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My name is Dan Hawkins from the Air Education and Training Command Public Affairs Office and your host for this professional development podcast, dedicated to bringing total force big A Airmen insight, tips, tricks and lessons learned from the recruiting, training and education worlds. Episode number 20 of the pod and it's a pretty good one. Major Lyndsey Torres from the Special Warfare Training Wing and she is their Lead Performance Dietitian, sits down with us and talks all about how the Wing is using a holistic approach to nutrition, education and training that will ultimately help the readiness of the Air Force's future Special Warfare Air Men. Enabling them to perform better across the lengths of their careers. For those of you that might not know the Special Warfare Training Wing, which was stood up in the fall of 2018 at Joint Base San Antonio Lackland, it's a pretty big enterprise. It spans 16 programs across 10 states. Major Torres goes in depth on how nutrition should be thought of just like you would a fuel specialist in the terms of just like our aircraft need fuel to fly, our Special Warfare Air Men in training need the right levels of nutrition to perform at optimum levels across the entire career field. Major Torres also speaks to how the nutrition plan has evolved over time at the Wing as well as what it actually looks like in terms of the daily execution to include hydration so they can build those healthy habits that will stay with the trainees long after they leave the formal training pipeline. It's really interesting when she discusses the need to ensure the trainees learn how to make the default choices they have to make in the early weeks of training stand up as their performance choice, and performance choice is in quotes here, out in the tactical operating environment when they most likely have to work a little bit harder to make those nutritional choices that are somewhat presented in front of them while their in the first parts of training. So it's a lot of fun, Major Torres very, very bona fide in her field as she'll detail in the very opening but she's had some interesting academic experiences as well as an internship with the NFL's Houston Texans talking about different way of optimizing performance so it's really awesome to see the level of professionalism and expertise that the Special Warfare Training Wing has from Major Torres and her entire Dietitian team. So let's get to it, away we go with Fueling the Human Weapon System Through Nutrition Episode number 20 of Developing Mac21 Air Men, starts right now! So Major Torres tell us a little bit about yourself. - Hello! I am Major Torres. I am currently serving as the Special Warfare Human Performance Operation Officer. And I'm also the Lead Performance Dietitian for Special Warfare Training Wing. I have been in Air Force just going on 10 years and I was previously a Military brat, my dad was in the Air Force so I ended up in the Air Force as well. I'm actually a Registered Dietitian for the Air Force so I get questions a lot on how I got to be a Dietitian or if the Air Force trained me. And so I was actually a Direct Accession to become a Dietitian but I did my Dietetic Internship at the United States Military Consortium on Dietetics and then after that I've kind of had a non-traditional career path. I've been a versees at Ramstein as a Nutrition Program Manager, Flight Commander downrange at Bagram, I've done an AFIT fellowship, I've been a Baylor Professor in the Army Graduate Program for Nutrition and then I was a Flight Commander at Wilford Hall that led me into working with Special Warfare and I'm also the Lead Military Chair for the DOD Performance Nutrition Working Group. - Wow! That's pretty cool. It's not what you would normally hear here on our podcast but I saw on your notes too that you actually worked with the Houston Texans. What did you do with the NFL team? That's pretty cool! - I did! I have two Masters Degrees and each one is thesis generating so one of my Masters Thesis was focused on cardiovascular biometrics in the Houston Texans football team and also looking at Vitamin D. So often we just expect everybody's CDC guidelines to help with cardiovascular biometrics so in football players they get more than the prescribed 30 minute a day but we wanted to look at do athletes need more Vitamin D? Is there a cardiovascular risk associated if they have low Vitamin D? - Wow! That's really, really interesting. Now we're gonna talk more about nutrition. But a lot of our listeners might not know Special Warfare Training Wing just stood up last year but can you give us maybe just a little bit of a thumbnail sketch of what Special Warfare Training Wing looks like? - So the Special Warfare Training Wing, before I go into what it looks like, it supports about 700 operators and support staff and about 1.5 thousand trainees. There are 16 programs across 10 states throughout 86 facilities and then within the Wing there are two different groups. You have Special Warfare Training and then you have Special Warfare Human Performance Support Group. And so the Special Warfare Human Performance Support Group is one of the first in the Air Force, it also has the Special Warfare Operational Medicines Squadron. So you have a Squadron dedicated to look at Medical kind of the typical clinical stuff you think about but more in a field setting and then the Human Perforce Squadron is the first Squadron in the Air Force and we look at a lot of Human Performance modalities that will help optimized training and also change the way that we train operators in general but also befality and longevity as we move throughout their careers. - And so I first met you this past fall at the Air Force Association Convention in Washington DC and I was just really fascinated with all of the things that the Wing is doing from a Human Performance prospective, too. To better train and equip our Special Warfare Air Men as they go through their initial training but where did this focus on treating Special Warfare Air Men and I'll use it in a general sense, athletes, come from? What was the genesis and where do you see it evolving towards? - So originally Human Performance started with POTF model in SOCOM about 7-8 years ago and then that is a contract model under Preservation of the Forces and then the Human Performance model within Special Warfare is some active duty and some GS civilian experts in Human Performance disciplines. And one of the ways that we started looking at, and I globally say we as Human Performance Professionals in DOD, but we looked at what is the Pro Teams do a football players, the NCAA in 2014 they deregulated they a lot of restrictions on what you could give collegiate athletes and so in the last 4-5 years there's a lot of science and research that's come out on how to optimize different sports and we all know some of the sports that make the most money are football. And so there's a lot of research that has come out and just kind of moving the career fields along in how to optimize and return players and so we started with that model and also moving it more towards a holistic human weapon system. And so when we're downrange we're not gonna have a timeout or sideline which your sports beverage is already lined out there for you by your athletic trainer or your dietitian. So we have to kind of look at that model to now make a Military Tactical Model and make sure we train and equip them that meets the needs of where they're gonna be. So it helps start the framework but it we don't want to train them with a smoothie in training and them to expect the smoothie downrange when that's not a viable MRE option. - And you talked about that Human Weapon System, so you think of nutrition in a way that's kind of applicable to how you need to fuel an airplane, you gotta do the same thing with our Special Warfare Air Men. - Exactly! So when we think about them as a Human Weapon System and we think back more to an aircraft model, you have maintenance you have fuel specialist so I say that I'm a Special Warfare Specialist and that my job is to optimize the fuel that they put in their body under the different conditions, to look at cognitive or physical conditions. And we think about that model, we don't just send an aircraft downrange or we don't just at the beginning provide maintenance on the aircraft and then expect the pilot to then be responsible for everything else. And so what we our traditional model has expected the pilot to be responsible for all the things the aircraft has done and that just doesn't isn't the best way to improve battlefield lethality and also provide the most longevity for our operators. Some of them will get hurt due to the conditions that they work and then they may not be able to serve longer or they get broken faster or we can't contribute them back to their families and so looking a lot at also performance but also longevity of them. - I also found it really interesting that you're looking at that fueling of those Human Weapon Systems not for one or two specific events but your looking at this really from a holistic approach across a wider spectrum than just one or two things. - Yes! Exactly. So when we think back to the sports model, a lot of sports, depending on how successful they are, so for instance the World Series, even then when the World Series is done then the baseball team kind of gets a break. In a lot of our model they don't necessarily get a break, especially in our Pipeline when you just look at training, some of them are 2-2 and half years with no breaks. And so we want to make sure we look and optimize that holistically. But a lot of times in our traditional sports model we look at pre, during and post event and we don't look more globally or kind of up and out. If we provide for instance in football or baseball, we want to make sure that we diminish the short term recovery, so we want to optimize recovery vs is we're trying to learn to chronically adapt then maybe wouldn't provide those acute strategies because over time we need to make them stronger over a longer period of time vs sports might just look at you know a 6 week cycle vs I need them to be good for 20 years. And so looking more from a chronic longterm adaptation vs just year to year and pro athletes don't necessarily work for 20 years. We're having higher demands than a professional athlete and expecting a longer career out of them. - So when the Wing focuses on nutrition as an aspect of Human Performance, what are the things that really means or what does that entail? I mean that seems like there's a lot that goes into it, that's not just you know as simple as oh we're just gonna put a bunch of broccoli in the DFAC. - Right. And one of the big things with nutrition, and this applies to everybody, is education doesn't change behavior or knowledge doesn't change behavior. Most people know that we should eat broccoli or fruits and vegetables are healthy but the average American is not consuming the amount of fruits and vegetables we would like them to consume. And so for our model, we really look at how do we change behavior first, a lot of behavior strategy models look at the environment and so if we teach them or I tell them I need you to do certain things and then I don't provide it in the environment how would I expect them to execute it. So one of the easiest ways to get a cohort or in my case Special Warfare Trainee or Candidates to do what I need them to do, is to make sure the default environment is the only choice I want them to have. So one of the things we did up front is in the Preparatory Course the first five and a half weeks I lose them the most on the weekends. And so if you think about your typical training environments or initial Military training if we controlled Monday through Friday all three meals but then Saturday Sunday they could go eat, and I won't mention any brand names, but popular fast food or their favorite, here in San Antonio they go to the River Walk and they have one of their favorite restaurants and all those things we did for five days are just lost. Or the typical cheat day become whole cheat weekend and all the strategies we got Monday through Friday are now lost every single week. And so the weekends they actually eat all three meals in our facility for five and a half weeks. So instead of this PowerPoint that tells them how beneficial it is to eat with performance foods in mind, is that that first weekend, when they get base liberties around week five week six they then go back to their normal dietary eating patterns and then they have gastrointestinal distress or some feedback mechanism physiologically that now reinforces this is why performance nutrition works. And usually what happens is that Monday back at training, when they have a pass test or a performance event they can compare it to the first five weeks and now they can see what that now does to their performance. And so the way I train teach them is more like I don't use the Human Weapon System to train them because they're not yet a Human Weapon System but I use the High Performance Vehicle analogy so most people know if you have a High Performance Vehicle I try not to use brand name but we're like 600hp if I put regular low octane gas in what would happen? And most of the students will say "You would never do that" you would never put low octane fuel in a performance vehicle because your not optimizing performance. But they now starting to see that when they are choosing to put low octane fuel in their vehicle then they're choosing not to optimize performance. Up until we get them they may have out performed all their peers at Basic Military Training or in the town they came from but then they get a cohort of very physically active it's hard to get them to understand why they can no longer eat McDonald's when they're still out performing a lot of their peers. Cause eventually our system is gonna get 'em and I like them to get that up front so then we don't have to worry about them falling out later for nutrition issues. - It's really interesting like so just in a general sense you know what is the results look like on that first Monday after they've kinda had the freedom to choose? Do a lot of them kinda learn the lesson in essence the hard way? - They do! - Which is sometimes the best way to learn, right? - So informal feedback I received is we have a gender neutral facility, the bathroom line is quite long on Saturday evenings, one thing I will note is that I never teach them to compromise breakfast, they always have to eat, and then dinner Sunday night they have to eat at a team. But the bathroom is the biggest thing. They joke when they come back, it's so successful on those tests on Monday that the cadre had ask that we shut down all of the weekends so then their scores would be better. Which was, it's a unique thing to see but part of it is to also if you operationalize it sometimes you might come off a FOB and you came off a mission and you finally get to eat then you have to go right back out. Part of it is, they need to understand what happens to them physiologically or their physiological limitations when they poorly fuel or in a deployment scenario operational scenario when you might only get MRE's you didn't get a lot of fruits and vegetables or you might have gotten a Burger King on a FOB or a burger place and now they have to go perform on that. So part of it too, I do like them to understand their physiological limitations but most of them are like "We love it! It's really exciting" but they now see, directly see their performance is hindered by nutrition and it's harder to get that kinda return on investment in the scenario. But Prep is our perfect kinda lab in order to give them that up front so they can make decisions as they go through. - Yeah so it's really interesting, you know as you look at this from a holistic perspective of like your sometimes having to undo probably a lot of really bad habits and granted you have that five week or so lock down period but how hard is that to really do? I mean is that a, so is nutrition a daily aspect in terms of like, is there lessons or is it you know just periodically and your leaving it to them to also make their own good decisions? Like what does that look like in the training environment? - So I get them week zero. About every week they have at least 30 minute to an hour of nutrition, where we're a little different at Prep is your typical academic model is a knowledge base. You learn about a carbohydrate and your tested on a carbohydrate. Now whether or not you do what we would like you to do that's not part of the test but what we do at Prep is they learn how to put food on their plate and then I go to the dining facility with them and they get feedback. And so the way I modeled that when they learn to talk on the radios for TACP their not teaching them how to actually put the radio together and how it works, they just teach the ROE's of how to speak on a radio. So I did the same thing with nutrition and I was finding got really excited to teach 'em all the science week zero and they just didn't know what they didn't know. And so know I just, this is what you do and this is what you do. Like you need X amount of carbs on your plate, this is the type of food you put on your plate. And around week three they actually get the science and then they start to figure out "Oh this is why it works" but by then they kinda already understand their limitations. I do, we have people from low socioeconomic statuses, we might have people that have one meal a day or food was really restrictive in their household they're not allowed to not eat all their food so the average toddler or adult we need six to 10 exposures of a new food. So if they haven't eat fruits or vegetables their whole life. Then you bring up a good point. Then I actually work with those students more individually and we talk about more of having a full tank of low octane fuel vs a half a tank of premium like we'll have to now work them over the next five to six weeks and we will train their gut. So their gut is very adaptable but for them we would do more, when I would grade their plate we would talk about what would be the easiest options on their stomach to move forward and they get more individualized. But we have that happen every class. So it's a really good point to think some people have fueled like an athlete. A lot of the students we get didn't play sports they have a passion to serve their country and like to be physically fit but they don't necessarily have that sports frame work. - So with nutrition theirs so much science that goes into it. How did you guys really work through building what the Special Warfare Training Wing model for nutrition and how it impacts the Human Performance System looks like. - So we have position statements that really drive, there's a lot of literature, medical literature, peer review literature, that looks at like we know how many carbohydrates you need we know how your gut responds. Part of it I actually realized is going back to basics. So nutrition is unique in that everybody eats and everybody thinks nutrition is their hobby. So people will say "I'm on Keto! And Keto works for me" and so I think my biggest thing we had to do is go more basic than I thought we would have to in order to start fresh so that when they get to their three level or their apprentice school houses with the dietician we have there, then they could actually individualize it and be more aggressive but if they haven't done performance fueling before they got to us, then we have to train their gut to do that. But I'm also de-training a lot of bad press. And part of that is they think you know Tom Brady's diet is more important so use a lot of reverse social math in that will use this is what the Olympic Training committee uses and try to get them to understand that this is not necessarily just Special Warfare but the human body as a vehicle, or Weapons System or athletic but a lot of it is going all the way back to basics because they get there information from non-reputable sources and it's hard for a 17-18 year old to understand why carbohydrates are really really beneficial when all they've ever heard is carbohydrates are bad. From people they respect. - And we've talked a lot about the like the food aspect of nutrition but I think the hydration aspect of nutrition is probably also another really big factor, I would guess, in Special Warfare Training. - So hydration is one of the things I focus on more in the environment inadvertently so kinda like nutritions unconventional Warfare. The new students at the Preparatory program actually have to pee in a cup every morning for eight weeks and they actually get a urine specific gravity reading every day for eight weeks. And so I don't necessarily need the data for everyday for eight weeks on whether they're hydrated or not but that if you think about creating new behavior changes three weeks 21 to 28 days. I get them to do a specific behavior for eight weeks the system is going to provide feedback so most of us have realized oh I didn't sleep enough that's why I'm dragging in this meeting I'm not performing. So all the things we've gotten over you know 10-20 years I'm trying to provide that vehicle in eight weeks. So they do hydration testing every day in Prep and then in the field we actually do hydration testing in a lot of our courses to provide also a risk mechanism for the operational medical squadron but also the cadre, these are gonna be your higher at risk. But hydration usually in south Texas is gonna take 'em out before low performance fueling and so they usually because of all the testing we have very little hydration issues and a lot of our hydration issues might be those that didn't come through Prep or they just had a bad day they maybe were starting to feel sick they were dehydrated or they vomited and then that's why we lost them, not because they didn't know how to hydrate. Which is a really beneficial thing because a lot of training programs just lose them because they're not hydrating at all. Vs in our programs the average athlete can lose half a liter to 2.2 liters per hour and if we're training them for 6-8 hours a day your looking at several pounds, you know it can get scary pretty quickly. But the students are very well versed in that. So it gets exciting when they train those that haven't been to prep they will start to train each other. - So when you look at this from you have them in this environment here in San Antonio in the Special Warfare Training Wing is there or are there plans to have like some kind of fall on mechanisms. I know you kinda touched on dieticians further on down the pipeline but what does that look like as students move up and out? - So for San Antonio is our Courses of Initial Entry and some of the specialty schools and so we actually have two dieticians on the books here. And then we have three diet technicians. And so our diet technicians do a lot of the hydration testing in the field and then at the school houses, so we have a TACP school house that happens to be in San Antonio and then we have our PJ school house in Kirkland and then we have our Combat Control School house in Polk and Special Reconnaissance and they each have their own dieticians and so they actually get to get a little more advanced. So I focus, its basic in terms of hydration. They know whether they're hydrated or not but as they move out to the school houses, if they start to still have trouble, they might do sweat content testing to see how much sodium are you losing per hour, how much potassium are you losing per hour. If the student still struggles once they get out of the course of initial entry then we can actually individually tailor a lot of that as needed. So a large part, portion of the population will respond to the initial things we do and they can also do sweat rate testing, so the volume, we can look at content and then whether or not they're hydrated after about 6-8 hours of sleep. So three modalities of tests and then as they go get a little further out from the point of origin then they can actually get more advanced individualized nutrition. - At the end of the day, I know we talked a little bit before we started recording, bout statistic and not really necessarily having certain measures in place but the nutrition aspect of Human Performance is pretty plain for you to see the value in it and what it's done for the training program as a whole. - Yes. I like a lot of times the feedback from the students and I heard student recently so we do a gradual tiered approach to nutrition and so I mention how nice it is to kinda restrict them up front but we also that's not a real world scenario and so we start to take off the bumpers, you know in bowling or the training wheels, and then I get to another facility that has those right options and then they have to make those decisions and so in one of course I actually like that we use this dining facility because it looks very similar to dining facilities downrange. It has international options it has weird flavors, it has fried foods and so if they can't navigate that on their own then I haven't set them up for success. And so I don't want to always provide vs a sports model we might only provide the performance option all the time, we don't have the luxury and the mission sets that they do to always provide them a performance option. And so I need them to learn to navigate what is the best of the options that they have. And so one of the students used to complain about how there's only healthy stuff at the Prep facility and then they started to miss it and they started to miss the team component because they all have to eat together they have to sit together vs as they go we treat them like adults. So if they don't want to eat breakfast somebody's not holding their hand that's a decision they made. In the pipeline it's an assessment technique as well but we're not here to restrict them. We treat them very much like adults and if they don't wanna eat they don't wanna eat. But as they go out then we kinda take the training wheels off and access how they're doing and then provide feedback as they need it. - And really as a dietician, I'll give you a chance to put your general dietician hat on, really nutrition in general not just for Special Warfare Air Men but it has broad applicability to all Air Men in the Military if your not eating right and your not making the right healthy nutrition choices it can have really bad impacts on you. - It can. I think we under value so often we look, I'm sure google has analytics on this, how many people wanna get a supplement or drink that helps with cognition I know a lot of drinks are coming out oh this helps with your brain, so does sleep and so does drinking water or proper nutrition. I think we've under valued the basics of the human physiology so just sleep, good nutrition and adequate hydration are the biggest performance edges and also I'd argue occupational edges. So whether you sit at a desk and your customer service at a retail store or an ISR and you have a high value target, I think we under value that. For our specific facility that's for Prep, SW Prep only. It's not rocket science, we have Greek yogurt, we have avocados, they don't get an omelet bar they don't get sodas, they don't get a lot of these things that have kinda made their way into the infrastructure of Military eating that somehow a corn dog is linked to moral and a lot of the feedback I'll get from commanders is "If you take away our fried food "our members will be so upset." And it should be why are we not providing performance options. Performance options are just an extra vegetable on the line set up the infrastructure. Once they get used to it and if we did it at initial Military training, we could actually change behaviors. 70% of the Military and civilians are overweight or obese. And we have large chunks of training in which we know behavior modeling we can highly influence that and drive other things. And I think we could optimize that if we looked at it a little bit better or moved it a little bit. So while our dining facilities I love it, obviously I'm biased to building it, its not just unique to them, anybody could eat there. In fact the Army ate there a couple weeks ago and they loved it so much they wanna have them eat, they're like they don't get any prepackaged bars prepackaged tarts which actually drives costs down and allows us to buy things like an avocado that we know is really good for cognition it helps with satiation its a healthy fat. Just those little things. How many times have you been to a Military dining facility and seen an avocado? - Probably never! - Probably never. - We get berries and so a lot of these things we know are really good for cognition and performance are also good for just keeping your waist line down and just how you feel and longevity in life and also TriCare dollars, don't you wanna decrease defense costs by how much we pay out when people leave the Military so its just kind of a 360 view to help everybody out. - Well we really appreciate you taking time out this is just really interesting stuff and we appreciate your perspective. - Thank you for having me. (swoosh) - Just a ton of great information there from Major Torres and just listening to her talk about the benefits of a solid diet makes you wanna eat better so our Special Warfare Air Men are in great hands in terms of nutrition. If you're interested in more information about nutrition from a DOD approved source Major Torres also told me that you can find a lot of great info at humanperformanceresourcecenter.org again that's humanperformanceresourcecenter.org all one word. And a ton of great info there, so a resource that she said she personally uses at work even. So a big thank you to Major Torres for taking time out of her schedule to sit down and talk with us about how the Special Warfare Training Wing is fueling the Human Weapon System through nutrition. As a reminder you can follow air education and training command via social media on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as well as on the web at www.aetc.af.mil and a reminder you can also check out the AETC Command Team they are also on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram so check out the latest from General Webb and Chief Gudgle as they talk about what recruiting, training and educating exceptional Air Men looks like here in the 1st Command. Thanks for checking out the podcast as we dive into the world of recruiting, training and education. For our entire AETC Public Affairs team I'm Dan Hawkins, so long we'll talk to you next time on Developing Mac21 Air Men.