Regular cardio can help first responders build emotional resilience, lower anxiety, and respond more effectively under stress. Research links higher cardiorespiratory fitness with better emotional regulation, while broader evidence connects aerobic exercise with improved sleep, mood, cognitive function, and stress recovery. For police and corrections officers, firefighters, EMS personnel, and dispatchers, consistent aerobic activity can support both physical readiness and mental performance on demanding calls.
As a public safety professional, you’re always “on deck” to perform under pressure. Your job requires physical strength and stamina, but it also demands something harder to measure: the ability to remain composed, make sound decisions, and recover quickly after repeated exposure to stress.
That kind of resilience is often seen as something people either have or don’t. But resilience is not necessarily something you’re born with. It can be developed, practiced, and strengthened. And research suggests one of the best ways to do that may already be part of your fitness routine.
The Cumulative Weight of the Job
Do you seriously need yet another article telling you your job is stressful? Nope. Am I going to take a moment here to point out the obvious? Yep.
Because your job is stressful. And the effects of that stress may show up as disrupted sleep, burnout, anxiety, PTSD, substance misuse, relationship problems, or even thoughts of suicide. Sometimes the impact comes after a single traumatic event. More often, it accumulates call by call and shift by shift.
As you probably know, peer support, counseling, wellness programs, and other mental health resources are an important part of dealing with the stress and anxiety of the job. But you also need practical strategies you can use every day to make you more resilient well before the next critical incident occurs.
Here’s the good news (and, quite possibly, the bad news … depending on your perspective). One of those strategies may be regular aerobic exercise.
Fitness and Emotional Resilience
In an April 2026 study published in Acta Psychologica, researchers examined the connections between cardiorespiratory fitness and anxiety, anger, and emotional resilience.
The study included 40 healthy young adults. Researchers first assessed the participants’ general levels of anxiety and anger as well as their cardiorespiratory fitness. Later, participants were shown a series of images intended to trigger emotional stress. The subjects’ anxiety and anger were measured both before and after the image exposure to see who was better at shouldering the emotional load.
The researchers found participants with higher aerobic fitness generally reported lower anxiety. They also appeared better able to withstand the emotional stress created by the test images.
And the results weren’t even close. Participants with below-average cardiorespiratory fitness had a 775% greater risk of moving from an intermediate anxiety classification to a high-anxiety classification than participants with above-average fitness. In other words, for the group with low cardiovascular fitness, their chances of reaching the high-anxiety category were about 8.75 times as high as those in the high-fitness group.
And that’s not all. Higher cardiorespiratory fitness was also associated with lower anger and better emotional resilience during the stressful image task. The researchers concluded aerobic fitness was associated with significantly lower anxiety and a greater ability to manage emotionally stressful situations.
Research Implications
Those findings should get the attention of anyone in public safety — but especially those concerned with wellness and readiness. They also require a little bit of perspective.
First of all, this was a relatively small study, and the participants were healthy young adults rather than police and corrections officers, firefighters, dispatchers, or EMS personnel. Though the researchers saw an association between fitness and resilience, they didn’t prove cardio alone caused the differences.
Another thing the study didn’t do is identify a specific amount of exercise at which a person suddenly becomes more resilient. There was no finding that 89 minutes on the treadmill or stair climber does nothing, but 90 minutes magically transforms your ability to handle stress.
Instead, the results seem to indicate people with better aerobic fitness experience less anxiety and respond more effectively to emotional stress.
Cardio Is Mental — But in a Good Way
The Acta Psychologica study fits with a much larger body of evidence connecting physical activity with better mental health. Here are just a few of the proven benefits:
- Anxiety and depression: Numerous systematic reviews and meta-analyses have found regular aerobic exercise produces small to moderate reductions in anxiety symptoms and can be as effective as other first-line treatments for mild to moderate depression in some populations.
- Stress resilience: Research in both humans and animals supports the “cross-stressor adaptation” hypothesis — the idea that repeated exposure to the controlled stress of exercise trains the body’s stress-response systems to react less intensely and recover more quickly when confronted with psychological stress.
- Executive function: Regular aerobic exercise has been associated with improvements in attention, working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control — all functions governed largely by the prefrontal cortex and all critical during emergency decision-making.
- Sleep: Exercise consistently improves sleep quality and can reduce the time it takes to fall asleep. Better sleep, in turn, is strongly linked to improved mood, emotional regulation, and resilience.
- Emotional regulation: People who exercise regularly tend to report lower perceived stress and greater confidence in their ability to cope with adversity, even after accounting for other health factors.
What Cardio Does for the Mind
Discussions on fitness and public safety tend to focus on what exercise enables the body to do: climb stairs, carry equipment, control a resistant subject, drag a hose, lift a patient, or work through a long incident without becoming exhausted. Those benefits are important, but aerobic training may also change how your body and brain respond to stress.
When you exercise, your heart rate goes up, your breathing becomes heavier, and your body deals with increased physical stress. Over time, repeated exposure to that stress helps your body’s various systems become better at managing stressors and returning to baseline.
To put it more simply, cardio gives your body regular practice being uncomfortable without actually being in danger.
That doesn’t mean a treadmill or elliptical workout is equivalent to a shooting, a structure fire, an inmate assault, or an unsuccessful pediatric resuscitation. It does, however, give you opportunities to practice maintaining effort and control while your heart is pounding and your brain is trying to convince you to stop.
Aerobic exercise can also support better sleep, improve mood, and reduce anxiety. Each of those effects can influence how a person handles stress on and off duty.
This is not an argument that first responders can run their way out of trauma, depression, or PTSD. Exercise is not a replacement for professional mental health care, peer support, or appropriate treatment.
It is one more protective tool. Unlike many interventions, it can be used regularly and proactively, long before someone reaches a crisis point.
A Personal Example
If you’re out of shape, exercising at 85% of your max heart rate can feel like you’re dying. For an experienced endurance athlete, that same effort feels routine. The difference isn’t the heart rate — it’s that the athlete’s brain has learned, through repetition, that heavy breathing and a pounding heart are something to embrace and not something to avoid.
Anyone who’s run a marathon knows it’s less a footrace than a 26.2-mile negotiation between brain and body. Your body keeps begging you to stop. Your brain’s job is to explain to your body that you’re going to keep going.
I was privileged to run the Boston Marathon again this past April. According to my Garmin, I spent 76.6% of the race in Zone 5 (anaerobic), with my heart rate over 160 bpm, and another 22.6% in Zone 4 (threshold), between 147 and 159 bpm. Zones 1 through 3 accounted for just 0.8% of the marathon. In other words, I spent almost the entire race well past the point where an untrained body would’ve noped out and shut down.
Without years of training, there’s absolutely no way I could’ve held that pace for just under 3 hours and 18 minutes. But it was my 46th marathon — and my fourth time running Boston — so it didn’t feel out of the ordinary. That doesn’t mean it was easy. It was genuinely hard. Training doesn’t mean you’re exempt from fatigue and discomfort. Instead, training gives you the resilience to embrace the suck with a smile on your face.
Marathon training teaches a lesson that outlasts any single race: Feeling uncomfortable isn’t the same as being in danger. That’s a lesson first responders can carry with them long after the workout ends. As football legend Tom Brady put it, “It is okay to feel uncomfortable. Unless we stress our minds, they don’t grow.”
Redefining “Fit for Duty”
Traditionally, being “fit for duty” has meant being physically capable of performing the job. Most people interpret this as a combination of strength, endurance, mobility, agility, and healthy body composition. But a first responder who is physically strong but psychologically depleted is not fully prepared to serve.
Besides lifting heavy things and controlling out-of-control people, the job also requires the ability to think through problems, communicate effectively, control emotional reactions, tolerate uncertainty, and recover after stressful events. These aren’t secondary wellness concerns. They affect first responders’ decision-making, performance, safety, and career longevity.
If aerobic training helps you reduce anxiety and improve emotional resilience, then cardio is doing more than preparing you to run, climb, or carry. It’s also preparing you to think and respond more effectively when your stress levels rise.
Of course, that doesn’t mean every first responder needs to become a marathon runner. You don’t have to spend hours on an elliptical machine or sign up for your agency’s next stair-climb challenge. It means doing something — any sustained activity that raises your heart rate and makes your cardiovascular system work harder. That might include:
- Brisk walking
- Running or jogging
- Cycling
- Swimming
- Rowing
- Stair climbing
- Hiking
- Rucking
- Dancing
- Circuit training
- Recreational sports
Your best choice is the one you can do safely, reasonably enjoy, and keep doing even when life gets in the way.
How Much Cardio Is Enough?
The Acta Psychologica study did not establish a minimum cardio load for increasing resilience. For general health, however, most experts recommend that you get at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity each week, 75 minutes of vigorous activity, or a combination of the two. You should also do strength-training activities at least twice a week.
“Moderate activity” means working hard enough that the heart beats faster and breathing becomes heavier, but conversation remains possible. Brisk walking is a great example.
“Vigorous activity” means your breathing gets harder and conversation becomes difficult. Running, swimming laps, or climbing stairs at a hard pace may fall into this category.
Now, 150 minutes of cardio might seem unattainable if you’re working 12-hour shifts, doing mandatory overtime, or dealing with a constantly changing schedule. But those minutes don’t have to be done all at once (in fact, it’s best if they’re not). Just 22 minutes per day will get you there if you stay consistent. You can also try:
- Five 30-minute sessions
- Three 50-minute sessions
- Two 30-minute workouts and three 20-minute workouts
And your workouts can look different from week to week — just like your job. Feel free to mix it up.
Fitting Fitness Around Shift Work
In public safety, work schedules aren’t built around perfect workout conditions. A planned 12-hour shift can easily turn into 14 hours. A quiet station workout can be interrupted by a call. Court, holdovers, training, family responsibilities, and sleep all compete for the same limited time.
That makes flexibility more important than perfection.
- Plan around your shifts. Instead of trying to work out at the same time every day, plan around your full shift cycle. A firefighter on a 48/96 schedule will train differently than a corrections officer working rotating nights. Identify when longer workouts work best, then use shorter sessions to fill the gaps.
- Short workouts are always an option. Not every workout needs to last 60 minutes. A 15- or 20-minute session can get your heart rate up, contribute to your weekly total, and bypass the excuse that you don’t have enough time to work out “properly.” You can fit in a short run, brisk walk, stair session, rowing workout, or body-weight circuit before shift, during a break, or after work.
- Make moderate activity count. Cardio isn’t intended as a punishment. A brisk walk gives you moderate-intensity aerobic activity without the impact of a hard run or high-intensity interval session. That’s especially important after a rough shift, when your sleep has been lousy, or when you’re just getting back to a fitness routine. It also requires little equipment and can be done almost anywhere.
- Use whatever equipment is available. Lots of public safety facilities have basic equipment such as treadmills, rowers, stationary bikes, and free weights. Many also have stairs. When you just can’t get to the gym, you can turn to resistance bands, a jump rope, a weighted vest, or just a trip around the block. The goal should be removing barriers between deciding to exercise and getting started.
- Build accountability without creating competition. Working out with a partner or crew can improve consistency, but resist the urge to turn every session into a contest. You and your partner can both train at an appropriate level while enjoying the rewards of shared accountability. The objective should be better fitness, not resentment.
- Protect recovery. More exercise is not always better, especially for someone already dealing with poor sleep and job-related stress. Hard training layered onto fatigue can become another source of strain. Adjust the intensity when you’re ill, injured, sleep-deprived, or recovering from a demanding incident. Resilience develops through stress and recovery, and both parts matter.
Training for the Next Hard Call
As a first responder, you can’t control what your next shift will bring. What you can control is what you bring to it.
Regular aerobic exercise won’t cancel the emotional impacts of the job. It can’t prevent every case of burnout, PTSD, or substance misuse. In spite of the T-shirts that say “Running is cheaper than therapy,” working out is never a substitute for counseling or clinical care.
But cardio can make you more emotionally resilient, lower your baseline anxiety, and improve your response to stress. It can also make it easier to recover from stress when it happens.
That makes cardio more than a tool for controlling your weight or passing your fitness test. You know you need to be ready — both physically and mentally — for the demands of the next difficult call. And adding more cardio to your workout routine can definitely help.
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