Secrets Of The Navy Seals: How To Train, Eat & Think Like The World's Toughest Fighters

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Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield here. And if you read the article over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com a few weeks ago entitled Look, Feel and Perform like an Ancient Spartan how to Become an Absolute Physical Beast, then you know that I've kind of got this personal goal during 2014 to challenge my body and my mind by adding epic events to my 2014 calendar, Doing Things like the Spartan Beast and Multi Day Adventure Racing, as well as something called the SEAL Fit Academy and the SEAL Fit Kokoro Camp, which are also two, two kind of difficult tests of both physical and mental toughness, as well as ways to learn physical and mental tricks and strategies to basically take things to the next level. Now, whether you want to turn yourself into an absolute physical beast as I, as I described it, that article, or perhaps just get the mental edge to be tough when it really counts, then today's podcast is for you. I've got Commander Mark Devine from sealfit on the call, and this guy has an amazing history. Not only is he the author of multiple books on Amazon such as the Way of the SEAL Think Like An Elite Warrior to Lead and Succeed Unbeatable Mind, Eight Weeks to SEAL fit, but he himself has quite a history as a, as a Navy SEAL and as a CrossFit affiliate and also as kind of the mastermind behind the SEAL FIT program. And we're going to hear a little bit more about his history today and then delve into all of the advice that he has for making yourself more physically and mentally tough. So, Mark, thanks so much for coming on the call today.

My pleasure, Ben. Looking forward to it. Thanks for having me. And that was a pretty expansive intro, so I appreciate that.

No worries.

You make me sound like a badass.

I practice in front of the mirror a lot before we start.

I bet you do.

And you know, I think that even though I intro'd, you, people might want to hear a little bit more because, you know, it's always interesting when you talk to somebody like a Navy seal. I mean, you guys are known to be some of the world's toughest fighters and some of the most mentally strong folks on the Face of the planet. I think it's a mystery to a lot of people. Kind of like how you get started as a SEAL and, you know, what leads up to that. So for you, what was your history? How did you get started in all this?

Yeah, mine is kind of interesting, so I'm happy to share it. I was actually being a SEAL was not my first career. Most people think you go out of high school and you join the Navy a lot of times because you don't have anything else to do, Right. That wasn't my case. I had a lot to do. I was actually hired to head down to New York and go to NYU to get my master's in accounting, which is kind of interesting because I had no accounting background in my undergraduate degree, which is up at Colgate University in upstate New York. But it was one of these kind of consolidated programs where they said, we'll hire you in a work study. It was Coopers and Lybrand, which is now PricewaterhouseCoopers. Come down to New York City, we'll send you to nyu. You work for us most of the year. You go to school during the summers and then night school during the regular year and come out of it with a master's degree and a cpa. Once you pass the exam, someday you'll make a perfect partner because you've got a liberal arts background and not an accounting background. And I took the job primarily because it sounded like a good job. Right. It wasn't exactly a tremendous amount of forethought put into it, but probably not uncommon when you're a 21 year old college graduate. So I did that. I went down to New York and went to nyu. I hated accounting. I actually transferred in the MBA program, got my MBA in finance. Chipping away at it took me four years. And I really didn't like the work of public accounting. I just wasn't suited for it. So I found myself, after a couple years into it, striving for these goals of getting my CPA and MBA. But the work part, which occupied obviously a good 12 hours of my day, was somewhat miserable. And to make a long story short, Ben, what really was a life changer for me is when I started, I got into the martial arts. My first real foray into the martial arts was right when I got into New York. I started at a place called Sato. Karate grandmaster Kaicho Nakamura. An amazing man, right? Just one of the few examples of true mastery that I have seen in my life. And, you know, he was so. He had such an impact on Me and was so powerful as a character that I'm telling you, there's literally a day that goes by that I don't have some insight from those four years I spent with him getting my first black belt anyways. How does that relate to becoming a seal, you ask? I'm sure your listeners are wondering, where are you going with this, Mark? Well, the thing about the martial arts that Nakamura, his brand was very, very traditional. And they looked at training not just to go kick ass or to win a tournament or to be an MMA fighter. He looked at training as a training the martial art as really a refined whole person development program, really like an authentic martial art was. And so we spent just as much time doing inner development working in as we did spending working out. So a hardcore training session on the dojo floor would be followed by a meditation session and a lecture, you know, on some sort of topic that was really interesting and also very insightful. And so the meditation practice was traditional Zen, you know, which is a Japanese, very austere, kind of spartan, ish, Spartanesque meditation style. But anyways, you know, as a kid growing up in upstate New York to suddenly be exposed to this warrior development, it started to crack me wide open. And I started to have a sense that there was more to life than just what I've been taught in the American dream. Just kind of march these orders and do these things and get a good degree and go make money and get in the workforce and get married and have kids and now you got your white picket fence and your house and all that and whatever. And so I started to think, well, maybe there's more going on here. And I started to practice even deeper the meditation and got into visualization. And soon I started to sense that I was misplaced, I was misaligned and that this corporate world wasn't for me. And so I dug into that and journaled about it and thought about it. And this all happened over this three to four year period from 85 to 89. And what came up was that I really felt this strong calling into a more warrior tradition. And the seals became my siren call. And I found out about the SEALS through a guy that my brother worked for who had essentially been a UDT guy, Underwater demolition team. I talked to him about it. He highly encouraged me to take a look at it deeper. I went to a recruiter and I got the normal runaround that everyone does, but did get a video from them. And the title of the video was Be Someone Special. And that really spoke to me because it really was the first time in my life that I understood or I started to open up to the fact that we have this. This untapped potential inside of us. And it really just. You just needed the skills and the training and kind of the mentoring to go mine that potential.

Right.

And so Nakamura was my mentor, my siren caller. My vision was to become a seal. And so armed with that, I went to work internally. I started to visualize myself becoming a seal. I started to really align with that as opposed to align with being a corporate titan. And sure enough, it just came to pass. Within a year, I was actually standing on the podium at Navy SEAL Headquarters, the SEAL Training Command in Coronado, and I was getting awarded the Honor man certificate as number one graduate of my Bud's training class in Class 170, which was in 1990. All that happened very fast, but it wouldn't have happened had I not been able to, what I call win in my mind. And so essentially, that was the essence of. That was the first experience I had with winning in my mind. Later on, after my active duty SEAL career and I got back into business, I started to take all that really seriously and apply it in a business context. And in beginning to train SEAL candidates, special Ops candidates, I launched the business SEAL Fit. And I started to experiment with some of the principles that allowed me to succeed at that level as a SEAL and as a leader and also as a business owner and entrepreneur. And that's where I started to develop some of the principles and concepts and tactics and tools that ultimately ended up in the program unbeatable mind that I teach to my Spec Ops candidates. And a lot of the tools ended up in the book the Way of the seal, which is really more about business leadership for business leaders.

Nice.

So that's kind of a long and winding road, but how's that for.

It's probably not too common to go for from financial accountant to Navy seal, but that's a fascinating story, and I think it's really interesting how you experience success going in already having some of that mental strength and almost. Almost putting the mental before or on. On a pedestal with the. The physical, which.

Right. That. That was a big deal for me going into the seals, and now it's become, you know, kind of the main thing. Right. I understand implicitly that the mind comes first. Where the mind leads, the body will follow, and that physically you're capable of far more. You know, Hell Week taught us this. In the seals, you're capable of far more than you have any concept or any Ability. And a lot of your listeners who are ultra runners and adventure athletes know this already, you know, and so I'm not teaching them anything new. It's all mental. You know, when you're day six of an adventure race, I mean, it's your body, screw that. It's been gone long ago, but it keeps on chugging along for you. As long as your mind is sharp and as long as you have the right goals and as long as you can see things properly and things are clear in your mind, your body will follow.

Yeah. And I definitely want to ask you a little bit about Hell Week in just a second and some of the crazy things that happened during Hell Week. But before we jump into that and kind of how you deal with the sleep loss and everything else that happens during an experience like that. As far as the SEAL FIT goes, you know, for example, I'm coming down, I believe it's in, in August to San Diego to do your academy staff lined up. Thanks, I appreciate that. That sounds scary. SEAL FIT Academy, as well as the. I'm kind of finishing up the SEAL FIT Academy and jumping straight into your kokoro camp. Two things that you do there at SEAL fit. Can you kind of give us like the. The bird's eye overview of what those kind of things involve?

Sure. Let me give a little background on sealfit. So when I started, I had this idea, Ben, back in the mid-2000s that I wanted to train. I was so influenced by my martial arts training. And I continued my martial arts training, by the way, beyond Sato. I ended up as a scars instructor in the SEALs and I got very close to my black belt in ninjutsu before that school kind of folded and I just continued to train in the martial arts. Then I picked up yoga. And so for 15 years, since about 1998, I've been practicing Ashtanga yoga. And then I began teaching it and combining what I'd been learning in CrossFit and Navy Seal style, endurance training, functional training with my martial arts training and my yoga training. I found out I was going nuts trying to combine three schedules at three different studios, CrossFit Gym and, you know, a martial arts studio and a yoga studio. And yet I found extreme value in all three traditions that were unique and different, that, you know, didn't really overlap, but combined were extremely powerful. And because they really, then they addressed this inner and outer training aspect. So not only was the outer training way more effective with, you know, functional training and the high intensity interval training of CrossFit and combining that with some of the innovative strength training techniques from Wendler and Westside Barbell, that was all very cool and I wanted that. And it was taking me new areas physically. But then the mental training of yoga and the martial arts and some of the awareness and intuition development and also the spiritual development that I experienced, I wasn't finding through the fitness training. And so I said, you know, there's got to be a way to kind of integrate these and bring them together. And so I said, well, let me start with a CrossFit affiliate and then I can kind of experiment, use that as my petri dish, so to speak, to experiment with this. So I opened up US CrossFit in Encinitas, California, which is my hometown. US CrossFit. We are like affiliate number 375 or something like that. Don't quote me on it, but somewhere around there. So that was in early 2007. My CrossFit certification was with Coach Glassman and, and Dave Castro and Nicole, who are now kind of widely known through their CrossFit games. The explosion of CrossFit. So I opened that up and started really mastering the movements and the principles of CrossFit. And yet I knew that it wasn't quite enough for me. And I wanted to train the way I trained in the seals, but using new cutting edge methods. So in order to operate at the level that a Navy SEAL needs to operate, number one, it's not, you're not phasing it like a sport athlete. It's got to be phased so that you can be at near peak performance for long periods of time because you're pumping overseas time and time again and you don't really have time to cycle through different training cycles. And so what seals do is they load up on volume, they get good at everything, and they don't really need to master everything right. In the fitness domain. So you find some seals that veer toward endurance training and some seals that veer towards strength training. But as a whole, they can all carry their load in both domains. Right. And so, you know, I looked at the model of CrossFit that's not good enough for seals. And so I want to develop something that would be good enough for seals. And I was already had SEAL candidates coming to train with me and not.

Not good enough. You. Are you referring to more of the, the lack of the endurance aspects?

Yeah, that's probably not a good term, not good enough because that could certainly be quoted out of context. I love cross. What I meant was it wasn't complete enough or maybe Even another way to look at wasn't narrow enough in terms of the domains to be trained.

Gotcha.

And the philosophy of the training is slightly different. And I'll explain in a second. So I launched this program called sealfit and I started training it locally with my little group of guys who were doing, I call it the pre soft training program. I had a guy named Rob Ord who was helping me with that and we were just experimenting on these kids and we combining endurance training using the functional domains that a special operator would need to work in. So swimming, swimming, even with gear and stuff like that, running under load, rucking under load is all team based because seals don't really train alone unless they're supplementing for something. They train as a team. And the impact of team training is different than individualistic training. And then we trained for team outcomes rather than individual performance measures like CrossFit does. And so it started to mold to be quite different. And the domains of fitness that I really narrowed the focus to were strength, mostly relative strength. Then even though we use some one round max type measures, that's really so we understand we can track our progress and we know where to work for building relative strength so that you can be useful to your team.

Right.

And so we focused on kind of strength lifts that were easy to perform, not overly complicated, and had a crossover effect to build strength for the entire body, for your entire system. So back squat, deadlift being the two primary. We also do push press and throwing a bench press in there. And so we narrowed our strength training to those kind of strength movements and looking for relative strength that will be useful, make you more useful to the team, shore up some weaknesses. Right. And then we focus on stamina development. Now stamina is, I'm sure most people in your listening group are aware, is not endurance. Stamina really is more muscular endurance, the ability of your muscles to fire repetitively and efficiently and recover quickly so that you can work for longer periods of time at kind of moderate to more, maybe anywhere from 50 to 75% output. And so we specifically train for stamina. And then the third domain is really that where CrossFit comes in, we train for work capacity, which is the way I define that is the ability to do a shit ton of work in a short period of time. Right, right, right. And that's where the firefighting. So every one of these domains you could relate to a SEAL mission. Right. The fourth domain is endurance and the fifth is durability. So endurance training, as I mentioned, we do that functional endurance Running, rocking, swimming and durability is really to do the things that most people know they need to do, but they don't take the time to do. So active stretching, we throw yoga drills in there. Sleep and recovery are a big part of the training for durability. Learning how to pre habilitate, range of motion and then rehabilitate quickly through training if you get injured. And those all kind of fall and also deep core development, those all fall into the bucket. Durability. Now those five domains think about a SEAL mission, right? You need, you know, if you're going to jump in and swim three or four miles to the beach and then ruck, you know, 18 clicks to your objective, then you need strong functional endurance and durability, right? To accomplish that, throw in a little metal toughness for good measure. And then let's say you get to your orp, which is your rally point and you need to build something, right? Maybe build some hide sites or maybe even build some structures. Maybe it's a forward operating base. And so you need stamina. You got work to do, so you need stamina and you're going to be tired and you just need to be able to do a lot of work. And then let's say you go do your mission and you get into a firefighter, you need work capacity for that. The firefight might last from five minutes to 45 minutes, but you better be on and you better have that explosive power and you better be able to stay focused and calm and clear headed and be able to shoot, move and communicate as a team in that 45 minute period or whatever that ends up being. It's intense. And of course then that ends because you've killed all the enemy and now you've got a hump back to your orp and you might be carrying a wounded man on your shoulder. So now you need stamina for that again and then endurance to get your butt out of town. So all that is trained and the volume is significant. The typical workout is two hours long, maybe a little longer. But what happens is when you get used to that volume, it becomes doable and very enjoyable. And your body just kind of adapts to be this, what I call warrior athlete.

And that's what this academy is built around, is basically taking people through all those concepts that you just described and teaching them and then also putting people to the test, incorporating these concepts into workouts and I guess, special challenges that you create for a week. Like that.

Exactly. Thanks for bringing me back to that. The academy was the question. So the Academy is where I train all of that at a deep level, plus I train mental toughness. So the Academy is a live in academy. What you're going to experience, you'll stay on site with us, we feed you and you basically turn off the outer world. You leave your iPhone and whatnot behind. We hope. I mean, obviously we don't strictly enforce that for business professionals like yourself, but the spirit of it is that you're in kind of a warrior monk, warrior athlete monk academy. Right.

So leave all the options. I went through an unplugging last year when we did a five day wilderness survival camp. And the first couple days you think about your cell phone and emails a lot and then within a few days you kind of forget all that, it doesn't matter.

And then you're afraid to turn them back on.

For what exactly?

Yeah. So we wake up at five in the morning and the academy has a very kind of yin and yang approach. So wake up at five in the morning, you might do a hard workout like you might do the SEAL fit workout. And then we'll come back in and after some breakfast we'll do a session on mental control where we'll work on some of the undermined principles to develop mental control and focusing techniques. And then maybe go out and do some sprints and then come back and have a lesson, classroom lesson on mental toughness. And lunch. And then after lunch maybe we'll do some skill development on all the functional skills of SEAL fit. And then after that maybe another classroom on leadership. And then after that, you know, you get the picture. A durability exercise using trx. And so it goes from hard to soft to classroom to hard to soft classroom. And this is five days long unless you're doing the three week special ops immersion camp, which is three weeks long. The special ops immersion camp we throw in a lot of ocean swimming, a lot of rucking and a lot of self defense. And then that culminates with the 50 hour Kokoro mental toughness camp. And that is really kind of our version of hell week. Big difference is instead of trying to trite you, getting you to quit, we try to teach you how to overcome those rough spots where you want to quit. And for it's different for everybody. Some people it's a mental fatigue or a lack of motivation. For others it's an emotional control issue or resiliency issue. For others, you know, their spirit is broken. They can't see and connect to a higher purpose and why they're doing that. And for some actually A small majority, they weren't physically prepared. And so physically, they just break down too much and we can't get them through. Yeah, but we're not trying to. I mean, if we wanted to get everyone to quit, we could, but about, you know, one third of the camp will ultimately not make it for performance or for other reasons. But we try to get everyone through. Now. Why is Kokoro camp so powerful again? The same reason that Hell Week was so powerful is that you do more than you think is humanly possible. You do more physical work, you do more mental work, you take yourself to places that you didn't know were places, and you basically meet yourself at a deeper level for the first time.

And you could refer back to your own experience in Hell Week or direct draw from examples in the Kokoro camp. But I'd love to hear a few of the crazy things that you've observed others to experience or you yourself have experienced as far as the mental or physical rigors. Give us a few concrete examples of something that really challenges you or that you think is one of the more challenging aspects of something like a Hell Week or a Kokoro camp.

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot there. For most people, there's two primary challenges that. That really take them so far out of their comfort zone that they're not sure how to deal with it. One is the physical discomfort caused by the cold. Okay, so cold obviously saps your energy. And we use the ocean. We're in and out of the ocean a lot during the 50 hours, and I'm not going to tell you how much because you're going to do it, but it's a lot. And so you're cold and wet and sandy and somewhat miserable. And so you've got to essentially embrace misery, embrace that suck and lean into it and make it your friend. If you can't do that, then it becomes very difficult. So a lot of that is framing and creating new relationships with things that you avoided in the past. And so not unlike an adventure racer on his first race, he's like, wow, I'm not used to training or moving nonstop around the clock. But when you make it your friend and you learn the tactics for how to accomplish that, then you'll have a much better chance of success.

Now, a lot of our listeners, they experiment with cold thermogenesis, cold showers, cold immersion, things of that nature. And I know that many of them have written to me saying, how do you get over that initial hump of dealing with the cold? For you do you have special tactics or tricks that you use to allow the mind to overcome cold exposure or rapid temperature fluctuations like that.

Yeah, the primary. Well, there's two primary, and they fall into this grouping that I call the big four of mental toughness. The first is deep diaphragmatic breathing. And that's not going to, you know, probably shock a lot of people because if, you know, they've probably heard that before. But it's one of the main things that I teach and encourage people, and I have some practices around that. Deep, deep breathing can, when combined with. The second thing is visualization, can. Can ward off hypothermia. Now, it's not going to ward it off forever, and it's going to be different for every person. And you'd be hard pressed to point to a scientific study because of the risk factors, but it can. One great place to look for this is Stu Smith, who was a sealed buddy of mine, did a episode, I think on Discovery channels like Fight Science or something like that, maybe you're familiar with it, where they immersed him in an ice bath, you know, for like 20 minutes. I can't remember the exact duration. And first of all, they benchmarked him. They ran him through an obstacle course and had him shoot. And then he immersed him in ice bath. And then he did the same obstacle course and shot after the ice bath.

Yeah, I saw this episode.

Yeah, he performed better.

Yeah.

And what was he doing?

His heart rate was slower and his nervous system was kind of calmed down from the cold.

Right. He went into a deep breathing kind of meditative visualization practice while he was immersed and literally willed himself to calm down and to warm up and stay warm. And then he went off and was able to perform. It's not unlike how a seal teaches himself how to shoot after running to an objective. His heart rate is racing, his body is on fire, and yet he's able to calm and really settle down instantaneously so he can pull the trigger with effectiveness. The combat conditioning training that we go through really helps us prepare for that. Same thing for cold and also sleep deprivation. When you combine cold and sleep deprivation, that's where both your physiology and your psychology are afraid. They get really frayed at the edges. The cold just freaks your physiology out. And if you can't stop that shivering, that takes an enormous amount of energy to shiver, which is your body's natural response to try to stay warm. Deep diaphragmatic breathing, where you just take a deep in and you're really, really focusing solely on that breath, does Two things. One, you're calming your body because obviously you're activating kind of your stress release response. Deep diaphragmatic breathing through the nose is the universal shutoff switch for fight or flight. And so you're calming your body down, telling it's okay. And then the breathing itself, if you start to pick up the intensity will actually warm you up. And so you use that breath to warm you instead of the shivering process. And you can kind of control and slow down and stop the shivering eventually. And then again, going by just focusing on that breath, you're collapsing your mental focus, your thinking mind to the process of warming your body breathing. And so you're not allowing your mind to think about, oh shit, I'm cold, I'm dying, this sucks, I'm not going to make it. All that mental chatter starts to go away and you get through the rough point. Now, of course, in the training environment, you also have the added benefit of knowing that we're not going to kill you because you're a client. And so eventually you're going to get out of it. So you've got to set, you set your goals to just getting through this hard spot. Don't think about anything else, just get through this tight spot. You make it five more paces, make it ten more breaths, make it whatever.

Go ahead. I was going to ask you about sleep deprivation, but it sounds like you were going to launch into something else.

No, let's talk about sleep deprivation.

Okay. And obviously I know you and I could talk forever, but I want to get into a few nitty gritty practical tips for folks on some of the things they can do. I love the idea of deep diaphragmatic breathing for getting ready to deal with extreme cold or fluctuations in temperature. You obviously experience sleep deprivation. What do you do about that? Or how do you teach people about how to cope with sleep deprivation? Whether they're a busy mom or dad, a CEO or somebody who's like, maybe they haven't slept and they've got an Ironman triathlon the next day or something like that, right?

Well, I tell you what, it might sound like a broken record. Let's talk about sleep first. First of all, sleep is highly underrated. Meaning you've heard the term sleep is highly overrated. That's total bullshit. Sleep is so important. It's incredibly important. When we went for five or six days without sleep in Hell Week, we tricked ourselves into thinking we were performing. But the only reason we were performing is because we were doing super simple tasks like caveman type Tasks if we had to perform any higher order brain functioning, problem solving, we would have been diagnosed as drunk, probably with a bloody alcohol level of 0.08 to over 0.10. And they've done a lot of studies in the last few years on sleep and its effect on your ability to control higher order reasoning and thinking. And so if you're someone who is routinely getting shortchanging their sleep and you're only getting six hours of sleep or five hours of sleep a night, and you're gotten through it like a big tough American guy, and you think that that's all you need because you've trained yourself to not in need anymore, then you're really kidding yourself. And it's accumulative, right? And that one hour to two hours on average, you need seven, roughly seven plus change hours of sleep at night. And that's kind of what the average has been in our age in the last 100 years or something like that. Or maybe not quite that much because they used to sleep a lot more when there wasn't electricity. But the optimal sleep patterns are about seven, a little over seven hours, with.

Many professional athletes incidentally swearing by closer to nine to 10. For a lot of people who are.

Training two plus hours a day, you need that, right? Because you need that extra recovery time. And the other thing is the quality of the sleep is ridiculously important. So you really only release growth hormones when you dip into that deep, deep delta sleep. Or, you know, I don't, you know, don't quote me on that because I don't have the stats in front of me, but you're really only recovering during one of the three primary phases of sleep, the deepest phase. And so if part of your, if your cortisol levels are elevated, you're never going to tap, you know, dive into that deep depth that you need to, to do the recovery. And when are your cortisol levels elevated is when you're, you know, when you have too much stress in your life or you say you're drinking too much caffeine or Red Bull or whatever, or if you're drinking alcohol within an hour or two before bed. And so you're not going to allow your body to dip into that deep recovery and you're not going to get the growth hormone release and the testosterone and whatnot. They went through a study with the seals recently and there are some seals. Seals are notorious for dealing with sleep by waking up early and working out. It's like you can't get to sleep because their cortisol levels are jacked because they're always on edge and they're always going 1,000 miles an hour with their hair on fire. And they cure that by slamming a few beers before bed, which gets them into a light level of sleep. But then they wake up at 4 o' clock in the morning and they're like, shit, not as much as I wanted, but listen, I've been asleep for four hours. That's pretty good, all things considered. So they wake up and they go to the gym and they bang out a seal fit workout for a couple hours and that kind of flushes away the fatigue and they go out and operate. Well, I mean that sleep deprivation is slowly building up. And their testosterone levels, when they tested them, they only had the testosterone level of a teenage boy or a teenage girl, I should say. They were just like 14% of where they should have been. And it was a big eye opener for a lot of these guys who are rough and tumble guys going, holy shit, where'd my testosterone go? They weren't recreating any at night. And so anyways, all of that was kind of the buildup of just how important sleep is for endurance athletes and adventure athletes and all of us who work hard and play hard. And so how do you deal with sleep deprivation when you have to face, when you have to perform? Well, I go back to a couple things. One is to ensure that what you have to do is something that you've trained to do over and over and over. For instance, going and running a triathlon is a fairly simple process physically, right? You just move your legs in one pattern for the bike and you kick them another for the swim, and you move them another for the run. And so physically the movements are radically simple, easy to perform, even if you were sleep walking or running. And so you know that even when sleep drives sleep deprived, you're going to be able to perform the physical movements. Then it's the mental management. The mental management, you get back into some sort of homeostasis through deep breathing and concentration drills. The deep breathing is going to clear your mind. And so when you start to do what I call box breathing is my practice for that. When you box breathe and you clear your mind, you literally actively visualize bringing energy into your body and into your brain, right? So you're activating and energizing your brain. Now this visualization, whether you're actually bringing energy in, that's a whole another discussion. The Eastern traditions will say that you are because life force and energy is what you breathe in with Every breath. Well, let's just leave that aside and say you are visualizing it. And so what happens is you get this sense that as you see the energy coming in maybe through the crown of your head or into your nose and recharging your body at a cellular level, you're charging your body with positive energy. So you're visualizing light or however you want to represent energy. And you're visualizing your body responding with health, with optimism, with excitement that it's getting recharged. Because before it was challenged it was sleep deprived. And so I highly encourage my trainees to start to look at their bodies as energy balls of energy that have been coagulated into this physical state. Because that's really what we are. And quantum physics is finally helping to, to prove that at an ultimate level. And so we can affect that through our mind. We can affect the quality of the energetic state of our body through our mind. So the deep diaphragmatic breathing gets us control of the body and it collapses our mind, our thinking mind, so that we're not thinking a lot. It's really a, you know, it's not unlike a meditative practice. It's just, I call it box breathing because, you know, I don't want to, I don't want my SEAL cannons to think that I'm trying to teach them some esoteric meditation with a mantra. I'm not. I'm literally just teaching them how to breathe and how to concentrate. And that's all meditation is. And then you add the visualization and then the visualization for sleep deprivation is energetic visualization. I'm charging myself up, feeling good. I'm going to have plenty of energy for this performance. I just actually did this yesterday. I flew out to New York because I got a quick turn. Can you come and be on Fox and Friends to promote your new book, the Way of the Seal? They want you on at 7 o' clock Sunday morning. And I got the word on Friday, so I flew out Saturday. And I live in San Diego and going from west to east sucks. When you fly east you lose that three hours. And all of a sudden it's very hard to get to sleep. So sure enough, I was exactly like that seal I described earlier. I got to bed at 10 or 11. I woke up at like 3:30 and had barely any sleep. No real deep recovery sleep. And so I said okay, what's going to be the best thing for me to do to try to go back to sleep or to get up and practice? So I said, okay, I'm going to get up and practice. So I ran the stairs in the hotel for about a half hour just to break an intense sweat. I did handstand push ups at every third floor. Then I came back in and I did box breathing and this energy visualization. And I did it for a good 45 minutes and then I went and did the interview and I felt great. Wow. Now, later on in the afternoon, when I got back on the plane to head back west, I conked, you know what I mean? And then I had trouble sleeping again last night. So it really is a temporary performance thing. Eventually you got to get the sleep.

Yeah, yeah. Now, do you guys in the Navy seals or you personally, you ever do some of these things that you see a lot of of like CEOs and airline pilots and folks doing like everything from modafinil to aniracetam to, you know, freaking aspirin plus coffee? I mean, are. Do you guys do much or is that just a big no no for like a Navy SEAL or someone in the armed forces?

It's a no. No. Having said that, some guys will do it if they have to maintain some level of alertness. A lot of the special operators, especially places like JSOC and the Tier one units, they in the past have had a really bad understanding of sleep and they think that they're tougher than everyone else and they're just going to gut through it and they'll have all night planning sessions and then go out and operate, you know what I mean, the next day, early in the morning, and they're finally. One of my buddies has done a lot, is a SEAL who became a doctor and then made it his, you know, became a dive medical doctor for the seals and then he made it his mission to study sleep. And, you know, he actually just gave us a presentation at our unbeatable mind retreat a few weeks ago, and it's just super interesting. And he was talking about how the Tier one units, you know, are just so far off with how they do sleep and using some of these stimulants, you know, to stay awake. The problem with these stimulants is that, that they don't allow you to drop into that deep recovery cycle that I was talking about earlier. They keep you in the surface levels and then you kind of screw yourself. If you're doing that for long periods of time, your testosterone drops, your growth hormones drop. It's going to weaken your body, and it's proven to actually put fat in your body too. See, an hour of missed sleep, a Night will lead to about 14 pounds of fat gain during a year. People ask me, why am I. I'm working out so hard and I barely eat anything and I'm gaining weight. I'm like, sleep. That's it. That's the only other answer, right?

Yeah, yeah. You mentioned mental enhancement, deep diaphragmatic breathing. We've talked about focus a little bit. I had a podcast guest named Dr. D' Agostino on a call a couple of months ago talking about ketosis as a potential strategy for eliminating free radical production from hypoxia experienced during diving in seals. And also talking about enhancing metal performance by upregulating ketone presence in the bloodstream. Have you seen much in terms of that or use that dietary strategy yourself, or are you seeing Navy pick up stuff like that? I have.

Personally, I haven't. I think it's pretty early in the game. You know, I've just literally learned about this myself recently. You know, I. As a general rule, I'm a little wary of reductionism in science that tries to narrow everything down to one, you know, one protein or one nutritional element that's going to change the game. I mean, our bodies just don't work that way, and we're just these complex systems, and every system is going to be a little bit different. So what works for me isn't going to work for you. And so, you know, honestly, I think. I'm not saying ketosis isn't worth checking out. I'm just saying a little wary about anything. That's going to be a universal, simple thing. Because you know what? There's no wonder drug. The wonder drug is basically to. To learn how to train smart and to do trial and error on yourself and basically train hard during the day, get great sleep at night, and then have fun along the way.

Now, let's say folks want to train in the way that would be ideal to prepare them. You know, using some of the strategies that you described earlier, those five strategies that you got into that, you know, you kind of. You kind of created as you got away from CrossFit and designed seal Fit. Can you throw a sample workout out at folks who want to kind of throw something at their body and see if they're able to handle? Like, what are some exercises or some workouts someone could do?

Sure. Well, you know, my post, first of all, I post all my workouts for free to the public@sealfit.com and so you can see our workout of the day. And each workout has those five segments I talked about. So There's a. I didn't talk about the first. The first segment is really what I call baseline. And that's where we do our box breathing. And then we do range of motion drills, which is a durability training, right? Getting our joints and our, you know, getting everything lubed up and making sure we're moving properly. And then we'll do a little warm up. And that's to get the team on the same page, right? Everyone's coming in, you know, with different levels of sleep and fatigue and this and that. And so we do a little mini wad, so to speak. It might be something as simple as like three rounds, 200 meter run, followed by 20 push ups, you know, 15 pull ups and 10 dips, something like that. And so, you know, for a beginner that might be a hard workout. For us, it's just a little warm up and then we'll go into our strength training. And so let's say we're working on push press. We'll warm up our push press. You know, push press is essentially doing a dip drive and a press overhead. It's not a strict military press. We want to use that you don't push heavy weight overhead just by strict pressing it in the field. You do it by dip driving and using your hip, explosive motion. So we'll do a push press and so we'll warm up. We already know what our one rep max is. And then we'll do like 10 rounds of three reps on the minute at 70% of that one rep max. So that's the strength training component. Now, stamina. I'm just making this up off the top of my head, but a stamina. What we'll do is we'll work with that same strength, we'll work with that same strength movement and then we'll back it down and do a lighter load so we can do more reps, more volume. And so the stamina might be, let's say three rounds not timed. These are kind of at a measured working as a team pace. So three rounds of maybe 20 push press, maybe at 55 or 60% of your one rep max followed by a motion that will complement the push. So maybe we'll do dips again, ring dips. So maybe you know, 25 or 30 ring dips, you know, something maybe even more, I don't know. And then we'd like to do the third element of that stamina section. We'd like to do some team exercise or like a buddy drill. So maybe like a 50 meter or 100 meter buddy carry.

Right.

And so that'll be. And we'll do three or four rounds of that. That's the stamina. And then the work capacity is really that CrossFit piece. So we'll take a little break, hydrate, break down the gear and then set up for work capacity.

Nice.

And the work capacity is balls to the wall. Timed evolution, not unlike today's work capacity might be a fran like thrusters, which 95 pound thruster where you do a full front squat followed by an overhead press in a very dynamic motion. So we do 21 thrusters followed by 21 pull ups and then 18 thrusters, 18 pull ups, 15, 15, 12, 12, 9, 9, 6, 6, 3, 3. And that's the wad for time as fast as you can with good form.

Cool. Yeah, I can definitely see some how you're incorporating some elements of something like CrossFit, but there is a great deal more, there's more going on involved.

And after that, Ben, then we'll take a break and hydrate, maybe eat something and then we'll go out for a run as a team and then come back and stretch together and do some of the durability so that you work through that. It takes about two hours.

Yeah, I was going to say that's a much longer workout than a 20 minute wad or something like that.

Yeah, for sure. And like I said, if you're a sport athlete or using a CrossFit style training to supplement your endurance training, it's great because you can do less of your sports specific endurance training and get stronger overall by adding those three CrossFit workouts a week. So if you're a sports specific endurance athlete, doing the seal fit programming might not be optimal for you. Having said that, throwing in one seal fit wad a week and doing it soup to nuts with a team will have another impact and that is to develop serious confidence and mental toughness. Right. And so if I was a triathlete, I would essentially drop my volume of running, biking and swimming down by about 30% and add two CrossFit workouts and one Seal Fit workout a week and see what happens. And I think the impact what I found with some of our athletes who are triathletes also, they're actually improving their times, they're having more fun and they're experiencing fewer injuries because they're now training functionally and they're starting to build some strength. And it's not the kind of strength and mass that's going to slow them down. It actually speeds them up because that functional training is training the fast twitch muscles. It's not hypertrophy at all.

Yeah. And I'm sure that our listeners will hear more about SEAL Fit workouts over the next few months because that's kind of the program I'm going to be using merged a little bit with triathlon training just because, for example, I'm heading over to Israel next week to do a half ironman over there. And you know, I'm certainly still going to be swimming, biking and running at least once a week. But I'll keep our listeners posted as to how those SEAL Fit workouts are going. Now, I want to squeeze in one other topic here real quick, Mark. Since we talked about fitness and since you emphasized the importance of recovery, how common is over training in something like a Navy SEAL population or the folks who are doing these SEAL Fit workouts because they seem pretty intense and voluminous and kind of as a, as a follow up to that, are you, do you have favorite ways that you measure the body or look at markers of overtraining or under recovery?

Yeah, it's definitely possible. And a lot of it obviously has to do with your level of readiness to handle the volume. And so we always ask, you know, people coming to the program to spend a lot of time in a CrossFit style workout and then, you know, start to ramp up their endurance training before they begin the SEAL Fit training. And so, you know, there's two parts to that. One is you have to understand the skills, you know, the skills of the lifts. And in the CrossFit modality, you've got the Olympic lifts now. Olympic lifts take years to really refine and develop, to be able to do them safely and properly. And so we want you to have the foundational skills to be able to move, you know, safely and not be a detriment to the team, let's put it that way. And then the volume, you just need to start to, to develop the ability to handle the volume. And sometimes there's a little bit of trial and error and you might overstep. And so we ask people to really listen, to develop their awareness of their own bodies and to understand when you're pressing into what I call disintegrating pain versus integrating pain. Integrating pain is this workout really sucks. It hurts bad. I'm pushing into new territory, but I also know that I'm not hurting myself. And so I'm going to just keep going. And disintegrating pain is something feels off in my back on that back squat. And I don't think I pulled anything, but boy, I don't know, right? Something feels off and if you don't listen to that and you do another lift or you push it, all of a sudden the spring's gonna pop, right? You're gonna pull a muscle.

Are you guys doing much as far as heart rate variability or any biomarkers or anything along those lines?

We don't.

Right.

We don't. A, because we just don't. And B, I'm not trained in those kind of scientific skills or those measures. I think that they're valuable. My preference personally is to develop the inner awareness, to be able to manage, to self manage. And that takes time. That's why I haven't certified any SEAL FIT coach beyond two civilians who've worked with me for four years who are highly trained athletes, endurance athletes. One's a former NFL player, the other's an ultra runner CrossFit gym owner. And then the other ones are SEALs who are all sealed instructors and own CrossFit gyms and are just uber coaches. And I have a ton of people who've said, mark, I want to get certified to teach SEAL fit. And I'm like, I'm not quite comfortable to do that because there's a lot of intuition that goes in what we do. And at least as it pertains to the Kokoro camp and the academy especially, you know, and going out and doing the SEAL Fit workouts, anybody can do those. But when it comes to doing the sleep deprivation training and the cold water training and putting it all together in the whole package, it takes a lot of finesse.

Gotcha. Yeah. Well, man, I could talk to you forever and I'm sure our listeners are geeking out on this stuff big time. But what I'll do is for folks who want to look into Mark's books, I'll put links to them in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com I will put a link to the Sealfit Academy and the Sealfit Kokoro Camp that Mark talked about. And then if you have follow up questions, stuff that you still are curious about, just leave them as a comment or a question in the show notes for this podcast over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com and I'll jump in and kind of help steer you in the right direction. So yeah, I'm happy to help out as well.

There's.

Oh, that's awesome. That's awesome. Sometimes folks who come onto a podcast interview aren't that keen on hopping on and responding to comments, but I'll be sure to send any your way that are specifically addressed to you. So that's great.

Let me know when you post it. So we'll retweet it and get this interview out to our tribe as well.

Oh, for sure. Cool.

Cool.

Well, that being said, folks, thank you much so, so much for listening into this podcast with Commander Mark Devine. I would highly encourage you to act on the knowledge that you've just learned everything from deep diaphragmatic breathing to box breathing to implementing all the components of physical fitness. Not just being, say, a chronic repetitive motion endurance athlete or not just being a high work capacity, you know, crossfitter, but kind of getting the best of both worlds, so to speak, focusing on the mental component. A lot of practical stuff that you can start into right away and some things for you to kind of add to your goals going into the new year. So, Mark, thanks so much for coming on the call, man.

You're welcome, Ben. It's been a blast. Really appreciate it myself.

All right, folks, this is Commander Mark Devine and Ben Greenfield signing out from.

BenGreenfieldFitness.com visit BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness, nutrition and performance advice.