While much of the public focus of the US Army’s Comprehensive Soldier Fitness has been on spiritual fitness, an artillery unit at Joint Base Lewis-McChord was able to see a different angle to the Army’s effort to “boost performance” of Soldiers and their families:

CSF-PREP’s mission is twofold: helping Soldiers perform with greater ease and less stress, and enabling them to prevail in the face of adversity. The program focuses on making Soldiers and their families stronger and more resilient in all that they do.

Where performance is concerned, the program introduces methods suited for effectively promoting teamwork, managing physical energy, relaxing one’s mind and body, realistically setting and achieving goals, using visual imagery to mentally rehearse tasks and directing attention at times when functioning at one’s best is paramount.

The unit hosted “performance enhancement specialists” who taught them how to breathe deeply and then followed them around while observing them prep their artillery.

CSF, which continues to have its critics, remains a fairly comprehensive effort on the part of the US Army to improve the resiliency of its force.