Building the Elite Podcast Building the Elite

In this episode, we talk about stress, training, and adaptation. This is a big topic, so we’ve broken this into a two-part podcast.

This is part two of a two-part podcast, so you might want to go check out the previous podcast if you haven’t listened to it yet. 
We wrapped up part one by discussing why and how you manage stress to ensure you adapt to your training. In this episode, we discuss what specific capabilities you should target to get the best results over time. 

In this episode, we talk about stress, training, and adaptation. This is a big topic, so we’ve broken this into a two-part podcast.

To understand programming, you must first understand how and why your body responds to training. When you understand that framework, things like how much running to do, how fast, and how often become much easier to program and adjust.

Like programming, adaptation is a complex subject that people study their entire careers. This episode will discuss the principles you need to understand when coaching yourself or others.

If you're interested in why certain programs work well while others don't, or you're looking to develop a deeper understanding of adaptation and training, this podcast is for you. 

SOF selection requires that you develop a close relationship with pain.

This doesn’t just mean lots of dramatic grimacing for the camera. Eventually, successful experiences teach us that pain can be just a signpost along a familiar path. It tells you something about where you are, but it’s not a stop sign or even a warning sign. It’s just a signal to be calibrated.

If the painful sensations of fatigue make you feel stressed and reactive and increase your desire to quit, then that stress response will worsen the feelings of fatigue. Pain triggers negative self-talk and shines the spotlight of your attention on your discomfort, which heightens your perception of pain, which turns up the volume on the self-talk, and on it goes.

Paradoxical intention is meant to break this cycle by having people try to do what holds them in fear. 

In this podcast, we explore this concept and how to apply it in your own life. 

People in the special operations community often find themselves learning to be human swiss army knives. They do intensive courses in anything from second languages to advanced trauma medicine, where their ability to succeed depends on their ability to manage their time, attention, and energy and study and learn effectively. 
For instance, we did an episode recently on how to be successful in the Special Forces medic course, known as 18D, and a consistent theme was the importance of good study habits. But nobody teaches that. People either figure it out or fail. And lots of them fail. We want to give people a framework that they can use to understand how to establish strong time management and study habits so that they can learn better and faster during challenging courses.

To do that, we talked to Dr. Karin Nordin, a Ph.D. in health behavior change, a published researcher on mindset theory, and a curriculum writer for Precision Nutrition.

Dr. Nordin is the founder and CEO of her own business, Body Brain Alliance, which provides behavior change coaching for individuals and curriculum design education for business owners. After teaching at the college level for years and then transitioning into the online coaching industry, she quickly realized that the evidence-based practices for both course design and behavior change were not being taught in an industry that desperately needed them. Now, she’s on a mission to create courses that help people change and to teach other coaches how to do the same thing.

You can go to www.bodybrainalliance.com to learn about some of Dr. Nordin's work we discussed on this call, like her Change Academy course or her coaching programs. 

Everyone wants to know the ‘secret’ to motivation. Like most topics, this isn’t as simple as repeating cliches like ‘just don’t quit’ or ‘stay hard’. These sayings can be useful as simple reminders of more complex concepts, but only if you understand the underlying process and skills that lead to that outcome.

Without those underlying processes and skills, phrases like “just don’t quit” are no more useful than a track coach yelling at his athletes to “just run faster.”

Everybody at a track meet wants to be a fast runner just like everyone who shows up at SOF selection wants to not quit. But, there is only one winner in the race, and only a select few make it through selection. The distinction lies in who can produce these outcomes when they matter – not in the ability to describe them.

Our personal experiences create the meaning that we attribute to words and concepts. Everyone can say the same words, but the meaning that those words have is unique to each person. All knowledge is local knowledge.

When a SOF operator says ‘quitting isn’t an option’ that means something to them because it’s based on real-life experience. They can distill a complex set of capabilities into a simple statement without losing its meaning. It’s that simple for them because they know how to not quit. They’ve earned the right to make that statement and mean it.

But, to the person hearing that statement without the same type of experiences and underlying skills, the words are meaningless.

In this podcast, we discuss the concept of motivation and how it relates to a reliable and adaptable set of skills that anyone can learn and apply. Our goal here is to provide the tools you need to give phrases like “motivation” and “just don’t quit” a useful sense of personal meaning.

Darkhorse Benefits is a special operations veteran-owned charitable organization. Many of their members are former medics who are actively involved in the tactical medicine community as instructors.
Not long after Russia invaded Ukraine, Darkhorse medics traveled there to train, advise, and assist people ranging from soldiers to schoolteachers in tactical medicine. They’re helping to bring in life-saving equipment like tourniquets and first-aid kits, and they’re training people to use them. 

In this episode, we talk with one of those medics, a former US Navy SEAL and SOCM medic named Kevin.

In our conversation, Kevin discusses things like the work Darkhorse is doing in Ukraine, what the conditions are like, and some of the most common injuries that they're seeing with both soldiers and civilians.

You can learn more about Darkhorse and help them bring much-needed medical equipment and training to Ukrainians by going to darkhorsebenefits.com

You can also follow them on Instagram at @darkhorsevets to see updates on their work in Ukraine.