Team Bliss Army Center for Enhanced Performance to stand up May 1

Photo By Stephen Baack | Janee Zimmerman, a member of the Fort Bliss Army Center for Enhanced Performance team,...... read more read more

Photo By Stephen Baack | Janee Zimmerman, a member of the Fort Bliss Army Center for Enhanced Performance team, sits in the "egg chair" while performance enhancement specialist Joshua Orr monitors her vitals.  see less | View Image Page

UNITED STATES

04.23.2009

Story by Stephen Baack 

Fort Bliss Public Affairs Office

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The Fort Bliss Army Center for Enhanced Performance is scheduled to open May 1 to help Soldiers and families learn to deal with the physiological and psychological stressors associated with training, combat and surviving deployments.

The facility will be the 10th ACEP location within the Army, and is designed to improve Soldiers' and families' quality of life through the training of mental skills based on the tenets of performance psychology, said Sean Lewis, site manager for Team Bliss ACEP.

"Mental skills, when trained and treated like any other training event, have been useful in Army units," said Lewis, whose team is addressing why some Soldiers handle the stress of combat better than other Soldiers.

The program is about looking at the most successful performers — from athletes who medal in the Olympics to CEOs running successful businesses to Soldiers who excel during difficult training cycles — determining what they do mentally that's different from the rest and teach that to everyone, said Dr. Jay Lee, senior performance enhancement specialist.

"Why can't everybody learn how to do this?" asked Lee. "It's not that folks are born that way. It's that they learn and acquire it from their history and backgrounds. Well, let's find out the best of that and give it to everyone."

Lee said the Army has no problem training tactics, techniques and procedures, but the psychological side is not always in step.

"A lot of times what you'll see is that the mental side of performance is almost 'sink or swim,'" said Lee, a former Marine. "By the time you get to the end of the training cycle, the weak have fallen by the wayside, as my old first sergeant used to say. The people who can step up and are mentally tough — obviously that's who you've got there with you, because they've been able to do it."

The program presents five mental skills to trainees: building confidence, goal setting, attention control, energy management and integrating imagery.

Of all five, Lewis said goal setting is one of the most consistently effective, whatever the task is.

"That makes sense," Lewis said. "If you set goals, that provides direction and focus. It keeps you on track."

"Goal setting is the place where you decide what to attend to and develop strategies for regaining that attention, regaining confidence and pulling people back into better ways of thinking," Lee said.

Attention control, or focusing on elements of a task or the day ahead to be as successful as possible, is another particularly important skill, Lee said.

"None of them are really good just by themselves," said Lee. "They work, but they're most effective when they're used together. Once they are dovetailed with each other, they support each other and have certain kinds of relationships you can take advantage of, that's when you really start to develop the whole mental athlete."

Team Bliss ACEP, however, does not merely address the abstract. Soldiers and families who visit ACEP practice the skills they learn real-time. The facility even houses an array of bio-feedback technology to address controlling "arousal level," or how the body responds to stimuli, Lewis said.

"Certain things cause stress in people, and when you're under a certain degree of stress, your heart rate goes up, you sweat and you have certain physiological that are natural," said Lewis. If you almost get into a car accident on the highway, what happens? Your heart rate immediately goes up. We try to teach Soldiers how to control that."

Lewis said Soldiers need a certain arousal level to kick down doors and be prepared to shoot an enemy while clearing a room, but not too much.

"It can't be to the point where you're shaking, you kick down a door and you don't know what to do," said Lewis. "That's that balance and that's what we're doing."

Those training at ACEP can play America's Army, for instance, while hooked up to a computer program that monitors heart and breathing rates, perspiration, body heat and even brainwave activity. Or Soldiers can sit in what Lewis calls the "egg chair," which isolates them from outside sounds and other stimuli while they try regulating their own vitals.

Lee said he is planning to have Soldiers engage in a brief and intense workout just before sitting in the egg chair, and see how fast they can lower their arousal level. He said this could be useful for a sniper who might have to quickly crawl across a danger area, and then just as quickly, set up to hit a target without heavy breathing and a pounding heart ruining the shot.

"These skills are really fundamental ways of using your mind to enhance your performance," said Lee. "That's going to be consistent regardless of what you do in life. It just seems critical for Soldiers to be getting this. It's a no-brainer."

The program may be new to many Soldiers, but Lewis, Lee and the rest of the Team Bliss ACEP staff have support that reaches to the top levels of the Army to make the program grow.

"Mental skills training is extremely important to today's Army," said former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker, who directed that the program go Army-wide in 2004. "We need to inculcate it into our culture; broadly, to the Soldiers and their families ... Peak performance is not a destination; it is a constant in life. We need to get good at it by applying these principles to the whole unit and the Army as a culture. This needs to be part of our everyday lives."

The Team Bliss ACEP is slated to open following a ribbon-cutting ceremony at 9 a.m., May 1 at Bldg. 635 on Holbrook Road.