Mark Divine's Blog, page 55

Weekly Monster Mash – 2/25/2016

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

Work Capacity: 90 minute AMRAP:

1K Row
200m Farmer Carry (55/35)
800m Run with a Slam Ball

Durability: Kokoro yoga or Active Stretch. Hydrate and fuel within 30 minutes.

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The Mark Divine BLOG: Q&A Session with Mark!

Hello tribe! It’s been a while since I’ve done a Q&A so I’m making some time in today’s blog to answer some of the questions I’ve been getting through social media. Here we go:

@RyanDavis via Twitter:  

Q: @MarkDivine What to do if you don’t feel like your “Why” is complete? It’s a “Why” impostor, or a “why” that doesn’t fit?

A: I think most feel their why can be better defined or refined… in essence, it is never complete because “we” are never complete. But this doesn’t mean we give up and stop trying to understand ourselves. In fact, I would like to say that this is a good thing because it shows great self-awareness, that you are growing and not satisfied with the status quo. It is a mistake to think that you will someday have it all figured out and your decisions will flow magically from a crystal clear “why.” You just get closer and closer to your truth and make the best decisions you can moment to moment.

@DJElliott via Twitter:

Q: Have you been watching SIX and if so have you enjoyed it? Do they capture any of the life of a SEAL?

A: We had a great time training the actors and they each told me what a profound impact that training had on them—and later they said in interviews that SEALFIT helped them understand what a real team felt like, and the incredible sacrifice and suffering SEALs go through to get and do, their job.

I haven’t seen the show (yet) because my schedule has been super busy, but I hear it is excellent. The military advisor, Mitch Hall is a great friend who served in a platoon I led at SEAL Team THREE. I know a lot of my SEALFIT and Unbeatable Mind teams are watching it and love it!

@YoungZion via Twitter:

Q: Do you have any detail on anything new you’re cooking for 2017?

A: Hi @YoungZion! We have a few cool things coming. 2016 was a year of transition for me and I did a lot of thinking about what comes next. A new version of my “why” is unfolding, and I want to impact more people positively but can’t do it in person very well without crushing my body and motivation. So this is what is coming:

Courage Foundation –  I know what impact Unbeatable Mind training can have with people who are lost or suffering – so I am launching a 501c3 non-profit organization called Courage Foundation to work with populations in serious hurt locker…starting with prisoners, veterans suffering from PTSD, and abused women. We are hosting an online fundraising auction March 1-10 with many cool things to bid on (including a private training day with me!) to help get this off the ground. To check out the items up for auction, CLICK HERE. Hooyah!

 

SEALFIT Bootcamp – soft launch late March. This is a high-end video production of our new training regimen which is like a SEALFIT OPWOD (our most advanced fitness training model) without the barbell work. Like p90X you will be able to watch, learn and follow along as I or one of my coaches lead you through a killer workout which will not only make you functionally fit for life, but also drill the big four skills of mental toughness relentlessly. Each workout is meant also to cultivate a SEALFIT value such as Honor, Courage, and Commitment. It will be a great way to bring more people into the SEALFIT lifestyle because – though extremely challenging and effective – the training is also simple, uses only a few easy to use tools (pull-up bar, box, jump rope, sand bag, and dumbbell) and is scalable for all levels.

 

Unbeatable Leader Book and Journal – Kickstarter campaign this summer or early fall. On the creative front, I have started to work on my next book – which is a new look at Unbeatable Mind training for leaders and organizations. Based on my personal experience building teams and companies, and a bunch of awesome UM students who have taken the principles into their workplace. I am stoked about this new book, and at the same time worried that I won’t get it right! I just have to get her done and put it out for you to decide if it is worthy. I am doing a Kickstarter campaign because I have wanted to use this tool for some time – and it is a great way to get feedback, traction and provide more value to inside supporters like you.

 

Sean Doran via LinkedIn:

Q: Is there one thing life has taught you that would have saved you a lot of hassle to know when you were 17?

A: Hi Sean! I would say I would get my ego out of the way, be more grateful for what I have, and be kinder to people. I guess that is three! But the bottom line is there is not strategy or tactic, a “what I would “do” different…rather it is how I would “be” that I would like to be different.

 

Ben A. via Facebook:

Q: Do you use any pre-workout supplements or drinks? What do you look for in a supplement?

A: Hi Ben! I only use AMPLE – it is a complete meal in a bottle. I drink about a third before a workout, then finish it after. Not only do I stay hydrated but I get tons of healthy fat, protein, and carbs to fuel my training. I think that when you are fueling well, sleeping well, and taking enough rest time from training, then pre-workout supplements are unnecessary. And post-workout, you need to fuel with real food. The problem is that it can be hard to get all the micro-nutrients and gut probiotics the way we eat – that is why the supplement industry is so big. If we eat better with things like Ample we don’t need those other things to drain our checking accounts!

 

Paul G via Facebook: 

Q: I would like to better understand what is the Witness and what is the Ego. From what I understood so far, the Witness is the guy that is keeping the reptile, mammals and monkey mind. So, what is the Ego? It resides in the same place as Witness but it has the opposite characteristic?

A: Great question Paul! Consider the witness to be the part of your mind that sits on one side of a window that separates your deeper, wiser spiritual self, from your shallow, egoic, selfish self. It is on the wise side and wants to see what is going on and to help and be connected to your outer rational mind. But it can’t see clearly or help out because the window is cloudy (or cracked). So, your witness can’t participate in your daily life and is hidden from your rational mind’s view by the mental chatter and internal dialogue loops that it runs constantly (that monkey mind you refer to).

The work of Unbeatable Mind and meditation will polish and fix that window so that when it is clear you will suddenly experience your witnessing self, and think and act more from your wiser, spiritual aspects. This is how the witness is different from ego…ego is identification with matter, and witness is identification with spirit.

 

Michael L via Facebook:

Q: What podcasts do you listen to? Who do you look to for inspiration and motivation?

A: Michael, you may find it hard to believe but I don’t listen to any specific podcasts. I use my time to train the five mountains and have found that most of what I know and need to know is found inside, not “out there.” Having said that, I think there is some wonderful info coming from podcasts, much of it very practical and helpful, and I pick up a lot of tips when I interview the podcasters for my own Unbeatable Mind Podcast. Strange world we live in!

 

That’s it for this round of Q&A. If you’ve got a question for me, post it on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or send it to me at info@unbeatablemind.com and you may see it next time!

Hooyah!

Mark

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Weekly Monster Mash – 2/18/2016

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

Work Capacity: For time with a swim buddy:

2 mile swim
6 mile run
2 mile swim

Durability: Kokoro yoga or Active Stretch. Hydrate and fuel within 30 minutes.

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Weekly Monster Mash – 2/11/2016

Baseline: Pre-SOP and box breathing, then ROM Drill

Work Capacity: 100 Curtis – P for time (115/105)

*EMOM perform 7 Burpees.

*For every minute after 30 minutes = 1 Sandbag Get up per side. Complete sandbag get ups after all Curtis- P are done.

Durability: Kokoro yoga or Active Stretch. Hydrate and fuel within 30 minutes.

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Weekly Monster Mash – 2/4/2016

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

Work Capacity: Complete for time:

400m Walking lunge
400m run
400m Bear Crawl
400m Run
400m Crab Walk
400m run
400m run with 45# plate
400m run

Durability: Kokoro yoga or Active Stretch. Hydrate and fuel within 30 minutes.

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Weekly Monster Mash – 1/28/2016

Hero WOD: U.S. Army Captain David J. Thompson, 39, of Hooker, Oklahoma, commander of Operational Detachment Alpha 3334, Company C, 3rd Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group (Airborne), based in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, was killed on January 29, 2010, while supporting combat operations in the Wardak Province of Afghanistan. Thompson is survived by his wife, Emily, their two daughters, Isabelle and Abigail, his parents, Charles and Freida, and his sister Alisha Mueller.

Baseline: Pre-SOP and box breathing, ROM drills then 3 rounds: 10x goblet squat, 10x ring row, 200m run.

Work Capacity: “Thompson”

10 rounds for time of:

15 ft Rope Climb, 1 ascent
95 pound Back Squat, 29 reps
135 pound barbells Farmer carry, 10 meters

*Begin the rope climbs seated on the floor.

Durability: Kokoro yoga or Active Stretch. Hydrate and fuel within 30 minutes.

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The Mark Divine BLOG: Overhauling Your Diet

PERSONALIZING YOUR HIGH-PERFORMANCE NUTRITION APPROACH

Overhauling your diet is not an easy task—the availability of cheap food and the ingredients used to make that food make it tough. Consider the statistics that shed light on the uphill battle: some 45 million Americans each year try a diet, spending an estimated $33 billion on weight loss products.

So in winning the war in your mind first, it’s critical to have a visceral grasp on your why.

If you’ve read my book, The Way of the SEAL, you know how much value I put in this step. You must know your WHY.

Here are the core reasons why it would be worth your time overhauling your diet.

Improve your body composition. Improving body composition means either shredding off unwanted body fat or it means increasing lean muscle mass. Or both.

Improving body composition drives a large part of the fitness magazine industry. Editors put models with great abs on the cover because they know it boosts how many magazines they’ll sell. The primary interest here, obviously, is the “I want to look good in bed” interest. Or look good in a way to attract potential mates. Hey—there’s nothing wrong with this. Evolutionary biologists will be happy to explain to you how all-powerful the drive to procreate is.

Reducing the Risk of Disease. The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute reports that too much body fat can cause or contribute to the following severe health problems: Heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, type-2 diabetes, cancer, osteoarthritis, infertility. A person who is overweight, with the chronic cellular inflammation that is associated with metabolic problems, can decrease these risks in tremendous ways. In other words, everything your grandmother told you about why eating well can make you healthy is basically true. I’m not telling you anything new here.

Genes—the hand of cards you were born with—are the keyboard that your diet plays upon. Some folks can eat a bad diet and smoke a pack of cigarettes every day until their 90. Others who follow the same routine might have a heart attack at 38. You can get a decent idea of where things stack up for you by looking up your family history. Founder of the Zone Diet, Dr. Barry Sears, was motivated to apply his biochemistry and medical training toward figuring out this interplay because his father and uncles died from heart disease, all around the age of 50. “I knew I was a ticking time bomb,” he says. Sears ultimately embarked on a journey to try to repress the heart-disease genes he was born with by eating a healthy, anti-inflammatory diet. It’s working so far: Sears is now 70 years-old.

Fitness and Athletic Performance. Generally speaking, athletic superstars are athletic superstars not because of what they eat but the genes they were born with. Training is a help, and so is good coaching and other factors. Only in recent years have top athletes in major sports been working with nutritionists in droves. There may be a lot of reasons why this is so, but surely one of them is that some athletes have dismissed the need to worry about diet as long as they exercise a lot.

The question that we really want to drill into is this: Can nutritional dieting be used to improve physical performance? The answer, unsurprisingly, is yes. Research is now clearly showing that by eating a diet that takes it easy on your insulin system, you can, over time, transfer a sugar-burning metabolism into a fat-burning metabolism—allowing you to access stores of body fat for fuel rather than being restricted to the limited supplies of liver and muscle glycogen.

Energy. Do you have a problem with energy and mood throughout any given day? Waking up tired, going to bed exhausted, and just grinding through the day?

If you do, know this: It doesn’t have to be that way. By overhauling your diet, resetting your metabolism and building in a sustainable approach to food, you can look forward to waking up refreshed and full of energy—an energy that stays high throughout the day, until you start to wind down for a night of good, replenishing sleep.

Cognitive performance. People tend to think of Navy SEALs as physical studs capable of incredible acts of stamina, endurance, and all-around athletic prowess. They would be right. But the work also requires superior levels of cognitive performance—even when it’s pitch black out, 0300 hours and you’ve been going all-out for hours or days. (Attend one of our SEALFIT Academies or camps, and you’ll notice how much emphasis we put on mental acuity and high-performance thinking in stressful situations). Poor nutrition practices can sap brain cells of the nutrients needed to perform routine mental functions, like making good decisions and committing things to memory. Good nutrition, on the other hand, can have you humming along at high-speed even late in the afternoon after a long, challenging schedule of work.

Emotional resilience. Emotional resilience is the heart of mental toughness. In our Unbeatable Mind Academy, we teach a process for changing mental habits so that dark thoughts and emotions don’t pull you under water into the jaws of the Fear Wolf. By interdicting these thoughts and feelings through a process of awareness and redirection, we learn how to transmute the energy of these feelings from a negative to a positive. There’s a lot of biology involved here as well and food is a major player. When things get tough, if blood glucose is low and you don’t have the metabolic machinery to access alternative fuel sources, a negative, self-defeating thought can trigger your brain to start shutting things down. Perceived exertion goes way up, thanks to this action by the brain, and everything feels a lot harder. The option of quitting begins to look good, as you weaken physically, mentally and emotionally. While there are ways to override these forces through training, if your nutrition was optimal—you will have a lot more psychological staying power in the bank to draw upon.

These are the major reasons why you might be inspired to do the work to replace a scattershot, junky diet with a high-test, sustainable nutrition program. So, what is your why? What’s most important to you on that list?

There is no one perfect nutrition plan that suits everyone, so if you want to perform at your peak you need to use your own body-mind as a test lab. One way to experiment right away is by joining our 6 Weeks to Cleaner Eating Challenge that starts on February 1st. This is a terrific program to help reset your system and challenge you to examine what foods affect your performance and energy levels.

I hope you take your fueling to another level and we stand by to help. In the meantime, train hard, stay focused and eat for performance, not just pleasure!

–Mark Divine

P.S. If you’re ready to make some true changes to your diet, join the 6 Weeks to Cleaner Eating Challenge that begins on February 1st. We’ve got coach Melanie, the SEALFIT team and of our favorite fitness and nutrition experts to help you get lean, clean and become a fat burning machine! CLICK HERE to learn more.

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Weekly Monster Mash – 1/21/2016

Baseline: Pre-SOP and box breathing, ROM drills then, 2 rounds:  200m run, 25m Bear Crawl, 25m Crab Walk.

Work Capacity: Complete 500 Burpees for time:

*Every 10 min. Complete a 400m Run.

Durability: Kokoro yoga or Active Stretch. Hydrate and fuel within 30 minutes.

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Weekly Monster Mash – 1/14/2016

Work Capacity: For Max Distance/ Reps:

30 min. Max Distance Row
30 min. Max Distance Run
30 min. Max Burpees

Durability: Kokoro yoga or Active Stretch. Hydrate and fuel within 30 minutes.

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The Mark Divine BLOG: 4 Exercises for Developing Mental Toughness

We head into the new year full of hope and New Year’s commitments… many of which we will ditch like a candy wrapper soon. There are many reasons for the lack of follow-through on good intentions. Perhaps it won’t be a surprise to hear me say that taking on a new habit requires mental toughness, and mental toughness is a skill.

So, though we want to forge a beautiful body and healthy lifestyle, the reality is we must first forge mental toughness… then those other things we desire follow naturally. It is true that mental toughness is cultivated through a tough life, tough choices and tough experiences. Ask anyone attempting BUDS or Special Forces training and you will note that they develop toughness and resiliency through the commitment and preparation for these programs, as well as by enduring the hardships of them. The good news here is mental toughness can be developed by voluntarily accepting tough things into your life, and facing them with discipline and courage.

However, mental toughness can also be cultivated by practicing a few skills daily, which may be more practical and less painful than going through BUDS. I submit that practicing these mental skills daily, learning the workings of your mind, will ultimately develop the same toughness as a Navy SEAL. After all, mental toughness really comes down to making the right choices at the right time for the right reasons, no matter what is happening externally. It is about developing control over your mental and emotional domains, like the ancient Stoic who ignored the outside in order to refine his or her inside. There are four key skills in this training, which we teach in depth in my Unbeatable Mind Inner Circle.

Control your breathing: Awareness of our breath, and control of it, is the best tool to bring initial control over our mind. Breath control will bring a present moment awareness absent of fear or future unknowns. We are just present when we practice breath control, and our minds begin to focus and able to tap into greater energy.

Maintain a positive mind: What wolf are you feeding, right now, fear or courage? Once we have control of our breath, and hence our minds, then the need is to reinforce positive self-talk. I recommend asking yourself ten times a day: “What wolf am I feeding now?” and activating a positive internal dialogue to feed the courage wolf.

Envision your desired future: Envisioning is the skill of winning in your mind before you step foot onto the battlefields of your life. Envisioning involves developing your imagination and then imagining a more complete or desired future for yourself… and then practicing that daily.

Set goals aligned with your purpose: Your goals need to be connected to your ethos, or defining your purpose and stand in life. Many times we commit to new year resolutions that have no connection to our ethos, so when the newness wears off we can’t answer “why am I doing this again?” Your goals should endure the challenges to their need, so that when the going gets tough and quitting sounds like an option, we can persevere easily because our major driving aim, or purpose in life, is in the line of fire.

Practice these four skills daily and you will develop the mental toughness of an elite warrior. Then those New Year resolutions will be easy to stick to, once the commitment is made. I hope to see you in training in 2017 with SEALFIT or Unbeatable Mind so, together, we can make this an amazing year.

— Mark Divine

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