84 Ft SEAL FIT Training x Technique Train Like A Fighter So You Want To Be A Navy SEAL? Open to anyone looking to take their personal fitness to a new level of intensity, the SEALFIT program is also producing the next generation of the Navy’s most elite operators By MIKE CARLSON Photography by JAMES LAW 84 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2013 t first glance, the small city of Encinitas, California, seems like your typical laidback, SoCal coastal village composed entirely of coffee houses and yoga studios. It’s the kind of place where a 60-year-old guy with six-pack abs will walk by carrying a surfboard. Encinitas isn’t all lotus-eaters, though. It is also the home of the SEALFIT gym. Part workout regimen, part mental toughness training, part self-defense class, and part life coaching, SEALFIT represents more than just a gym membership. It’s a lifestyle for modern-day Spartans. And, in some cases, it’s a feeder program for BUD/S, the Navy SEAL’s brutal qualification school 30 minutes down the road on Coronado Island. “Our ultimate aim is to build character, that warrior character who is quiet, humble, willing to lead, a great teammate, someone who gets the job done, and upholds commitments, who does not quit,” former Navy SEAL and SEALFIT creator Mark Divine says. A ray of sunshine peaks through the clouds and lands upon The Grinder, an expanse of concrete flanked by lines of Concept2 rowers and black powder-coated squat racks. The stars and stripes snap in the ocean breeze atop a 30-foot flagpole. The daily 7 a.m. workout, a grueling two-hour regimen, for Divine’s hand-picked crew of SEALFIT members is about to start. Divine’s journey is a classic tale. At 25 years old he was working as a CPA in Manhattan after getting his MBA degree. A former collegiate swimmer, triathlete, and black belt in karate, Divine was woefully unhappy in the white-collar world. With very little time to train, he could foresee a steady decline into physical mediocrity. “I felt like I needed to pursue a warrior path,” he says. “I didn’t know how to articulate that back then, so I looked at different careers I thought would fire me up. I kept coming back to the SEALs.” Divine matriculated into the SEAL teams in 1990. He spent seven years on active duty and 10 more years on active reserve. During his time in the reserves he helped launch a microbrewery, started navyseals.com, and opened his own CrossFit affiliate, called US CrossFit. In 2006, he launched SEALFIT. His idea was to share the experience of training like a SEAL candidate and marry it with the best practices of CrossFit, martial arts, strength training, yoga, and his own curriculum of metal toughness development he calls Unbeatable Mind. Divine’s menagerie of disciplines is a holistic package that resonates with people of all ages, and both genders, who hail from all over the world. He posts a daily online OPWOD (Operator Workout of the Day) that has a robust following, as do the Unbeatable Mind online videos he produces. Several times a year he holds SEALFIT immersion programs, known as Kokoro Camp, that sell out. “I think a lot of people don’t know how to express the desire of following a warrior path,” Divine says. “And our society has lacked models for that that until recently. It is nice to see CrossFit, and the Spartan Race, and Tough Mudder, and those types of programs that don’t profess to be easy, but instead say, ‘This is going to kick your ass, but you are going to grow from it.’ It’s the same thing with MMA. You get into a training session with a lot of guys and who are doing an abnormal amount of work compared to the rest of society. You leave the training a better person every time.” 85 86 Ft SEAL FIT Training x Technique Train Like A Fighter Exactly at 7 a.m. the SEALFIT training commences with a debriefing around the whiteboard. SEALFIT shares space—as well as gear, members, and instructors—with Divine’s CrossFit gym, US CrossFit. The SEALFIT workout will seem familiar to anyone who has experienced CrossFit’s ideology of constantly varied functional exercise performed at high intensity. Yet SEALFIT departs from CrossFit in more aspects than they share. For one, unlike CrossFit there is no leader in a SEALFIT workout. There is no coach yelling from the sidelines. After the initial debriefing, in which the workout is reviewed and discussed, it becomes a team effort. Secondly, there is simply more to SEALFIT: more modalities, more volume, more attention to the needs of the body and the mind. “We invest CrossFit into our training as work capacity, and then we do more strength and stamina and durability training, which is lacking in the CrossFit model,” Divine says. “We believe that recovery, stretching, yoga, and breathing is critical to a warrior. CrossFit develops that horsepower, that metabolic engine, and it does an incredible job of that. But SEALFIT is not about creating a sport athlete. We use hard functional fitness, with these other attributes of stamina, strength, durability, and mental toughness in our training program.” Eleven men make up the class this morning, including Divine and Lance Cummings, the director of training at SEALFIT and a 30-year veteran of the SEAL Teams. All of them wear some combination of fatigue-style utility pants and boots. Several sport a special green T-shirt that indicates they have completed Kokoro Camp, Divine’s 50-hour workshop that replicates a small portion of SEAL training’s most infamous trial: Hell Week. They look like a cross between a class of frogman recruits and Tyler Durden’s underground gang of truth-seekers in the movie Fight Club. 86 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2013 88 Ft SEAL FIT Training x Technique Train Like A Fighter WE KNOW THAT TO BE A SEAL OPERATOR YOU ARE MOVING LOADS FOR HOURS AT A TIME. SO WE HAVE A STAMINA COMPONENT IN EVERY WORKOUT.” While they all appear similar, the motivations of the group vary dramatically. Dave is 41 and an entrepreneur who exited the business world with a considerable financial buffer and a mission to reclaim the physical strength and athleticism he lost. Travis had suffered a traumatic brain injury in a bike accident and began using CrossFit and eventually SEALFIT to test his postaccident boundaries. A 23-year-old kid, who asked not to be named, is preparing to enter Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL Training, within a matter of weeks. Divine has had several frogman candidates go though his training in preparation for the infamous six-month crucible known as BUD/S and proudly estimates that SEALFIT trainees have an unofficial 90-percent-plus pass rate. “Anecdotally, about one-third of BUD/S graduates have used SEALFIT to prepare,” Divine says. “If 200 people are in a class, you will get 20 to 25 graduates, and one-third of those 25 have used SEALFIT. We have a growing cadre of guys wearing the Trident or in training. We are nearing 100 guys already. And the Navy only mints 175 new SEALs a year.” The workout begins unlike any CrossFit WOD, with five minutes of meditation and deep breathing. Divine’s programming is heavily flavored by his experience with martial arts and yoga. From there, they all grab a PVC 88 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2013 pipe and begin doing mobility drills, focusing heavily on the shoulders since an overhead press is part of both the strength and stamina portions of the workout. Next, the members put on 20-pound weight vests and grab 30-pound sandbags for a triumvirate of drills. Incredibly, this is still only part of the warm-up. For 20 minutes straight, the team— still wearing the weight vests—perform five different functional exercises, using moderate weight, performed quickly, and with no rest. After a short break they begin the strength portion of their workout, which is loosely based off Jim Wendler’s 5/3/1 powerlifting program. 90 Ft SEAL FIT Training x Technique Train Like A Fighter The last part of the main workout is devoted to building stamina. It incorporates the lift that was performed in the strength evolution, combined with two other functional compound movements. Oftentimes an hour-long run or swim is tagged onto the end of the training day. “In SEALFIT we bone-crush anyone in workouts over 30 minutes,” Divine says, noting that the majority of CrossFit workouts are 15 minutes or shorter. “We dominate in that field. We know that to be a SEAL Operator you are moving loads for hours at a time. So we have a stamina component in every workout.” Today, the two-hour session finishes with a designation Divine calls “durability.” It’s a conglomeration of moves designed to make the body tougher, grittier, less likely to break. It is basically all of the things athletes know they should do, but usually don’t, such as sprinting, stretching, yoga, and even self-defense. Divine holds an instructor credential in Ashtanga yoga, and through that he has developed his own style called Warrior Yoga. He credits yoga and durability training for getting so many of his students through BUD/S, where injuries are a large part of the attrition rate. The mystique of SEALFIT generates plenty of curiosity, both from the local CrossFit population looking to kick their training up a notch and from civilians and military from all over the world. That is why Cummings, a practicing chiropractor who holds several exercise certifications, including Army Master Fitness Trainer and Navy Training Specialist, has instituted a strict screening process for SEALFIT candidates. The standards, which can be found on sealfit.com, are formidable. “I’ve had law enforcement and firefighters wash out after just 20 minutes,” Cummings says. The attraction of the SEAL teams seems to cross all bounds of age, gender, and socioeconomics. Pro athletes, doctors, and everyone in between has come to Encinitas to prove themselves, to test themselves. “We represent something different in our society, and people are intrigued by it,” Divine says. They think we are special, but we aren’t. We are just guys who like to work harder than the average. ‘Do today what others won’t, so tomorrow you can do what others can’t.’ I am training to accomplish that.” 90 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2013 92 Ft SEAL FIT Training x Technique Train Like A Fighter Mark Divine The Crucible A LOT OF PEOPLE PAY GOOD MONEY TO GET THEIR ASS KICKED. THE STIFFEST TEST IN SEALFIT, KNOWN AS KOKORO CAMP, REPLICATES JUST A SMALL PORTION OF BUD/S TRAINING, INCLUDING HELL WEEK. A DAY IN THE LIFE OF SEALFIT A typical SEALFIT workout lasts about two hours. It begins with meditation (what Divine calls “box breathing”) and usually ends with an ocean swim or long ruck (walking or jogging with a heavy backpack). Those two elements bookend a warm-up, and then separate workouts develop work capacity, strength, stamina, and durability. Since the SEALFIT HQ is only a few blocks from the ocean, the candidates often get wet. However, for practicality sake, Divine rarely programs water drills into the daily SEALFIT OPWODs that are posted online at sealfit.com. BASELINE (WARM-UP): STRENGTH: Box breathing Range of motion drills Sandbag drills with weight vest (step-ups, get up & press, 200-meter run) WORK CAPACITY: ROTATE BETWEEN EXERCISES EVERY MINUTE FOR 20 MINUTES, WITH WEIGHT VEST Frog plex (squat clean to overhead press to back squat, with 115-pound barbell) Tire flip Sledge strike Buddy pull Buddy carry 92 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2013 One-rep max push press STAMINA: FOUR ROUNDS OF: 8 reps push press 12 reps renegade row 1 15-foot rope climb Kokoro Camp, held several times a year, represent’s SEALFIT training’s biggest test. Candidates move into the dorm-like living facility at the SEALFIT headquarters and train, study, and live the SEAL life. The camps are either one week or three weeks long and are scheduled to finish about six weeks before BUD/S starts, making it the perfect laboratory for potential operators. Every camp culminates with 50 sleepless hours that replicates the Hell Week experience. “The Kokoro Camp is the hardest training in the world outside of BUD/S,” says Mark Divine, the creator of SEALFIT and former SEAL teams member who retired with the rank of Commander in 2011. “I had a guy come all the way from Estonia and quit in the first hour of the camp. Even people who quit say it was valuable because they now understand a new normal.” An exceedingly high level of physical conditioning is necessary to participate in Kokoro. Before considering it, applicants should have completed: • 10-mile run in less than 1:20 • 20-mile hike with load in less than six hours Within the first few hours of Kokoro Camp, candidates will be asked to perform the following: • 50 push-ups (40 for women), 50 sit-ups, and 50 air squats in two minutes • 10 dead hang pull-ups for men, 6 for women • 1-mile run in boots and utility pants on road in 9:30 • Body Armor (a.k.a. “Murph”): one-mile run, 100 pull-ups, 20 push-ups, 300 squats, one-mile run, all while wearing a 20-pound pack (15 pounds for women). Must be completed in less than 1 hour and 10 minutes “In Kokoro, you put away the distractions from your life,” says Lance Cummings, a former Navy SEAL and the Director of Training at SEALFIT. “You are hurting and putting out and everybody is hurting and you can see that everyone is drawing on you for inspiration and you are tapping into them as well. I have been to Afghanistan and Iraq and 50 other shitholes around the world where there are no distractions, and when you come home those distractions that occupy your time are there, but you can remain focused a little better.” DURABILITY: 30 minutes of warrior yoga and hand-to-hand combat training BONUS VIDEO Check out our tablet edition for video shot on site at SEALFIT.