Mark Divine's Blog, page 50

How SEALFIT Trains the Push Up

It is amazing how many people come to our camps and academies who do not know proper form for the push up. We hope to remedy that with this 15 minute in depth look at how we train the push up.

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Weekly Monster Mash – 9/9/2017

Baseline: Pre-SOP and box breathing, then ROM Drills.

Work Capacity: For time:

100x Dead Hang Pull up
200x Push up
300x Air Squat

*Every time you break (When you come off the pull bar, or stop continuous motion of either the push ups or air squats), complete 200m run.

Durability: Hydrate and fuel within 30 minutes. Journal post training session SOP.

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Weekly Monster Mash – 9/2/2017

Baseline: Pre-SOP and box breathing, then ROM Drills.

Work Capacity: “Glen”

For time:

30x Clean and Jerk (135/95)
1 Mile Run
10x Rope Climb
1 Mile Run
100x Burpees

Durability: Hydrate and fuel within 30 minutes. Journal post training session SOP.

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How To React In a Fearful Situation

We want to extend out deepest sympathies to all those in Texas and Louisiana who are enduring an extreme tragedy. Stay strong and persevere.

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How To React In a Fearful Situations

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Weekly Monster Mash – 8/26/2017

Baseline: Pre-SOP and box breathing, then ROM Drills.

Work Capacity: For Time:

1 Mile run
40x Sand Bag Get up
40x Clean and Jerk (135/95)
800m Run
30x Sand Bag Get up
30x Clean and Jerk (135/95)
400m Run
20x Sand Bag Get up
20x Clean and Jerk (135/95)
200m Run
10x Sand Bag Get up
10x Clean and Jerk (135/95)

Durability: Hydrate and fuel within 30 minutes. Journal post training session SOP.

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SEALFIT Academy Graduates Share Their Experience

SEALFIT Academy is a 3-Day event to immerse yourself in the SEALFIT lifestyle and dive into the training techniques to live an uncommon life. Check out sealfit.com/sealfit-academy/ for more info and to sign up for our upcoming academy.

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How Often Should You Reevaluate Your Goals?

How Often Should You Reevaluate Your Goals?

The best-laid plans…

No one can predict the future. Even if you’ve taken care to make your goals prudently and taken into account everything you could have known at the time, if you’re ambitious enough to set a good number of goals, eventually something will come along that made your previous deadline unrealistic. Athletes are just one wrong step from a long stay on the sidelines. Organizational shake-up or bad client news puts a project on the backburner.  Enhanced job or family responsibilities decrease the time to chase our own dreams.

Of course, it’s not always bad news that forces us to reconsider our goals. If the weights suddenly feel lighter than you were expecting, or a surprise check comes in the mail, it’d be silly not to move up your debt-free date or push for even better performance.

Whichever direction your goal progress suddenly moves in, it’s important to have a framework in place that gives you a constant update on whether your goalposts need to move. One of our favorites is a process developed for split-second, life-and-death scenarios, but just as applicable to your five-year plan.

The OODA Loop

Created by Air Force Colonel John Boyd for aerial combat operations, the OODA Loop has been adapted for use in nearly every military, national security and public safety setting, as well as business, sports, and a host of other personal endeavors. Boyd observed that dogfighting involved a near-constant change in conditions and determined that success required a mindset that could quickly adapt to new information. As its name suggests, the OODA Loop is a constant cycle of Observing any changes in your situation,

Observe

This is the first and most important step: poking your head up and taking in new information. Your environment is constantly changing, both through your actions and due to forces beyond your control.

Ask yourself some questions:

      Has anything changed about my circumstances that might require me to revise my goals?
      What does my progress tell me about how achievable my targets are?
      Are there any new opportunities which would require a shift in focus?

The nature of your goals, and the kind of observations you’re looking for, should determine how often you should go on the lookout. Most fitness experts recommend waiting a week or two for results, but a sudden stabbing feeling is something to take note of. Likewise, you shouldn’t be reaching for the next rung of the ladder after one good day at work; it might be a good time to check the job board every day or so if you’ve had a sustained string of successes.

Orient

What’s important now?

Orientation is the process of synthesizing the new bit of information with the old worldview to form a new understanding of where you are. Boyd called this the most crucial phase of the loop, and it’s definitely the most complex.

Think about your real priorities. You can’t decide whether your goals need to be more ambitious, or to give yourself a little more time, until you’ve taken stock of your whole life, and where this fits in. For most of us, our family and career come first; a crisis or opportunity in those spheres might necessitate moving a pause in progress toward a financial milestone, or a revised fitness schedule that puts our target numbers a little further out. Even if a little more time or energy would get you to a personal goal much faster, it’s not an option if doing so would let you slip up.

Of course, this is also where you make sure the new information isn’t just a blip. A single off day at the gym is usually not the start of a trend; your financial plan should already account for a little tick in the red or black. The Orient phase is when you hold new observations up against the big picture, and see how big it looks in comparison.

Unlike the Observe phase, which can be fairly regularly scheduled, a new orientation is needed whenever there’s new information. Don’t risk one iota of your progress, or jeopardize your success entirely, by operating in a world gone by.

Decide

Armed with this new information, it’s time to devise a new plan of action, or to keep the old one. You’ve oriented yourself to the new post-observation reality, and it’s time to put your face back toward the horizon and figure out how to get where you’re going.

Is it time to get even more ambitious? To lay off and give some attention to some other part of your life? Is now just not the time for one of your goals? Figure that out now, and devise a new plan; alternately, keep on keeping on if the new information’s just not that important.

Act

You shouldn’t call this the “easy” part, but it’s the simplest one. It’s time to put into place the new plan you’ve been forming since the start of this process.

However, as you’ve learned, this doesn’t mean the process is over. Once you start putting into place your new plan of action, it’s time to start all over again. The OODA Loop is not a decision-making shortcut but a success algorithm you should have constantly running.

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Goal Setting Tips: Mistakes to Avoid

Goal Setting Tips: 5 Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

We’ve all been there. You start out on a new project with the wind at your back and a spring in your step, with no reason to expect you won’t end up exactly where you dreamed you’d be. Then something goes wrong. Whether it’s a major catastrophe that puts your goal forever in the horizon or a barely noticeable hiccup that snowballs into a permanent derailment, the high ambition you started don’t even resemble the results you managed to come up with.

The culprit, it may surprise you to learn, often isn’t found in the muck and mire of getting things done. As often as not, it was your actions on the bright and sunny day you set out on your adventure that doomed you to failure. Failing to calibrate your goals to human nature’s way of accomplishing them (and to being true to yourself) makes it very unlikely you’ll get them done, no matter how motivated you are throughout the process.

The SMART Goal Framework

Developed in 1981 by businessman George T. Doran, the SMART framework is five-point objective-setting guide for every avenue of life. SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely. Obviously, then, goals that don’t get achieved typically fail one or more of these criteria. Let’s take a look at some common mistakes, and discuss how to avoid them with these tips on goal setting:

Lack of Specificity

Without knowing exactly what you’re chasing, there’s not much of a chance you’ll catch it. While a lofty ideal might feel good, you can’t be more than who you are if you can’t give hard and fast rules of what achieving it will look like. Working at some vague statement of what you want will only make you feel like a failure, not because you didn’t try but because you didn’t give yourself a real chance to win.

Say, for instance, your “goal” is to get in shape. That’s great. Which of the millions of stations at thousands of gyms are you going to use for that? Instead, make your goal to be a faster runner or stronger lifter, or better yet, an 8-minute mile or a bodyweight bench. (Adjust those numbers up or down as necessary.) From there, you’re just a few minutes’ work from a plan that works.

No Method of Measuring Progress

Even if your goal meets every other criterion, if you’ve left yourself no way to track how you’re doing, you’re at serious risk of spinning your wheels. Remember that SMART goals are time-specific “What I’m doing isn’t getting me where I need to go” is something you need to know now, because every second you spend not making progress decreases your chances of ultimate success.

One of my most important tips on goal setting is that the line between achieving and not achieving your goal should be clear and objective. That way, you can stop and evaluate at any point to make sure you’re on the right path and making the right amount of progress.

Setting Goals out of Your Control

Sure, it would be great to be employee of the month or year. The only problem is, you don’t control whose picture goes up at the front of the office. Even in the best workplaces, executives with differing priorities and office politics dictate the impressions of supervisors and employers.

Don’t let others decide how you’ll feel at the finish line. Instead, set your sights on leading the team in sales or your work’s relevant metric (or better yet, meeting a number that would have the same effect). Your planning and effort, not the opinion of others, are what should inform your results.

Not Being Realistic

It happens way more often than you think: someone sets out to run a marathon. He or she buys an expensive pair of shoes, Googles a program, works out time on their schedule, pays the registration fee to motivate themselves. Three months in, on a cold, windy night, the cold, hard truth comes in: they don’t like running.

Goals that don’t match where you’re coming from aren’t going to work for you. Even if the love of your pursuit is there, the goal may not fit your lifestyle. Nothing says you can’t get off a 12-hour shift and write a novel, but that’s a tall order for most people. You won’t join the 1,000-pound club 60 days after stepping in the gym for the first time in a decade. And even if you do love running, qualifying for Boston six months after ACL surgery would require a Nobel-Prize-level medical miracle.

Build your goals for who you are and where you are, and be humble enough to admit both things. The moon will still be there when you’re ready to shoot for it.

Not Including a Deadline

It can be tempting not to put yourself on a deadline. You might not know what your future schedule will look like. You may be afraid of what the pressure will look like. Don’t let yourself fall into the trap.

Goals without a deadline tend to become dreams deferred, always one life event or another away from serious pursuit. If you’re worried about the crushing pressure of an impending due date, you’ve likely set an unrealistic goal. Once you’ve calibrated your goals to reality, commit them to reality by confidently stating when they’ll be accomplished. A well-set deadline, rather than intimidating you, can motivate you through the tougher stretches: you know for a fact when it will all pay off and you’ll be standing on the mountaintop.

Don’t worry about feeling trapped by unforeseen circumstances, either. If something comes up that makes your original deadline unrealistic, you can always reset the deadline to something achievable.

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Weekly Monster Mash – 8/19/2017

Baseline:  Pre-SOP and box breathing, then ROM Drills.

Work Capacity: 70 min. AMRAP:  

800m run
-5 Rope Climbs
-10x Man Makers (40/25)
-15x Curtis -P (95/65)

Durability: Hydrate and fuel within 30 minutes. Journal post training session SOP.

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