Key Takeaways
- Physical fitness is an important part of police readiness and is associated with aspects of job performance and injury risk.
- Research does not establish that physically unfit officers are more likely to use lethal force.
- High physiological stress can impair performance and increase decision errors during simulated lethal-force encounters.
- Scenario-based training and techniques that help officers regulate stress may improve performance, although evidence from real-world use-of-force incidents remains limited.
- Police readiness involves more than fitness. Training, communication, tactical skills, decision-making, stress management, departmental policies, and situational factors all matter.
- More research is needed to determine whether improvements in officer fitness or stress regulation actually reduce inappropriate or lethal uses of force in real-world policing.
Physical fitness has long been part of police recruitment and academy training. Officers may be required to run, pursue suspects, control resistant individuals, carry equipment, assist injured people, and make rapid decisions while under intense physical and psychological stress.
This raises an important question: Can an officer’s physical condition affect performance during a use-of-force encounter?
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Research supports physical fitness as an important part of occupational readiness in policing. Studies also suggest that physiological stress can affect decision-making during critical incidents. However, the evidence does not establish a simple causal relationship in which physically unfit police officers are more likely to use lethal force.
Police shootings and other use-of-force incidents are complex events. Physical readiness is one factor worth examining alongside training, stress responses, departmental policies, tactical circumstances, suspect behavior, weapons, communication, and officers’ decision-making.
Why Physical Fitness Matters in Police Work
Police work can alternate between long periods of relatively low physical activity and sudden episodes requiring considerable strength, endurance, coordination, or speed.
An officer may need to pursue someone on foot, climb obstacles, restrain a resistant person, move an injured individual, or maintain control during a prolonged physical struggle. These tasks can become more difficult when performed under stress.
Recent research provides evidence that physical fitness can be related to occupational performance.
A 2025 prospective cohort study followed 240 police recruits after academy graduation. Researchers created a composite measure of physical fitness and examined subsequent job performance and musculoskeletal injuries during the recruits’ first year of service.
Higher fitness scores at graduation predicted better overall job-performance ratings. The researchers also reported associations involving communication, use-of-force judgment, and injury risk (Jia, 2025).
The study supports physical fitness as a component of police readiness, but it should not be interpreted as evidence that fitter officers are necessarily less likely to shoot or kill someone. The researchers evaluated early-career job performance and injury risk, not civilian deaths caused by police (Jia, 2025).
Stress May Affect Use-of-Force Decisions
Physical capability is only one part of performance during a critical incident. Police officers may experience substantial physiological stress when they perceive an immediate threat.
That stress can influence attention, perception, and decision-making.
A study involving 122 active-duty police officers examined performance during a realistic lethal-force scenario. Officers experienced elevated heart rates averaging about 150 beats per minute during the scenario, along with perceptual and cognitive effects such as tunnel vision. The average performance score was 59%, and 27% of participants made at least one lethal-force error. Greater stress reactivity predicted poorer overall performance and increased lethal-force errors (Baldwin et al., 2022).
Training and years of police service had more complicated relationships with performance and lethal-force errors. The findings therefore do not support reducing lethal-force decisions to a single characteristic such as fitness, experience, or training (Baldwin et al., 2022).
Can Officers Be Trained to Perform Better Under Stress?
There is evidence that physiological regulation training may improve decision-making during simulated critical incidents.
In a longitudinal study involving 57 active-duty frontline police officers, researchers tested an intervention incorporating heart-rate-variability biofeedback into stressful scenario-based training requiring lethal-force decisions (Andersen et al., 2018).
The researchers reported a 67% reduction in lethal-force errors immediately following the intervention. Improvements were maintained at the six- and 12-month assessments, while performance gains began to diminish by the 18-month assessment. The researchers concluded that the pattern supported periodic retraining (Andersen et al., 2018).
The results are promising, but the study had important limitations. It involved only 57 officers, used simulated scenarios, and did not include a control group. It therefore should not be treated as proof that physiological regulation training reduces civilian deaths or inappropriate shootings in real-world policing (Andersen et al., 2018).
Nevertheless, the study suggests that physiological responses to stress can potentially be modified and that this type of training may improve performance during high-pressure decision-making.
What Police Academies Actually Teach
Police academy requirements differ considerably across the United States, making broad claims about a single national police-training standard misleading.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2022 Census of Law Enforcement Training Academies provides a clearer picture. State and local law enforcement academies required an average of 806 hours of basic training in 2022 (Buehler, 2024).
Training covers numerous aspects of police work, including firearms skills, defensive tactics, health and fitness, legal education, communication, and scenario-based exercises.
More detailed Bureau of Justice Statistics data show that academies provided an average of:
- 73 hours of firearms-skills training
- 64 hours of defensive-tactics training
- 56 hours of health and fitness training
Scenario-based instruction was also widespread. About 97% of recruits were trained in role-play scenarios involving arrest-control tactics, verbal tactics, and responses to people with mental illness or behavioral health issues. In addition, 68% of state and local training academies were responsible for training 75% of recruits using use-of-force training simulators (Buehler, 2025).
These figures provide a more complete picture than simply comparing firearms instruction with one category of de-escalation or physical training.
Fitness Standards Do Not Settle the Use-of-Force Question
It may seem intuitive that a physically stronger or fitter officer would have more options for controlling a resistant person without using a weapon. But intuition should not be mistaken for evidence.
Use-of-force encounters can involve many variables, including whether a weapon is present, the degree of resistance, the number of officers involved, the distance between an officer and suspect, environmental conditions, departmental policy, available equipment, communication, tactical decisions, and the officer’s perception of an immediate threat.
Physical restraint is also itself a form of force and carries risks for both officers and civilians.
For these reasons, it is not scientifically justified to look at the number of people killed by police and conclude that poor officer fitness is a simple explanation for those deaths.
The available evidence supports a narrower conclusion: physical fitness contributes to occupational readiness, while physiological stress and the ability to manage it can influence performance during high-pressure encounters (Jia, 2025; Baldwin et al., 2022).
Whether improvements in police fitness programs would independently reduce lethal-force incidents remains a separate question requiring direct research.
Maintaining Fitness After the Academy
Fitness assessments during recruitment or academy training establish an officer’s physical capabilities at a particular point in time. They do not guarantee those capabilities will be maintained throughout a career.
Police work itself can create health challenges. Shift work, disrupted sleep, psychological stress, sedentary periods, irregular eating patterns, injuries, and long working hours can make maintaining physical and mental health difficult.
Officer health and wellness have increasingly become organizational concerns. Bureau of Justice Statistics data show that 60% of general-purpose state and local law enforcement agencies offered at least one formal health or wellness program in 2022. Access varied substantially according to agency size (Goodison, 2026).
Fitness programs therefore should not be viewed solely as mechanisms for excluding recruits who fail to meet a physical threshold. Maintaining officer health throughout a career may also involve physical conditioning, injury prevention, psychological support, recovery, and continuing occupational training.
What Could Improve Police Readiness?
Current evidence supports a broader approach than simply making recruitment fitness tests harder.
Physical conditioning is important because officers must be capable of performing demanding occupational tasks. But preparation for critical incidents also involves decision-making, communication, defensive tactics, scenario-based training, stress regulation, and recognizing when force is or is not necessary.
The research on physiological stress is particularly relevant. Officers may need to make consequential decisions within seconds while experiencing substantial physiological arousal and changes in perception and cognition (Baldwin et al., 2022).
There is also preliminary evidence that training officers to regulate their physiological responses during realistic scenarios can reduce lethal-force decision errors. However, the evidence comes from relatively small simulated studies and should not be assumed to translate directly into fewer real-world shootings (Andersen et al., 2018).
Researchers should continue examining whether improvements measured during training translate into fewer injuries, inappropriate uses of force, or lethal-force incidents in actual police encounters.
Final Thoughts
Physical fitness matters in policing, but the relationship between fitness and use of force is more complicated than assuming that an unfit officer is more likely to reach for a firearm.
Recent evidence indicates that physical fitness at police academy graduation can predict aspects of subsequent job performance and injury risk (Jia, 2025). Other research shows that physiological stress can affect performance and lethal-force decision-making during realistic simulations (Baldwin et al., 2022), while physiological regulation training may help officers reduce decision errors under simulated high-stress conditions (Andersen et al., 2018).
None of this establishes poor physical fitness as an independent cause of police shootings.
A more evidence-based approach is to treat physical fitness as one component of broader police readiness alongside tactical skills, communication, decision-making, stress regulation, mental health, continuing training, and departmental policies.
Improving these areas may help officers perform more effectively and safely. Determining which interventions actually reduce inappropriate or lethal uses of force, however, requires direct evidence rather than assumptions based on physical fitness alone.
References
Andersen, J. P., Di Nota, P. M., Beston, B., Boychuk, E. C., Gustafsberg, H., Poplawski, S., & Arpaia, J. (2018). Reducing lethal force errors by modulating police physiology. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 60(10), 867–874. https://doi.org/10.1097/JOM.0000000000001401
Baldwin, S., Bennell, C., Blaskovits, B., Brown, A., Jenkins, B., Lawrence, C., McGale, H., Semple, T., & Andersen, J. P. (2022). A reasonable officer: Examining the relationships among stress, training, and performance in a highly realistic lethal force scenario. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 759132. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.759132
Buehler, E. D. (2024). State and local law enforcement training academies and recruits, 2022: Statistical tables. Bureau of Justice Statistics. Bureau of Justice Statistics report
Buehler, E. D. (2025). State and local law enforcement training academies’ training topics and instructors, 2022: Statistical tables. Bureau of Justice Statistics, Office of Justice Programs. NCJ 310041.
Goodison, S. E. (2026). Health and wellness resources available to law enforcement, 2022. Bureau of Justice Statistics, Office of Justice Programs. NCJ 310553.
Jia, D. (2025). Graduation-stage physical fitness as a predictor of operational performance and injury risk among police recruits: A prospective cohort study. BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine, 11(4), e002871. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjsem-2025-002871
