Behavior reveals purpose

Behavior reveals purpose.

The path we're on is not determined by what we say, but by what we repeatedly do.

As Donella Meadows wrote, "If a frog turns right and catches a fly, and then turns left and catches a fly, and then turns around backward and catches a fly, the purpose of the frog has to do not with turning left or right or backward but with catching flies."

The same is true for SOF selection candidates during prep. It doesn't matter what you say you want, or how detailed your training plan is, or how much you talk about goals. What matters is what you actually do, day after day, when nobody's watching.

You can say your purpose is to prepare for selection, but if your training is erratic, your recovery inconsistent, and your decisions shaped by comfort instead of commitment, your behavior reveals the truth.

"Purposes", said Meadows, "are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals."

Selection doesn't care about your hopes and dreams. It exposes what you've built. Ultimately, your habits will always tell a clearer story than your words.

This is why, when evaluating selection candidates, we look for the daily things that they've been compounding over time. Like Meadows' frog, what do these routine behaviors reveal about their purpose?

Does their training stack the long-term adaptations they need to perform well in selection, or does it cater to their vanity or need for novelty?

Does their nutrition support their recovery, longevity, and performance, or reflect a preference for convenience and skill avoidance?

Do they consciously manage their time, or leave their consistency to chance?

Is their sleep routine focused on giving them a strong start to the next day?

Are they taking care of themselves with regular movement work?

Is there an emphasis on skill development in their program, or do they assume that "just try harder" is the solution to everything?

It's not about flawless plans or obsessing over the minutiae. It's about the candidates who prove their purpose through intelligent, long-term consistency.

If you want to change your outcome, start by changing what you do. Not what you say.

Your breathing is probably holding you back

Your breathing is probably holding you back.

Research indicates that around 25%* of well-trained endurance athletes are limited by their breathing capacity. Anecdotally, we've found this to be true for a significantly larger percentage of SOF candidates due to the nature of their training. This occurs for a variety of reasons:

1 - SOF candidates tend to be bigger than endurance specialists, which biases them toward less efficient aerobic systems relative to their mass, regardless of fitness (world-class endurance athletes are smaller for this reason).

2 - Relative strength levels required for heavy rucks, team events, etc., necessitate more time spent lifting weights, which tends to bias postural patterns and relative tissue stiffness, reducing expiratory volume.

3 - Upper body strength & work capacity demands are significantly higher, leading to more upper body muscle mass. This metabolically active tissue not only requires constant blood flow and oxygen, but also acts as 'resistance' to breathing.

Additionally, if your breathing is holding you back, you probably don't realize it, because it rarely feels that way.

For example, you might feel like you can't keep the pace you want on runs because your legs feel heavy and sluggish, or like your heart is about to jump out of your chest. And, indeed, your legs were faltering, but the problem was really that your lungs couldn't provide the necessary fuel (oxygen) and clear the waste (CO2) that your legs needed. Alternatively, your lung volume may be restricted, causing each breath to compress your heart and limit stroke volume, resulting in a higher heart rate.

So, your legs feel heavy because something else is holding them back.

For all these reasons and more, we have all our trainees perform daily individualized & generic movement work to improve and maintain their ability to move well and maximize their ventilatory capacity.

Examples of what these drills look like can be found in the first comment.

*Numbers vary depending on the population and definition of 'restricted.'

Example of movement circuits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AfJjtEOP70&list=PLh4o6NOiCweCsdIiXFdQpztoDthiM_WVZ

Survivorship bias

Don't let survivorship bias sabotage your prep.

When people look for training advice, they gravitate toward stories of the few who made it. It's tempting to copy what the "winners" did, thinking their path must be the way. But, something that worked for one person, one time, in their unique circumstances may not apply to everyone, everywhere. Looking at only those who were successful with a given process can lead you to overlook the much larger number who were not, but aren't around to talk about it.

This is called survivorship bias. For every "success story" you see, there's a long line of people who did the same workouts, ate the same food, read the same books, and washed out.

This is the potential pitfall in seeking n-1 stories to determine your path. There will always be outliers who were successful despite following a process that gave them a low probability of success. For instance, Craig (one of our coaches) joined the Navy without knowing how to swim and learned *while* he was in his selection pipeline. We cannot emphasize this enough: Don't do that. It eventually worked out for him, but being weak in the water is also one of the most surefire ways to fail. Thousands of people prove this every year, one ruined career at a time.

It's a fatal mistake to build your strategy only on the outcomes of the survivors. You're missing the data from those who broke down, failed, got injured, or quit. Those stories rarely make the highlight reel, but they're just as important, if not more so.

Selection is designed to reveal your weaknesses. Copying what worked for someone else, without understanding your own limiting factors or the power of probability, is a shortcut to failure.

If you want to be among the few who finish, look for commonalities across many candidates, not just the handful who survived. Build your program around principles, not outlier anecdotes. The road to selection is littered with the stories no one tells.

The graveyard of failed attempts is always much larger than the podium. Don't just ask what worked for the winners. Ask what broke the rest. Note the similarities. Look for patterns. That's where real learning happens.

Humans work in cycles

Humans are meant to work in cycles at different time scales, balancing stress and recovery.

The more dialed in your cycles, the better you learn, adapt, and perform.

• Hourly = periods of focused and diffused attention throughout the day 
• Daily = sleep and wake cycles
• Weekly = difficult and recovery days
• Monthly = overreaching and deload weeks 
• Yearly = performance and learning/exploratory-focused months or quarters 

This doesn’t mean there isn’t room for variability. Resilient people’s cycles can adapt to bigger disruptions or deviations during stressful periods.

For example, more resilient people: 

1. Can handle longer and more challenging days during the week because their sleep is deeper and more restorative. 
2. Can handle larger training volumes and ‘you have to perform’ weeks and adapt faster when given a chance to recover. 
3. And, they can recover faster and more often in a SOF selection because, in every spare moment, they can switch off their stress response and rest and recover. 

They accomplish all this by being adept at balancing stress and recovery across different time scales. They can quickly turn their stress responses on and off, which enables them to avoid living in the ‘gray zone’ where they never recover or truly push themselves to their limits.

If you struggle to take breaks during the day, sleep well, take a day off, do a deload week, or enjoy a vacation, you need to retune your brain and body. Recovery comes first. Learning how to relax and unwind is the first step in achieving higher levels of performance.

Our bodies adapt outside of training, so if you can’t recover effectively, even the ideal training plan won’t lead to the results you want.