn't about being the fastest person on site. It's about knowing exactly what you can do, and doing the right thing with it.

Take the test and get your free four-week plan.

Look after yourself. If you have a health condition or an injury, or it's been a while since you exercised, check with a health professional before you start. Stop straight away if you feel pain, chest discomfort, dizziness or unusual breathlessness. General information, not medical advice. Guard Select isn't affiliated with or endorsed by NZ Police or the New Zealand Defence Force.

Be the change. Join the movement.

Yours faithfully,
Tarquyn Read
Founder, Guard Select
Guard Select Limited, PSPLA company licence 26-141664

Key sources

• NZ Police (2024): Use of Force Overview
• NZ Police (2024): TENR, Operational threat assessment
• Forcier et al. (2006): fitness and reactivity to stress
• Artwohl (2002): perceptual and memory distortion in officer-involved shootings
• Hope et al. (2012): physical exertion, recall and recognition
• Nieuwenhuys, Savelsbergh and Oudejans (2012): anxiety and shoot/don't-shoot decisions
• Vickers and Lewinski (2012): elite and rookie officers under pressure
• Andersen and Gustafsberg (2016): training police use-of-force decisions
• Balban et al. (2023): brief breathing practices and stress