Today's quick fix is tomorrow's weakness

Every crutch you add now makes you more breakable later.

If your daily routine relies on pre-workout powders to get moving or SARMs to push through training, you’re not solving the real problem. You’re just hiding it. These interventions might help mask poor sleep, bad nutrition, unmanaged stress, or basic training errors. But every time you reach for an external fix instead of fixing the foundation, you’re shrinking your margin for error.

This is the classic trap of shifting the burden to the intervenor: The quick fix gives relief, but at a cost. Instead of building autonomy and resilience, you get dependent. Sleep aids might knock you out, but over time, you need more to get the same effect. SARMs, stimulants, and even endless “exercise candy” let you work harder for a while, but your real baseline is slipping backward underneath. Now you need a double scoop of pre-workout just to show up, and you can’t push through a session without it.

Every external crutch you add means there’s less slack in the system. The minute that prop gets taken away or runs out, you’re stuck with whatever you’ve been avoiding: Poor movement, low energy, fragile sleep, zero stress tolerance. The underlying system is weaker, not stronger.

You won’t have your favorite powder, pill, or “hack” when you’re cold, wet, and moving on empty in selection. The cadre won’t care if you can’t function without a chemical jumpstart.

The goal isn’t to see how hard you can push when everything is just right, and the chemistry is perfect. It’s to build a system resilient enough to function, adapt, and excel under stress with nothing but what you bring in your mind and body.

If you’re serious about SOF selection, focus on the hard stuff: real sleep, solid nutrition, basic cooking skills, stress management, recovery, movement quality, and metabolic flexibility. Build a foundation that can’t be knocked out from under you the moment a crutch gets taken away.

The more you depend on outside solutions, the less resilient you become. Don’t trade autonomy for a temporary edge. Train to need less, not more. The only support you can rely on is the one you build yourself.

Attention comes before everything else

Managing attention is the first and most crucial step in becoming more resilient.

Attention occurs outside stress responses, thinking, emotions, physical sensations, etc. So, the better we manage our attention, the more cognitive oversight we retain even when stress is high and cognitive function is impaired.

The goal of improving our attentional regulation skills is to see more clearly, not to control our minds or think more clearly. In fact, this capacity has nothing to do with thinking. The point is to notice what's occurring in our body and mind before we respond: emotions, sensations, thoughts, and impulses.

The root of emotional intelligence, pain & fatigue resistance, and cognitive performance is learning to pause between stimulus and response. If you can notice and sit with an intense sensation, thought, emotion, or impulse before responding, you can learn how to deal with hardship without *needing* anything to be different.

You can be in pain without suffering.

You can feel intense emotions without them hijacking your actions.

You can notice thoughts and impulses without acting on them.

Noticing comes before thinking or responding.

The downstream effect of improving our ability to regulate attention is improved self-awareness (e.g., pattern recognition). And, when we know ourselves and can direct our attention well, we can much more effectively change our default responses.

Armed with this information, we can consistently place ourselves in situations that stress our ability to remain calm and learn how to thrive, not just survive the chaos of an arduous path.

You have to feel it to heal it

As Dr. Krista Scott-Dixon says, you have to feel it to heal it.

You can't logic your way through a breaking point. You can't just read about stress, or visualize your way out of pain, shame, or fear. The only way out is through, by experiencing it in real-time, accepting it for what it is, and riding it out until you find the other side.

That's why, at some point in the later stages of your selection prep training with us, you'll do workouts designed to be just a little too much. Not because you're failing, but because you're training.

This isn't just a physical process. The goal is to gain direct experience with doubting yourself, feeling like you don't have enough to meet the challenge, and carrying your body through regardless. You must know what it feels like to step into discomfort, walk through "not good enough" and keep going anyway. "He who learns," as Aeschylus wrote, "must suffer."

Pushing difficult emotions aside doesn't erase them. They simply get buried, only to show up later as anxiety, frustration, emotional numbness, or cycles of shame.

In selection, you won't be able to hide from these feelings. SOF instructors are professionals at finding your weak points, and they will exploit every crack in your armor. If you haven't learned to sit with discomfort, vulnerability, or doubt - if you haven't felt it and survived it -you'll break when it matters most.

Feeling uncomfortable isn't weakness. It's part of the path to strength. The only way to get stronger is to expose yourself to the full range of what you'll face, without trying to fix or run from it. You don't become resilient by hiding from the least fun forms of discomfort, but by walking into them and coming out the other side.

If you avoid the hard stuff in training, you won't be ready when it counts.

If you want confidence, stability, and the ability to recover from setbacks, practice being present with discomfort now. You can't shortcut this work. You have to feel it to heal it.

The next time a workout pushes you to your edge, stay there. Let yourself feel it. Learn who you are, and see what you can build from that place.

Your training program should adapt with you

Your training program should adapt as you become more capable.

New mental skills or improved physical capabilities will change the function and outputs of other systems. This dynamic is called cross-influence. Humans are complex, and changes in one system will create a cascade of effects in related systems.

For example, let's assume your current limiting factor is your aerobic energy system. Your efficiency and cognitive bandwidth will improve as you become more aerobically fit. So, at the same aerobic output during a long ruck, you have an increased ability to think, reason, and plan. This is a good thing (in the long run), but now you have to get better at managing thoughts, self-talk, and your reaction to pain & fatigue.

Before, you could disassociate and go into a 'mental fog.' Now, you're mentally present, and it sucks. To combat this, you must develop the necessary skills to take advantage of the improvements in another seemingly unrelated system in the body.

The dynamic relationships between different systems are often predictable, and a good training program will adapt and adjust to these new interactions over time. It's also one of the reasons why repeating the same program over and over doesn't work.

As new limiting factors arise, they must be addressed to continue progressing and not simply hide liabilities that can and will eventually be exposed. If your old training program didn't do that the first time, it's not magically going to in the future.

Adapt your approach as you become more capable, or you'll quickly get stuck in a cycle of reacting to side effects.