Living with a SEAL: 31 Days Training with the Toughest Man on the Planet

by Jesse Itzler

my successes in life have come from learning how to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.

This is a habit I have. When I see or read about someone interesting, I call them up and basically ask them to be my friend.

“To you it’s fourteen degrees ’cause you’re telling yourself it’s fourteen degrees!”

“In extreme heat, it’s a totally different mind-set, bro. You have to get medieval. Embrace it! Grind it out. Think about how others are suffering. Enjoy the pain.”

I find that endurance running is more of a mental challenge than a physical challenge, and I’m pretty good at blocking out the pain and boredom of long runs.

“We’re going to stay here until you do a hundred.”

I’ve never heard her curse, but she has this look that she’d give you: her go-to move. Silence.

“I like my feet to be the first footprints in the sand,”

SEAL has two gears: idle and full out.

His specials tonight are tossed bananas and running miles.

“Six in the a.m. and three miles at night,” he repeats. “We need to build this foundation.”

“Sweetie, SEAL says I need to get out of my comfort zone.

I don’t do shit for applauses. I don’t do shit for fanfare. I do shit for me. —SEAL

I don’t think about yesterday. I think about today and getting better. —SEAL

We do five pull-ups (nickels) and then ten push-ups (dimes) “every minute on the minute.”

It doesn’t have to be fun. It has to be effective. —SEAL

We do fifteen sets of ten push-ups, with thirty seconds of rest between sets.

“When you think you’re done, you’re only at forty percent of what your body is capable of doing. That’s just the limit that we put on ourselves.”

He was taught that if you have a job to do, you do it with 120 percent effort.

He runs like a submarine. Silent. Deadly.

I eat only fruit until noon. That’s been my thing since I read Fit for Life by Harvey Diamond in 1992.

“Fruit till noon, brother.” One of the main underlying philosophies in his book is that we use more energy for digestion than all other bodily functions combined.

Any success I have ever had in my life usually occurred when I was not chasing the money but was doing things out of passion.

“Failure is just life’s way of nudging you and letting you know you’re off course.”

“There’s only one rule in training: If it doesn’t suck, we don’t do it.”

just like to go to sleep hungry… so I wake up hungry. Life is all about staying out of your comfort zone.”

“Sheets” are small dissolvable strips that you place on your tongue (think Listerine strip) that are loaded with caffeine, B-12, and other vitamins and nutrients.

This is our push-up routine: Do one push-up then stand up and wait fifteen seconds, then go down and do two push-ups and wait fifteen seconds and so on, until we get up to ten push-ups, and then we start taking thirty-second breaks. For push-ups sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen, SEAL allows us to take forty-five seconds between sets.

“Do six-mile runs in the mornings and three at night. And don’t forget to hit the push-ups. Make sure you get two hundred in every day.

“Whatever you got going on, someone else has more pain. You gotta learn how to fight through it. No matter what it is… Think about someone else and take a suck-shit pill.”

“Money is fun to make, fun to spend, and fun to give away. That sums it all up.” He loves it!

Remember when you told me to ‘control my mind’ the first day you moved in with me, well, I’m telling you in business… ‘control the situation.’”

All you really need to do is get your push-up and sit-up routine consistent, and you can see amazing results.

So, back to basics. I do ten push-ups followed by as many sit-ups as I can until the second hand on the clock hits 12 again. Then I start the push-ups and sit-ups again. We repeat that for thirty minutes nonstop. By the end of the workout, my core muscles, chest, and triceps are cooked. Plus my heart rate is up in the mid-150s.

A thousand push-ups is something I could never have imagined doing. It just shows that repetition and consistency equal results.

The simplicity that SEAL has is one of the most important things in life. He gets to do what he loves every day. He lives stress-free.