How To Train To Become Amazing At Combat | Navy Seal DJ Shipley

Consistency will get you farther than anything else if you set out a training plan you can only maintain for 6 weeks and then you think you'll hold on to that for the next 6 years you won't no but if you chip away at it and you make a repeatable cycle now it's just part of your day I'm training for the instate I'm training for the instate why do you do that cuz it makes me better at that you're trying to engineer yourself to Become a combat machine yes your body is made of flesh and blood

so you have to attend to the fact that it is limited in its adaptive capability like the North Star is combat robot you're down here with mushy humans and you got to kind of take little step stabs at it and come back stab it and come back stab it and come back and over weeks months and years you got to a level where you're like substantially closer to like sidebo level it's building up to it it's Building the tolerance and a lot of the stuff we do in work is incline weighted treadmill walks you'd put

on your kit you'd slap on a gun you'd slink behind you and you'd watch ESPN and walk on an incline trying to get ready for Afghanistan hey folks Dr Mike here for RP strength and today I joined in our super brand new amazing studio as Scott Vader guy says don't touch anything so I'm just kind of sitting here awkwardly I'm joined by DJ Shipley DJ what's up Man really stoked to be here dude thank you so much for having me stop I place is beautiful Jim's badass and he said everything we paid him to say

DJ uh who are you tell us a quick blur about who you are and then I'll tell the folks listening why we're talking to you I'm DJ Shipley I am a husband a father retired Navy SEAL and a knowledge transfer specialist co-founder and co- CEO of gbrs group you like up in your merch nice sure dude appreciate that you Bet I'll take a payment after as usual yep Navy SEAL retired Navy Co medically retired how long were you in the service for in total 17 years so from 2002 to 2019 is this where like you

sit in an office building and then you do workouts and you tell people your SE or did you see some combat a little bit of combat little bit here and there no folks he's being very polite he saw combat for a longer time than I've seen non-combat so we wanted to bring DJ in for a few Reasons one he's just cool also ultimate dad bought energy we're in yeah but we're here to talk about an intersection of some of the stuff that you specialize in DJ and the Fitness World which I guess is what we

do on this channel I was always trying to get this to go into the O Direction but my body is ugly and so is my face and so people told me that just keep talking about Sport Science and just stop taking your clothes off especially the clothes that reveal well You know what mhm so now here I am talking to folks like you and we're going to talk about I think three things today we're going to talk about myself as a sports scientist and a Brazilian judicial practitioner you as super Commando uh and your specialty

now your career now is training folks for tactical applications which means going into really difficult situations and dealing with them Combat situations fire rescue that sort of thing and we're going to talk about the idea that some folks in this space let's just call them on average basically like police officers who regularly see physical engagements in their I was going to say deployment that's not what it is on their beat is that's like the 1980s term just my beat um some of them are Training really well a lot of them are training very very trying

to be polite in a way that's very lacking in a way that leaves a lot to be desired so what you and I are going to talk through is the core philosophy of modern kind of uh local combat Doctrine how that works what implications it has and then on the back end what does that mean for how police officers who are in the street deal with Perss how should they be training their physical bodies and their skill set for that eventuality and it's not like hypothetical eventuality it happens dayto day how can you do all

the training you need in order to become so good at that that you're really putting your best foot forward so we'll talk about that after that we'll talk a little bit about you've been what's the colloquial term downrange is that what they call it what does that mean what Does downrange mean just downrange like U if you're on a flat range and I'm going to go forward to the firing line it's downrange yeah where bullets are flying yeah and so that so you've been deployed to combat a whole crapload of times and I'm going to

ask you a bunch of questions about what is the fitness scene like for people who serve in the US military here Stateside at decently well equipped foreign bases and Allied soil and then also like in a foxhole That you dug with a shovel do you bring like a dumbbell in there is there protein bar available we'll talk all about that and then we'll talk about uh some mindset stuff because you're a bit of a mindset specialist and specifically the mindset stuff I have to ask you is going to be kind of like what are the

good and not so good mindsets that you takeen to various stages of your combat training beginning starting to catch some wind under your Sails and then that real perilous time where you think you know things but maybe you could be doing better big mindset stuff mhm that all good with you absolutely Yahoo all right forward to it all right so what tactical training should look like regular Police SWAT fire rescues on there and absolutely every single person who plans on holding a weapon in any military force on Earth this is the very top line of

what they should be Doing and how can we possibly recommend you and I what people should be doing we have to start kind of I don't want to say first principles but we have to start with what is it that we're actually doing in combat and yes we are treating police interactions with perpetrators as combat because hopefully they're not combat but what you train for is to be ready for when goes as far south as possibly it can versus like oh this will just be a nice person and I'll get their cat out of the

tree and shake their hand so this is kind of this area of combat Doctrine as I understand it I'm a total dilatant I never went to school for this just all make belief nonsense I'm a nerd I watch a lot of YouTube this is it so uh what we're training for in tactical combat training please correct me if I'm wrong at any point feel free to embellish at any point true we are looking for just a few things the Ability to defend against resistance the ability to move freely around resistance which means away from it

so you have to be able to haul ass like your physical body has to be able to haul ass let's say you're a cop you get out of your vehicle you draw on what you think as one individual turns out it's a gang now you're getting four guys shooting at you you have to be able to egress quickly if you physically can't move your body really fast is going to Be a bad time yep uh you have to be able to move around resistance someone is hold up shooting at you you got to be able

to move laterally in order to get the good angle on them and you have to what do you guys call it pushing up you got to be able to move toward resistance and generally the more athletically you can move in those circumstances the higher probability that things go not very poorly for you agreed so far Agree you're also training so so far we're like okay so you're just like an athlete you're like a track runner or a gymnast all same same yeah same but there's another layer which is the ability to impose coercive or deadly

force against resistance and course a force just means like putting someone down to the ground putting them into handcuffs deadly force means the obvious and in uh Modern Combat Doctrine or sort of combat Theory the way that This works is in concentric circles that start at your body and move out so the closest combat you can possibly have to yourself is grappling Jiu-Jitsu Wrestling Judo Etc about a few feet out is striking kicking punching Etc you can't grab them but you can sure punch them or kick them with police forces punching and kicking is you

looked down upon with combat operations yeah if you can't get to a knife or whatever like that's What's going to be happening so far so good yeah sometimes you got to be able to create space for sure for sure way to do with a strike yes uh we're talking about also becoming um able to use handheld Weaponry non-projectile Weaponry knife Club whatever it may be you have projectile Weaponry tasers handguns for police everything for everyone else and you have to be able to coordinate with teams is probably one of The biggest weapons you have as

a human who is in a really difficult situation as a police officer as a military person isn't just it's not just you sometimes it is a lot of times it's what team assets do I have next to me how do I communicate with the guys how do I get other guys to come help me and that means fellow local responders you have a potential for kind of distant responders like if you have sniper cover that's really nice um and of course not so much For police but more for military guys um you called into weapons

platform operators uh Vehicles armor aircraft drones cuz like you that's just it's not just an army of one you could be like there's a lot of in that building we don't like get rid of it happens that's all of what you do in combat more or less other than medical and Evac procedures and comms is there anything left over is there any of for contingencies With an example of a contingency we'll say you're doing a a helicopter insertion and you have two to make one meaning you plan on two birds one of one gets shot

down you still continue Mission what do you do land a second Hilo offload everybody who's still labor the go you have to bring in a backup aircraft to pull those guys out all those things have to go if it's a vehicle operation the exact same thing it's a bump plan so vehicle three goes Down all those half the vehicles are going to vehicle 4 half vehicle or half packs are going to vehicle 2 sure be able to rep all those out so they happen automatically CU if not you got 65 guys on the ground they

hit an IED now work it out if you haven't planned and rehearsed all that it's not going to cleaning it is absolute chaos because now you don't know the external threats now you get hit an ID and now people start shooting at you now solve the Problem if you don't know the driver the pasture and the turret gun are all going to vehicle too if anything happens if everybody doesn't know that there's a huge gap and it ain't going to get better when they start shooting at you right 100% be able to solve it 100%

beautiful okay so we add that in is there a police equivalent of that I suppose there is yeah there is you know responses for backup and contingency operations for Anything else sure you know if you're doing an assault and one guy goes down primary entry what do they typically do they typically pull back yes like not going to be a hard assault they're not going to keep advancing forward but you have to know that if you don't know it and one guy rushes in you've committed this entire assault Force now to those yes because you

didn't know the proper stuffs yeah you're like Bob come back uh too late now you got to follow them in Now you've committed the entire force you can't just do one of these like it's good we never really like Bob anyway yeah what is the what is the well I'm not going to say this word it's the c word they use in the Australia and the UK all the time I love that word Bob's a c word Bob's a c word hard tea which hard tea which is real bad yeah so for all of these

demands we have a few different types of training that can make us better at them And this is kind of cool because we have all these demands and the next layer of I'm going to talk about confirm with you of course please correct anything I say that's wrong is going to be a smaller list because it turns out that a lot of the stuff that you have to do is attended to by one type of training can attend to three different kinds of things mhm so we're already seeing a consolidation and then we'll have Another

consolidation after this to be like okay in the real world how do I really train because I'm about to list a lot of stuff and then some folks listening could be like okay so I'm a police officer I have administrative duties I have Patrol duties like my actual job and you're telling me that I have to train all of this stuff you're about to say on top of that and what I'm going to say is sort of but a lot of it gets condensed into something that Actually doesn't take a trillion years to do so

training types whole body strength power for all movement your body has to be able to exert High forces and rapidly if necessary and it has to be able to do this with single or multiple efforts all the way to endurance so not only do you have to be able to like pull a suspect down on the ground hard you also have to kind of half Sprint towards the a guy you didn't get and chase him down and Everything in between yep and whole body strength and power training and whole body endurance training just two kinds

of training kind of cover almost all the things you need to do as far as with your human body there's a little bit more to that because then there is The Locomotion side so you do some kind of locomotion training which means typically my preference as a sport scientist is with gear weight Plus you want to stay close to your total gear weight that you would have on average but on the high end why correct me if if anything of this just makes no sense in the real world you don't want to train light because

when you have full gear on nothing feels the same you're slower uh you get tired faster you can't jump onto that window sill like you used to cuz you have all your but if you train with like you're Like all right sweet my typical what's a typical like well it's typical tough cuz it's Mission dependent how much weight are you care what's your load out as far as like average like are we talking about 20 pounds of are we talking about 80 pounds of are we talking about what somewhere between depending on the mission said

call it 50 to 80 50 to 80 so what I would say is a lot of your training for Locomotion training which I'll get into exactly What that means in a second you should be training on average with 80 to 100 lound of gear weight that does mean putting extra and obviously when you're training you just wear one of those a ton of companies make excellent weight vests you can put you know all kinds of Weights in them why not train with 150 lbs because then the movement you're doing is so much slower that it

no longer has specificity To that application and when you go with actual gear and combat you're like Sonic the Hedgehog and you're like I didn't train for this I'm getting to places way way faster and my transitions aren't the same it also beats the living out of your joints so you have to be concerned with like okay I'm not going to strap a barbell to myself and 2 225 and then do all the Tactical drilling MH but at the same time so you want to stay close to that Typical gear weight but a little bit

on the high end so that you're training in a chronic worst case scenario the most gear on me possible with the most demanding physical tasks such that when you've emptied half your Clips already and lost something off of yourself and you have to move from building to building to building you're running and you're like holy this is easy ideally you want to think actual combat engagements are easier than your Training in a physical sense obviously the mental side is totally different correct any of that off off base no I mean you know it so I

agree and disagree to a certain extent I agree absolutely loading heavy it makes you better when you decrease load is on you but if those guys are gearing that up say you're on deployment and you're doing that same thing seven days a week by the time you come home you're so Zapped so a lot of it it's It's building up to it it's building the tolerance and a lot of the stuff we do in work is incline weighted treadmill walks you'd put on your kit you'd slap on a gun you'd slink behind you and you'd

watch ESPN and walk on an incline trying to get ready for Afghanistan you'd still Sprint you do weight vest on and all other kind of stuff because guys have so many different types of injuries a lot of lower body a lot of shoulders a lot of this it's it's training for the Actual event itself with leaving a little bit in reserve but understand what your true Thresh should is because a lot of people they only train slick and now when you throw on that weight vest they don't have the Reps in it now it feels

foreign and especially as it translates to CQB you know not just your apprpriate exception but just your overall body awareness how far is that pouch sticking out how far is this butt stock sticking Out if you're not training in that I'll go to collapse my sector and I'll grind the back of my plate car against this wall and I'll make so much noise I can never get those decimals back in real life so I like it for that aspect being super comfortable in your gear that's your work suit man yes that's your business attire it

should fit you exactly to you your exact specifications shoulder Mobility I've got to move my pouch up one Molly space do all of those Things yeah and then we do the same thing like when we grapple like they used to bring in BJ pin those guys in the back and they'd grapple in plate carers like get used to that you ever had a 200lb dude lay on top of you have plates on yeah that sucks it's uncomfortable dud so basically the advice is yes do all that stuff slightly overweighted but if you're training a lot

and you're new to it you got to do a lot of stuff light and then some stuff Heavier and work up into it building into a repeatable Cadence and that's the one thing I I try to tell everybody consistency will get you farther than anything else if you set out a training plan you can only maintain for 6 weeks and then you think you'll hold on to that for the next six years you won't no but if you chip away at it and you make a repeatable cycle where you don't know it's a it's no

different waking up and brushing your teeth now it's just part Of your day I'm training for the instate I'm training for the inate why do you do that because it makes me better at that yeah why do you do that mindset drill because it makes me better at that if everything is for that same objective you can justify it really really easy same thing with recovery and everything else yes way taking a break because I need my optimal physical presence to do that job yes I am taking a day off because of that ego hasn't

entered the Equation yet and I wonder why I gu nothing to do with it really like you're trying to engineer yourself to become a combat machine yes and the combat machine has several demands your body is made of flesh and blood so you have to attend to the fact that it is limited in its adaptive capability and you basically have to like the North Star is combat robot you're down here with mushy humans and you got to kind of take little stabs at it and come back stab it And come back stab it and come

back and over weeks months and years you got to a level you're like substantially closer to like cyborg level because there's such a physical taxation nobody ever talks about and really what you're trying to do is optimize your bandwidth processing information is the hardest thing to do it's extremely hard to do when your heart rate's at 190 you can't breathe you can't climb up one more flight of stairs but you still have to Go up 10 more flights and then make it a really high level executive decision at the very top taxation can be ignored

you're so exhausted you don't give a F just shoot me and get this thing over with yes and that's how people get it's like think about walking with 80 lbs of on for 4 and 1/2 hours three points of contact in Afghanistan now hit the house now process all these women and kids and all these Fighters and all this other stuff all this information's Running through and if your physical preparation hasn't been done it's going to collapse on itself yes so that's why we train that is because it gives me the bandwidth of process all

the other information doesn't have a physical component to you're in such good shape that you're not limited by your physicality anymore and now you're just like this is a Tuesday I can process all the executive stuff I need to awesome and then so Locomotion just occurs in a Few different types there people say Okay training for Locomotion it must be all kinds of different kind of I have to be a circus performer there's rapid Locomotion which is like running really quickly jumping onto stuff sustained Locomotion which is basically either rucking or just jogging there's navigating

obstacles you got to get used to getting through some obstacles with your gear it's going to happen in real life and you should be Training at least to some extent uh on moving external loads moving obstacles moving humans moving weapon systems so on and so forth if you don't have experience dragging a human it sucks a lot worse than it looks like 185 PB barbell you can grab it and run with that 185b person you're like but he's so low on the ground and you try to pull him and you're like oh friction is a

physical force and he's not helping me cuz he's Passed out this is all bad news so you got to get some of that kind of work so far so good yep combat so so far we have you got to train something for whole body strength power some kind of locomotion training with no guns involved regular folks can do this MH then there's direct combat training so grappling which includes takedowns and restraint especially for police officers you have to know how to Do takedowns I suppose like I'm not talking about Police Department hiring requirements in the

United States cuz you don't have to do any of the but I don't want to go on a limb and say maybe you should have to but we're going to we're going to take that whole administrative thing and wipe it clean as an individual police officer listening to this how good do you want to be at your job if the answer is as good as possible you're going to want to Be really really proficient with taking people down and restraining them mostly because if you can't take down a suspect that's really giving you a lot

of problems and you can't restrain them there are only other a few contingencies you have one is deploy taser those don't work as well in real life nearly as people expect no it's also ass soon as you deploy your taser on one person you can't deal with anybody else some people don't they just shrug off the taser a Sufficient layer of clothing like leather jacket taser doesn't work people die when they get tased that's a lot of paperwork um after taser you have call backup but you should be in comms all the time anyway the

thing is backup could be so far away that the Got 5 minutes just you and this guy in a Walmart aisle that's it no one else is coming to help you so backup's kind of like a ghost you know when it finally Shows up hey it's all good but until it shows up you got to be ready for that so far so good yep and then if you taser doesn't work it's your weapon and that's a lot of lot of paperwork and also moral conundrum like if there's someone clearly on meth that is otherwise a

decent human being being able to single leg them switch them over put them in handcuffs did just have a rough night in jail and then later they're like dude I'm so sorry you're like yeah just lay off the meth mhm that's a guy you know it's Jim from your community it's a very different story and very different dreams you'll have for the next 10 years of your life if Jim has a razor blade and a Walmart and he's still on meth and you can't confidently take a person down cuz you're not confident in that skill

set or you try and he kind of just Shir comes off and he shrugs you off cuz he wrestled for you or something you might Have to shoot Jim to death that's Jim from down the street you're going to be thinking about Jim a lot if the police clears you for coming back to service you may never be a cop again not all police shootings go so well for the police officer so far so good grappling is a big deal yes I am a Jiu-Jitsu brown belt etc etc so I seem biased but like I

watch a lot of body cam videos my wife and I as a hobby I talk to a lot of police Officers police work in in relatively high crime areas it's really like a a running start grappling competition nine times out of 10 the fact it's not mandatory blows me away insane so there's going to be a lot of grappling folks yep um striking um mostly striking is reserved for people in combat operations uh I think it's like some combination of illegal or unethical for police to strike uh someone some kind of emergency kind of leg

kick situation Might be a situation pushing Etc but grappling really takes care of most of the combat hand to hand you'll have to do as a cop agreed disagreed how much striking proficiency do we want out of Patrol officers I mean in a perfect world it's better to have and not need definitely for sure not have I don't know all the laws and legalities you have to go to but I know for creating space strikes definitely work kicks definitely work push kicks definitely Work and if they don't have them and a lot of people they

think they'll Elevate up to a certain standard be able to perform it in my opinion you won't and what humans naturally do they grab you so now yes you can be the world's best striker if shootting on a double and it pick you up over your head it's kind of over for you like in my opinion if you only had to have one grappling is the best solution for those guys yes so grappling super important um then we Have competency with handheld Weaponry I mean yeah with a police officer that means the Baton that's it

you're not allowed to cut people are they still carrying batons usually not yeah so very situationally dependent um but for folks listening to this who are in armed combat abroad Etc yeah uh handheld Weaponry is a big deal so proficiency with knives Etc then you have uh projectile Weaponry so projectile Weaponry in this case um learning how to Put your gun up get sight picture consider whether or not to pull the trigger pull the trigger y that seems like a simple set of steps and it really kind of is but unless you've practiced it to

an absurd degree when there's a screaming meth mom with one titty hanging out and no teeth running at you like this and she's got a knife better be real smooth better be and sometimes it isn't you look at everything else they you've had to run 300 met up to this house you had to take down a dude in the front yard now you bust into the house now this the physical taxation can't be ignored if you haven't done all that say you were even successful you're not a trained Grappler you basically just muscled through the

thing think about how exhausted that dude is yep you're going to take 12 steps on the front porch open up the front door now make an excision yep now she's charging at you is it a Cell phone in her hand or is it knife it's hard to tell you're trying to process so much information now you're not comfortable getting that draw stroke producing that weapon with a master grip breaking your shots clean now you don't know or you get people with no physical capability whatsoever and the only tool they can go to is the pistol

the Lifesaver but now they're not trained enough to actually perform with it yes and Now you know you got the court of public opinion it's going to be against you you're going to be in front of the man you be on CNN Fox News you have a bad shoot and now you look at the fact that most police departments are shooting 250 rounds a year or less 250 bullets out of the gun total per year depending on who you talk to that's probably high for a lot of people a lot of police offic they have

do a qual call it once a quarter so four times a year They'll actually shoot and those tests in my opinion aren't very hard you'd be surprised how many people don't pass them and it's not it's not their fault it's the system's fault for not giving them all the tools not giving them updated Weaponry not giving them the right holsters the right Optics the right ability to train enough funding to train they get x amount of rounds per per department and if you blow through it on training there's no more ammo to Train for a

year two years you don't know so they're constantly using a reserve it's like you're you're dying a thirst in a Sahara Desert you got one canteen they're just trying to ration it like sure there's no good way out of that there isn't but then I've seen such a a weird disparity between certain departments you get there and they have every tool imaginable they've got dedicated gyms and personnel and mental Performance coaches I mean they have everything to them and when you see the team you look at you're like that's the team I want to come

save me yeah I mean and there's there's tons of those teams around the country you just don't get to hear about them a lot and it's the ones in between that don't get any funding yeah but the reality is all the same a cop running the beat in buuy Mississippi going up against a barricaded shooter is no different if You have a Green Beret on if you're a Navy SEAL or you're some cop or some SWAT team dude that's the same thing it's an armed adversary it's the same thing their processing is the exact same

as yours they're just better at it because that's all they do yeah that's their instate they're training for that one specific incident where it's going to be a barricaded shooter you are training to never get to that situation just part of the culture for Some of the people it's like if they fostered that in like we're doing BJJ Tuesday Wednesday Thursday every week we're bringing in a guy this is what we're going to do one hour a day like dude you start to feel more confident you start chest comes up chin up like I can

process more information cuz I know I can physically handle myself it's like that's what I want for those people yes and so same thing with projectile Weaponry tasers handguns you have to be In it dry runs or with live ammo whatever combination gets you enough reps in multiple shooting angles scenarios Etc so that you can do the thing and have like you said as much bandwidth left over if it's alien to you to draw your weapon and to pull it up that's where your bandwidth goes yep but if that's complete automated as you're doing it

you're assessing the situation and you're like that's a pregnant lady that's a psycho with a knife y as Opposed to just we see the exact same thing in CQB so about room clearing in and out of buildings the guys that do the best on a flat range almost always do better in the house because they're not thinking about the shot sequence they're not thinking about safety manipulations and hide over bore aspects or anything they're just searching for angles and distance Dynamic entries driving into the corner collapse inter sector and the shot sequence sounds Exact same

way it does on a flat range yes you get a guy who isn't comfortable they hold the rifle weird everything looks choppy they're very fidgety they're very unsure of the next foot they're going to take Next Step they're going to take and you can see it it's it telegraphs horrible body language so you have to be good at shooting fundamentals period so that's what we do that's our very first block we bring everybody on the flat range even the teams that don't Want to do it I know all you guys out there are going to

watch us that's why we build it in you get guys who don't and then you really get to see because our our standards aren't hard but they're based on CQ and processing information when you get through them everybody gets so much better and now we go to CQB everything's smooth yeah now you can see like if you build the foundation on the flat range you build it in the gym you build in your mindset Components your foundation's so solid it can withstand all the other direct you're going to stack on top of it your foundation's

weak you'll crumble there's a gentleman I'm a big Fanboy of named Bob Keller former Delta long long time he said something super baffling where he was like yeah as soon as I uh got into Delta I was getting getting ready to train like Tom Cruz repelling off of driving backwards in cars with a minigun out the window he's like They just like took us to the range and completely broke down our basic shooting skills and rebuilt them up over months and he's like what the hell but then he's like ah okay it turns out that

your basic competency with shooting is like 80% of what you bring to any other strange scenario you're being an insanely competent range shooter to CQB to firefights out in the forest they're like but for a few nuances they're solid yeah but if you don't know how to pull Your weapon up site picture Etc if that part's tough for you the forest just makes it 10 times tougher and that very basic thing you have to rely on is just not there for you true true I mean it is like we went through selecting training it's not

uncommon we do a a huge cqv block it's basically 8 weeks long and we get down there on day one and it's dry pist entries Twan entries and you do this whole buildup and then every day on a Flat range you're shooting somewhere between 2, and 2500 rounds per weapon system every single day does a little bit more than the average police officer gets to shoot there but then they maintain that all the way through so you have shooting coaches that's all you do and there's no whizbang drill and that's what I tell the guys

when we come out the train if you think what's a whizbang drill it's a drill you make up in your mind you think that Oz's created and Once you do this one drill you're going to hit some Bob Keller status there isn't there's just the foundations that are done at a super high level regardless of whatever terrain you have to navigate whatever pouch you have to navigate the foundations and the Baseline average is so high it can withstand all the other this is a little bit of a preview of where we get to in a

second but this is really actually super good news another piece Of good news I have to layer into this is when you're training for grappling as a police officer let's say or as a person in the military you don't need to train an arsenal of different moves different guard entries different takedowns and judo throws you need one good shot to the legs one good Judo throw one good guard pass if we even call it that no one in the street knows what a guard is just one Toriano pass neon belly mount back take that's like

Four moves and whatever single leg double leg whatever you like to do whatever fits your body best and you figure out in the first several weeks you just get real good at that cuz when you see a suspect and he's resisting you he's not a D1 wrestler he inside single and he's toast and so because the fundamentals of shooting are simple but you need to train them so much and the fundamentals of grappling really simple you just need to train them a Bunch is that actually like a ton of different stuff because people think like

oh so I got to become a black Melton Jiu-Jitsu I got to be able to you know get into any gym and teach the girls how to do like triangle from three different positions absolutely not you won't be triangl anyone out in the street I hope good God hope not uh and then you don't need to become John Rambo at shooting you just need to become super super proficient with The basics on all of these and it's not going to take up 90 hours a week or some crazy like that but understanding that that basic

core is the priority is also really clarifying because it's like oh oh this is the stuff that really is high Roi yep decent oh yeah for sure uh we'll skip the stuff for for actual operators uh projectile Weaponry gets a bit more complex different weapon systems transport system vehicle operation observation communication Teamwork that kind of stuff uh not a huge deal uh different kind of transfer for police officers there's ancillary stuff like medical orienteering survival that is all not police officers are trained in that stuff and it's good to refresh that stuff but here specifically

we're talking about combat combat and it seems like there's a lot of stuff and there's not that much because we have a couple of high Roi waste to Train which kabash like all those categories with a number of hours in the week that almost every police officer can manage to do in their literal spare time but before we get to that let's answer the question of why you should go the extra mile let's say I'm a cop been working the same beat for a few years I clock in I clock out maybe I lift weights

too in my own spare time cuz I'm just trying to be jacked why do I want that next level of Proficiency with my weapon with my hands with my ability to move around I have a few ideas and I'd love for you to really remark on how this works in the real world you ready yeah so fundamentally it's so you can be better at your job and I know that sounds strange but that's really really important because police officers in my mind have perhaps one of the most important jobs in all of the history of

Civilization keeping the peace once you've been to places where there is no peace currently is it like a place that you can live and work and your kids can go to school no without peace nothing exists that's worthwhile more or less you want to go to nothing you want to go to unless you real gunfights and then that's exactly where you want to go yeah so police officers have arguably one of the most important jobs there is agree and getting better at the job does a Couple of really really awesome things for them first it

increases their survivability most people aren't trying to die on their job if you be like hey tomorrow Jim you want to die or do you want to live be like what the hell get out of my face of course I want to live okay how many hours of training did you do last month for Close Quarters combat and grappling proficiency you may get an interesting answer to that question be like so are you actually trying to Survive or not because one of the things that baffles me and I mean this with 1,000% due respect is

folks police officers absolutely put their literal lives on the line every day it's more than I can say for myself but some of them seemingly don't train for that eventuality what do you think about that I think that's because they haven't been bitten by reality yet you see the guys that have lost guys guys that have Been in bad shoots or they've been stabbed they've come really close to dying they have this motivation for training bug that kicks over and then everybody below them becomes a byproduct of that so if you go to a team

I'll just throw one out there that uh LPD SWAT if you roll into that team it is at such a high level because they understand the reality you're forced to adopt the reality you're never going to have an easy day on that team because you don't Have an easy job and they know it if you go to Middle America you know 1,500 people in your hometown and you get there and the culture is not like that we haven't had a shooting here in 54 years that doesn't mean it's not going to happen why do you

put a gun on every day when you go to work then that's my question with him if you put it on and there was no threat why do you put it on yeah why don't you just walk around with a flashlight it's a dangerous job and Right now you're limiting your options yes like being not being a professional and then the other aspect is it doesn't create confidence in the family like when we talked about it last night like when your wife meets the whole department she should see the people in the department go I

feel so much better about you getting these sketchy calls at 2:30 in the morning because these are the dudes who are backing you up like okay and then it motivates the Next Generation to want to be you yeah like when I grew up everybody wanted to be a cop a cop a fireman the Marine with the pull-up bars like that's what people want to be and there's a huge physical aspect they don't send some fat cop to local high school to do recruiting that' be weird it would be weird they don't send the F there

are no fat Marines right like those are the guys on a pullet bar those are the guys you want to be you're motivating everybody else And it shows them it is cool to serve it is cool to be a patriotic American and it is cool to be in shape and be an absolute professional that's what you want and it breeds confidence when people see you when you spill out of that squad car sloppy all your shit's unted like they see you're an easy target when a dude spills out and he so pers will like basically

from an evolutionary subconscious logic like assess like are you the alpha ape or not Of course how many times you been mugged zero exactly I've tried a whole lot no one seems to look at me the same yeah like if you look at guys who are big in shape they look aggressive they cauliflower ears in big ass forms like people don't mug you yeah they mug people they can it's the same thing they look at that guy and they go that dude ain't got nothing for me yeah and they make a move yeah and so

if you're a cop you're jacked you're lean mean you Arrive you raise your voice people shut the up real quick if you're out of shape they're like do I really need to shut up exactly oh you going to make me well I'm I mean I have a gun but they know that the use of that gun is really tentative so yeah you know a lot of that people build it up in their mind that it's going to be 7 days a week like I have to be a professional bodybuilder a CrossFit Champion I've got to

do this like dude it is so maintainable if you Make it part of your everyday routine like you won't even know we're talking 30 30 40 minutes an hour three days a week dude and you can change the whole trajectory of your life like we talked about it last night if I could make every single police officer take a BJJ class for 365 days 3 days a week you would be one of the best most capable police officers in the nation normal people can't hang with you dude no and that'll give you so much physicality

to Be able to move people through time and space against their will that is a super human feet that most people cannot do yeah like that's what you should be able to do I don't know why they don't issue you guys capes once you graduate the the academy like you should they're asking you to do superum things but they not giving you the resources to be successful it drives me crazy yeah because now I respect him so much more now that I'm out and I get to see what They're up against I see the lack

of training and funding and assets my God if if the leadership brass knew what you guys were actually having to do if they truly gave a they wouldn't let you do it they give you more assets yes they' go we're not we're not doing this right now we're building these guys a gym we're getting a BJJ coach in here like we're going to give these guys every tool to be successful you have on the enti city the mayor down Senators are up arms a dead human who could have just had like a really rough day

and not been mentally well doesn't mean he's an evil person but now he's dead or worse you get a guy who doesn't have the confidence to pull a pistol when he really should and they get ran down by a dude with a box cutter and they kill him yeah it's like why did that happen yeah didn't have the physicality to get away wasn't confident enough in his weapon systems and Producing him from whatever whatever um holster he has and now he's dead yeah I don't want that either man like you got to be the hybrid

he's dead the cop is dead in this case your team survivability is worse if you're not in really good shape and know your cuz the team relies on you you got a partner you and your partner step out of the squad car it's you two against the world if you're both tip top shape your partner has a higher chance of surviving If you suck you're you're a liability to your partner you might not want to do any of this you look your partner in the face and he's like you got me back when goes down

you're like yeah but I haven't been training for the that's kind of weird it is you're not carrying you're not carrying equal weight yes it's 50/50 there's two of us you got 50% of this problem and so do I yeah everything you can't carry now I have to it's more taxation on me and It's not fair yes the other one is if you are super well combat trained there's a lower chance you'll have to escalate to lethal Force mhm because if I can grapple you to the ground no problem I don't have to draw my

pistol on you I don't even have to take you that seriously you can be three inches in front of me talking to me and be like oh all right this can go down real quick but if you don't have that proficiency you're trying to create Distance you're trying to draw and not all situations have to be resolved with pistol deployment cuz again on the rosy lovey doy side of perspective you might kill a human being at somebody's son Somebody's Daughter somebody who had a trajectory after jail that could have been great um on the other

side that's a lot of paperwork to do and a lot of you not being a cop anymore a lot of your name getting to the media and then you have To move to like Montana or something because just regular people will be like oh you're that guy that killed that dude you're like holy so I don't think anyone's really interested in killing someone in combat as a police officer it's the thing you want the least and if you have no Arsenal behind your pistol there's just one there ones and zeros out there man you either

drawing or you got nothing a bad deal yeah there's nothing in between there's no escalation Right taser sort of again very conditional yeah dude it's so much easier to be able to escalate or deescalate you come in at a 10 it's like now I'm back at a seven now I just hover y it's like is she really going to do anything with that boiling water right now she really going to charge me we're at 26 feet right now yeah I've Got Hand on pistol already I don't have to draw it yeah I don't have to

put Finger on trigger like I already know I can Process information now I'm looking at everything else I'm trying to talk her down nice soothing ber white voice it's okay honey just just chill be calm if not your voice raises her voice is now you're trying to pitch match it's like now you're screaming at each other you're only getting more amped up yep bad news that yeah uh fewer bystanders and victims get hurt it turns out bullets continue to travel uh out of your gun even though they didn't hit the Intended target or they pass

through the intended target and hit someone else like you're at a Walmart and there's a situation where someone's rushing you there's people behind you you draw you can grapple different story you always have the right to self-defense and some people need to be shot and the Army's famous for saying this it's written in their Doctrine the body is an acceptable bullet trap but you have to hit the body Yes if you miss those things go they're going through lace potato chips 500 yards until they smack some's going to stop it hopefully it's not a kid

you hear about all the time shoot through as it goes wrong and from what I've seen pistol calibers don't traditionally pass through that easy especially if you put them in Center thoracic cavity that's what you need to be able to do but if you're not confident enough to make it I mean you see it suboptimal grip they Just close their eyes and just squeeze and they think they're going to make it and unfortunately now you can see it you can see it on CCTV other body cams and they're not trained the system put them in

that suboptimal position yeah real bad news and I guess at the end like you're better at doing your job as a police officer which means you have a more stable free and prosperous community and world like if you have a low crime area Because you're good at your job that's a great thing so why train really hard when you're a cop is like there may be no more compelling reason to train hard than being a cop versus being like maybe a special forces guy but if you ask like an NFL player why train hard it's

like what's just for millions and just more or whatever and more Glory well that doesn't not nearly as good of a reason as keeping your community safe like so in my view a lot Of police officers maybe most ones that see the street should be understanding themselves as professional police athletes yes that's what you do and pro athletes have a pretty rigorous training schedule and it's not just clock in clock out there's more that has to be done luckily for our purposes not infinitely more but more y all right so that's a lot of stuff

it seems like holy I could be training All day this is crazy however there are highly broadly applicable police tactical training subcategories that to your earlier Point don't require a ton of time in the week but if you can consistently do them and get really good at them you don't have to do a lot of different kind of stuff Super Quick List one is resistance training if you lift in a way that's centered around strength training mostly sets of 5 to 10 occasionally higher Reps maybe if you get Advanced with some hypertrophy sort of muscle

growth specific elements maybe with some power elements throwing medicine balls really hard at walls but even that's not required just basic strength training multi-joint movements pushing pulling picking things up off the ground like that really only three or four different types of movements you're doing two to four times per week in most cases that you have to train like that And it's an hour or less each time probably if you do them quickly because that builds endurance too so we check two boxes you're talking about 30 minutes three to four times a week and all

of a sudden after a few years you're just way more strong way more jacked way more endurant than almost everyone you'll ever meet in the street and grab with your own two hands yep that covers a lot of it does man the physicality cannot be Ignored and it doesn't if people look at it they see a dude that looks like you or whoever else and are like I can never do that but you don't have to you don't have to you God no you need have a functional skill set to complement your job that allows

you the bandwidth to process more information right now moving humans through time and space against their will is a superhuman quality you need to possess yes I don't care if you're 135 lb female police Officer you're dude it's 260 you have to be able to move people around against yes and so just core resistance training several times a week for 30 minutes 40 minutes at a time majorly checks that box in a way that you don't need to like tell your family to off you're not a pro bodybuilder or some crazy like that movement training

um preferably with gear weight beyond your usual dynamism and Duration that you would see in your actual situations break a sweat move a ton get a into uncomfortable positions move into a Crouch from a Crouch from laying down standing up moving around obstacles with tons of on you and weapon or simulated weapon you do that two to three times a week for 20 minutes at a time huffing and puffing the entire time that's all the cardio you will ever need for 95% of Your police work 99% of your police work we're not even to a

total of 4 hours of training extra on top of what you normally do per week yet and we've covered movement and resistance training we do the same thing we bringing guys to train we do a physical component a lot of lower body upper body dissociation do a lot of hit Mobility stuff cuz guys they get these precarious situations like congratulations you dropped into that hole now you can't get out of it Now without using your hands like you get the hips moving now it just it affords you more options more opportunity to change position be

under control not just falling into a position I can fall in control I can rebound out of it but you have to practice it to your point if you make it part of your routine is it's not very hard man like it could be part of your warmup and now you've knocked it all out now your hips moving better for grappling better for Everything else yes but it's got to be part of the routine next up grappling training 30 minutes three times a week on the core move set one or two takeown options one or

two guard pass options just one how to mount and control how to backtake and control and how to apply handcuffs from those positions there's just not a whole lot more to it take down defense is something you'll develop just in live Training and just a couple tips like knowing how to sprawl or knowing how to lower your center of gravity also like very few people on the street are competent takedown artists so just knowing how to drop your center of gravity and doing the ankle pick reflex off that that's it like no one's going to

drop you on the street it's just nonsense so 30 minutes three times a week of grappling training good grappling training on top of all this We're getting to a place where we're training four or 5 hours a week extra that literally means 1 hour a day 5 days a week weekends off you already at a after several months of doing this at a proficiency that leaves almost all other of your fellow police officers completely behind forever sounds pretty good Roi to me it's what I've been doing my whole life I I've gone five days a

week since 2002 never missed a session outside of a Significant injury but you make it maintainable repeatable and then you start subbing in whatever you need to yes if we're going to go to Afghanistan I sub out maybe a lot of the combatives training then I sub in more incin trebal walks with heavy load trying there's tons of mountains over there yeah trying to get my legs conditioned to it you swap it out but that block and you know a lot of guys they can't find it throughout their day and they're like oh I'll do

it after work no you won't not unless you're super disciplined if you were we wouldn't be having this conversation right like some sometimes and I don't want to Advocate sacrificing your sleep but a lot of that you're sleeping through your opportunity yeah if you would be more more discipline to go to bed earlier yes wake up earlier like get a home gym dude it doesn't have to be much get a couple kettle bells and send it in the garage you know what I Mean like you could get some stuff done tons of 7 a.m. jiu-jitsu

classes I used to roll with cops all the time usually your Jiu-Jitsu class will have some weights y you do that you get with a couple other cops two times a week to do some shooting drills some running drills with gear you're kind of squared away and your confidence goes through the roof man and you can you can see on you see cops on the street all day long which ones are confident which ones Aren't which ones know they can handle this whole situ and the ones who are just God get me the out of

here dude it's weird to be a cop and and ask God to get you the out of here where you're literally signed up to do exactly and only that and it sucks but you know I blame that on the culture of whatever team they're coming from sure it's like they didn't Foster that be a pro mentality yeah like when he checked in this is what the standard is the Standard is standard till someone exceeds it when that group exceeds it to become a dynasty I always see that and and I believe it's true if you

set a team that has a certain reputation a certain pre to join that team it makes you want to join that team and once you're a part of it you just naturally adopt you like sure well this is a standard the only place it's going is up from here sure let's keep going so getting a couple guys together from the Department and doing this kind of stuff with them probably pretty smart damn right cuz then it grows then three turns to four four turns to 10 really really fast like d you see Brian and Josh

like dude they've been hammered it lately yeah yeah they're crushing on a flat range like let's go join them okay and it multiplies then all of a sudden you can change the entire culture of that whole team by just one dude who's super motivated he's like I am not sitting Around with this status quo I'm not doing this sure Elevate the whole group DJ this is something where I just don't know anything about this how much shooting training per week as far as time can get you competent competent and keep you competent competent that all

depends and I hate to say that you Dan Herer from Sig sour we had a conversation he goes there's a very different progression for people that Shoot over 10,000 rounds a year and people that shoot under 10,000 rounds a year and I believe that to be true if you're only able to shoot 250 rounds a year and you're not training on your own in some capacity in my opinion there is no progression for you that's going to matter if you're not doing dry fire at nauseum to make up the difference and if your foundation isn't

good enough to understand every dry rep you do you have a suboptimal grip you're not actually Finding the sight you're making contact with the trigger way too late you don't know where the wall is you're not confident reload procedures and slide loock malfunctions all of this you're basically just burning reps just to burn them it's like but if you can add that in and let's say on Saturday your active recovery day you're going to wake up at 7:00 a.m. go to your your local range and you're going to shoot for 1 hour if you did

that every other week you'd be Exponentially better than everybody else on the force that's it and if you could just we talking about like four days a week you got to be there for an hour that's not realistic they got cord they got they got all this other they have to do and I understand that but a lot of guys they want to find a hobby and I tell this dudes if you want to be a pro it's probably not the time to learn how to golf yeah that doesn't make you better at your job

and I get it's Downtime mental decompression I get all that but if I had the opportunity to train an hour on Saturday or go hit golf balls at a driving range brother I'm going to the range yeah 100% if you're not going to the gym you better be doing something for the optimal end State because you have to save people's lives sure I'd say the flat range is more important than hitting golf balls so two times a week for 30 minutes at a time putting Rounds On Target is going to take most people and get

them to a place where with already basic firearm training if you add in that in supplemental dry fire like really understanding the weapons Transitions and being comfortable when that pistol comes in your hand does it feel like a pistol should if you pick it up and it feels like a 4x4 it feels foreign to you you're never going to be able to perform with it yeah so we select guns that base it off hand size Line them all up blindfold you all the guns are clear and say stop and you find a pistol and they'll

typically stop at like a a 2011 platform a Glock 17 a 3 20 something of a bigger frame and when they put both hands on it like that's what I thought a pistol would feel like let's go shoot it yeah and pick the one you shoot the best and for a lot of these guys they don't have that repetition they don't have that mind muscle connection with their firearm and When they grab it like it doesn't feel right in my hand because you don't use it enough dude sure if you're burning say you did 10

draw Strokes every single morning you put it on before you leave the house clear and safe I going do 10 draw Strokes 10 perfect draw Strokes in holster it over the course of two months you'd be so much better dude if you're actually picking up the dot you're picking up the site making contact with The trigger all the fundamentals in Lin once you build up that Cadence like I can do 10 Drive Strokes in less than 60 seconds let's do that yeah that's a big deal it is man that's where that pistol's coming from it's

not coming out of the trunk of your car it's coming from your holster yeah that's burning that and now you feel so much better now when you go to the flat range you don't have to worry about bumbling through a draw stroke have I defeated my bail Whatever my secondary retention system is it'll just naturally happen that's half of it just getting the pistol out with a master grip and driving it forward if you can get that you're halfway there that's really good news so so far here's like a typical what a typical week could

look like for a police officer that wants to do some extra to become really good in their spare time three grappling sessions just at a Jiu-Jitsu jym MH you tell the instructor what you need they'll hook you up a lot of times you get your guys together a lot of times the police department will help sometimes they won't you get some of the guys together you do some grappling there's actually a great um uh Instagram page called BJJ cops and they uh go around and teach people teach police officers how to do the basics of

bris Jitsu for things like turning a suspect over and putting handcuffs on And like where do you put the knee so on and so forth so just in any just basic Jiu-Jitsu is already the UN you need to specialize police officer Jiu Jitsu just take a Jiu-Jitsu class three times a week the good thing is is the live rolling will get you so much strength training and cardio it's already half checkbox in those so three Jiu-Jitsu sessions a week that's 1 hour hour total uh 3 hours total so far for the week 1 hour each

two weight training sessions Half an hour each compound movements rows squats pull-ups pull Downs presses with very minimal rest circuit style you're getting crazy cardio you're getting jacked you're getting lean all the good things crazy movement competency strong Etc if that's just 30 to 45 minutes twice a week you get crazy gains and you have 30 to 50 15 to 30 minutes each one of those sessions either before or after put on a weight vest and do some Movement do Sprint intervals do jog intervals jump over obstacles uh go from lying to crouching to standing

to Jumping to running and back a few times in a circle stuff like that with with a weight vest maybe with your sidearm and everything with your uniform on doesn't have to be cuz you'll get used to that no problem you're already taking care of everything except for one thing and that's shoot and you basically said like morning Practice and also maybe two sessions twice a week half an hour each or even one one hour session a week at the range putting down some serious gunfire in my head that adds up to a total of

6 hours per week and it doesn't have to be every week most weeks you get like three or four total hours MH some weeks you get seven or eight on average you get four to six hours per week per week that's an hour extra per day that Elevates you from person who has badge and uniform and does their job to a person who's really starting to get real good at the beyond the level normally expected from a police officer yeah that's reasonable right in my opinion it is like I don't know why you couldn't make

that time watch SS of Game of Thrones that are longer than n the whole like I don't have an hour to train is a categorical ey we've been Dealing in sports for forever that's just your life has architected poorly and to be completely honest if your life outside of police work is so busy that you can't get yourself to that police officer plus status you need to file for retirement because you're going out there and endangering yourself your family's going to suffer when you croak and everyone else around you because you're like well yeah they

got to drive the kids to kindergarten or Soccer practice like dope what do you do for your real job like oh I actually my job is to confront people who want to kill me and those around them regularly like okay but should to busy to train for that cuz like violin practic is at 5: and you got to drive the girls over they're like well yeah like can you say that again with a straight face and make it make sense to me am I off my rocker here cuz I don't do tactical is this just

no and you know people get Stuck in that it's not going to happen to me I was the same way what yeah like by what force of God will it not you're literally the person who they send when everyone else is like woo I don't want to you know like some guy with a knife yelling and stabbing a dumpster they don't call me they don't call you they call the police it's your job literally to go exactly to that guy you it won't happen to me like I can hope that won't happen to me cuz

I live in a nice Neighborhood I lock my doors when I'm in the hood whatever the right maybe I'll hope now I still prepare for no goddamn good reason because I'm an egotistical idiot and well you have a whole history of preparing for something much more intense so you're overprepared but like if that's your job job and you're predictably going into shitty situations DJ is there like a way you can steal man the idea of it won't happen to me or is it just as Unreasonable as it sounds coming out of your mouth judging from

the people I've had interactions with it's of no fault of their own it's they've never seen it so just imagine you went to combat we say you did 10 rotations to Iraq and you've never seen anyone get hurt you've never seen an IED happen you've never hit one no one's ever been shot there's no purple hearts in your entire unit and you're going out night after night after Night and every time you do you're coming to against nice afghanis or Iraqis no weapons no IDs no svest and you've done that for 9 years over and

over and over and they keep telling you eventually you lose motivation you're like I get it dude I get it but I've done this so many times and it's not happened what are the chances it's going to happen T night slim to none and that's the mindset they end up adopting like sure it ain't going to Happen in the moment it does they have this frantic look on their eyes it looks like snatch when the window comes down the shotgun comes out you make a funny face and you just react and like I never thought

it was going to happen that's the reality dude it's not reality to what happened to you if you just understand that every time you go out this could be the last time you ever suit up again tell yourself that every single day this could be the last time I Ever do it am I as prepared if I never had another day if you woke up on Monday morning they were like you're never allowed to train again everything you have at this moment is the only thing you'll have for the rest of your career would you

be satisfied me person hopefully your luck continues like me personally I'm like I've exhausted all resources and if you can't say that to yourself that gives you a level of confidence cannot be Igned it's like I've exhausted everything to be as good as I can at this one thing because that craft deserves it yeah or worst case I put in an hour a day Monday through Friday extra on top of my work duties to be that like super cop okay I'm not an avv seal I'm not training 5 hours a day on top of my

work fine but if you can't put an hour on top of everything else you sit down and figure out what you really want or you just get stabbed in The throat on CCTV camera or you get the famous uh quote you know I die for my kids I die for my kids would you live for them oo that's tougher it is living requires effort would you rather be capable and survive and do a 25y year career and then retire white picket fence house on the bay and now your kids come over with their grandkids you

want to live a h long happy life you better exhaust some serious resources right now but it doesn't have to be so Monumental You're not training to win the Boston Marathon no exponential growth over a long period of time that's repeatable in your process like by the end of a 20e career you've maintained something you could do that same routine and just adopt something different yes so your 1 hour a day of Fitness training for police work is something that isn't extra to you anymore it's extra to people who are in your department and they're

like B that guy's crazy he's Just Fitness junkie or he thinks we he thinks this is Mogadishu but really it's you know Suburban Boston that to that person that's extra but to you it's just what happens it's just your life and once it's your life well it is a part of your schedule can you imagine you know let's say a very not understanding wife being like can you make it to Kelsey's you know recital tonight you're like oh sorry honey the guys and I are grappling we do that Every Tuesday night at 5:00 p.m. as

soon as I get off work and what is she going to say she's like do you have to no no I'm going to let a homeless person slit my throat on CCTV camera so you can watch in the courtroom and never sleep again is that what you want she'd be like whoa hold on what no of course not well like that's right this is my job though unfortunately that is the reality a lot of external factors come into it and that's why they don't do it and we Talked about it before men are sacrificial by

Nature they'll sacrifice himself for everybody else before you know it you have you couldn't sketch me the inside of your gym right now like you haven't seen the inside of it in 5 years that's why you look like that like you have to be really stringy with your time and if you set that up with the family Dynamic and let them know like I'm not off chasing chicks I'm not boozing in a bar right now I'm training For the reality that I have a super dangerous job and I'm trying to be professional and this is

my this is my only ability to reduce risk this is how I do this is how I come home seems open and shut as far as family is concerned well it soon you that's why my wife's a gangster I told her that at the very beginning like I meant it if you want me to stay alive my wife's a gold star wife her first husband got killed in combat I told her the only way I can do this for My entire career without being killed is if I train it like it's the only thing that

matters yeah you have to I'll tell you what one thing that drives me crazy and I feel so bad for these guys I get hundreds of mess just guys that check in a new department and they get ridiculed for training by other people in the department why don't we step outside take that badge and gun off I'll show you what ridicule looks like it's like you know you're always in a Gym oh you give a too much oh you think everything's an in give a too much that's the thing it's like what is this Middle

School dude I'm telling you but they create that culture where people are embarrassed to train and these guys right like I don't know what to do I was like set your own standard Do not sit there and do not drop your standard down because some dude is making fun of you he doesn't give a don't be around hey Bob step Out front dude it's one of those things but that's the culture if you give a too much they make fun of you no different than you're in high school like oh you trying to get straight

A's yeah I was that guy yeah now I'm on TV yeah right anyway yeah you know that's a cultural shift and I feel bad for him but once they get over that there are certain teams around the country I've train with and when you walk in there if I stripped The off the walls and I put them in a stero uniform you would know if you were sitting in front of an Oda a group from KAG SAS you wouldn't know anything all you know is combat operators in the world you know you look at him

you're like dude all I know is you dudes are foaming at the mouth right now and you look like you should be on an NFL line right now like this is what I'm talking this is what it if you could Mass produce this all over the Country prod wanting it it is and I think that's it's a lot of guys that grew up in our generation yes guys a product of ' 80s and '90s sure Proud To Be An American Proud to do that job they love wearing that badge put them that SWAT team passion

it's the only thing in there man it is and you know I still look at those people like a child like wide eyed I'm like wow dude I you know I try not to Fanboy of the guys but I do too like I've grown dude like I've grown up watching you guys you know when my old man was in the teams you know LAPD SWAT was the Pinnacle yeah anytime I get around those dudes I'm like it's super cool Broward County Sheriff's Office in Miami like there are teams that are teams above teams it's weird

cuz they look up to you exactly which you know I never tell them that but like it's a roll reversal yeah like you guys are so impressive and you've been doing it at such a high level for So long and you've created a culture that is so infectious and that's what I love the most and that's what I tell the guys now when the leadership structure isn't there and you don't want to play the game anymore you've lost motivation there's no funding the mission set sucks lean on the patch yeah that patch on that shoulder

means more to me than that trident ever would I would go above and beyond just to wear that patch and if you have that Unconditional love for the group you'll go to exponential links just to earn it earn your seat at table every single day earn that patch every single day how do I do it consistency showing up every day and proving that I actually want to be yes and we're here to tell you and just did over the course of however the long that conversation took that it just really takes an hour per day

extra 5 days a week and you're already in such money compared to where You were before you are man you don't have to quit your marriage or whatever you don't have to do six hours after work it's an hour a day bro Y in my opinion it's better to knock it out first thing in the morning cuz if not you get stuck in cord you get this you get that it's like if you think you're one of those guys that's going to clock out at 5:00 p.m. and you'll hit it before you go home you

won't you get stuck in ballet recital and Spanish Class and all this other sacrifice a little bit of your sleep have enough discipline to go to bed early yes get your recovery window wake up and send it dude yeah well if you train really hard by the time 8:00 p.m. hits you're falling asleep on the couch anyway problem solved all right that was awesome swiching gears a little bit true how do you guys I was going to say you people but that's apparently Politically Incorrect no you can do it okay how do let's just say

folks in Special Operations mhm when you're here at home versus your any incremental degree of downrange how do you stay in shape and I have specific questions but this is the general topic how do you see your access to nutrition your access to training here and how does that to some extent degrade or not degrade all the way through and how do you kind of cuz you Build one hell of a physique to make it ready to go down there and do that thing but then when you're down there and there's like a tarantula crawling

across the sand and you're like well you can pick that up and do curls with it that's all we got and then when you're eating only MREs or some like that it's tough to do Fitness but you guys somehow manage to do it so I got questions you good yep all right what kinds of facilities do our special Operators generally have access to at home and what kind of Freedom encouragements support from command do they have to build up their bodies to be all like Jocko esque like is is there a really good weight training

facility on Bas is it like well there's nothing on Bas but you got free memberships to 10 other gyms around town at the commissary or whatever at the what do you guys call it mes hall or whatever yeah chow hall is there like decent options with high Protein available and or are you allowed to get your own supplements or do they provide supplements tell us a story about just at home for special operators what is the fitness scene looking like and I assume most of the guys partake mhm it's changed over the last 20 years

but I will say when I first came in it was the encyclopedia bodybuilding with arold Schwarzenegger taking supplemental protein creatine the Fizz fuel Ino explode that whole thing Bally Everything was body building and then you did the job to get the functional aspect of it sure still longdistance run we do group PT and all that kind of stuff and then it kind of changed Jim Jones came on scene train guys from 300 Crossville went really big and then everybody kind of adopted it simultaneous I'll say 2009 like we really got to lean in on human

performance and I would say every single to the Command their gym is no if you walked into Clemson right now it's no different oh damn hot uh hot tubs cold tubs they got sensory deprivation tanks they've got infrared saunas I mean sorex racks as far as the eye can see every piece of turf every every single piece of equipment you could ever want they have it up there upstairs every piece of card equipment you could ever want you've got a fight gym next to it with full-time fight guys 5 days a week come on Weekends

we've got a chow holds connected to that got an outdoor Turf I mean they have every facility you could want and for whatever reason we don't have our own pool which is weird but can block off hours we go don't have their own pool it's weird the Army does I don't I don't know why but yeah um and everybody has it now from range regiment to SF the Air Force guys like I was just in Alaska the Air Force gym for the normal I don't want to say normal sounds Kind of scory um the regular

Air Force regular army in Alaska has one of the nicest gyms you'll ever go to oh that's awes as far as I can see and they really do promote Fitness they've got Chow Halls they've got options they've always got the neex they're always selling protein supplements and all that they really push it now and I'd say the ma the majority of Special Operations guys are really into the human performance aspect now you get some guys who just Aren't into it they can perform and they can do whatever they do but the physical standard is high

and most guys adopt it as part of the culture and like not only am I doing this for job benefits but it's a recruiting tool too yeah when people see it they know you give a because you wouldn't look like that you wouldn't be able to perform the things you can do consistently for that amount of time unless you were just self motivated when I look at you and uh you tell me you're a former seal I'm like okay I can believe that if you were some kind of like slumpy Humpy Dumpy I'd be like

okay must have been a while ago or some like that yeah like obviously have the guys like when people like oh he was a he was a green braid he's like i' never would have thought that that's not a compliment no no that's not a compliment at all you should look at that guy like yeah that dude looks like he's been Doing that for a long time purpose built um overseas is a different story because Fitness is such a part of nsw and the Seal team culture I've definitely been in places where we were scrounging

for a long time step by step good Germany Qatar mhm turkey maybe big bases mhm American bases Allied bases Mhm what's the gym scene food scene like at those places good if there's an American influence G are good yeah that's right America godamn it I'm so proud if America has touched it they have great gyms you know I that quote out dude it's it's the truth if you go to Germany right now the the Allied bases the gyms are fantastic the Chow Halls they might be different you know serving donor kebabs or whatever the they're

Doing but I mean is good as yeah they are the gyms are really good if the US is such the gyms are really good I a bunch of Europeans um Italian bases with no American influences it's different like they have um they have fo culture I'm kidding they have a football culture right so it's a lot of running it's a lot of speed work it's not so much heavy lifting I mean they do have those guys but for for us that's one of the very first things we talk about when We go overseas where we

live and what's the gym like okay so big basis with American presence they're squared away all as well yeah what's next as far as the uh string of types of facilities you can live in to prepare for be in combat you got after major bases what's like forward operating bases and what's the scene like there I guess it varies a lot it depends on how big they are like when we went to Iraq in the early days big Baghdad biop would have monster gyms dude but it would take we got there in 2004 was the

invasion 2003 by the time we got there it was up and coming I mean they had Smith machines I mean they had everything it grew and then by the time you left I mean it it's a gold gem wow like I mean it's 100,000 ft I mean it's massive cuz they have to have that many people and they understand the physical importance you get these smaller bases like we occupied one of saddam's palaces We had a pool and the only Saddam had a good gym or I don't think he trained gym but we we stole

squat racks we stole dip bars it'd be scalable dumbbells you know randoms up to 70s and one um one flat bench you convert to an incline and that's basically all you had for 6 months that's decent yeah I mean good enough dude like really good at pull-ups we're doing all that because you're going out every single night the physical taxation so you're in kind of Like this modified D Lo for the whole kind of time you're just trying to maintain maintenance phase and then depending on where you go some days you don't want to go

hard of course you get up in Afghanistan 12,000 ft and you have done a crazy leg workout I mean there's multiple people that have fallen out like you can't make it you have to be rested and recovered and you never really know when that's going to pop sure like you get this Target and he Goes and you look at him you're like based off wins based off the this is where we're going to land that's where we're going you're like oh my God why did I do all those lunges why did I do all those

lunges and how is the nutrition seen in places like that it depends if you are attached to a base that might have a three-letter agency kind of spill over to it really good what's a three-letter agency if you Were talking about the agency you're talking about some Intel agencies out there they bring private chefs with with them and hell yeah really good like really really good omelets made to order fresh rice all the time lean proteins fet I mean like nice like really good stuff and you get in some places where you're eating stir fry

5 days a week because you can't stomach anything else mhm like you're eating 10 hard wed eggs at every meal just trying to get some Protein in you supplement in with uh protein shakes but I mean we would bring a big 1660 been a Home Depot and SE a big rly Stanley cases mhm we'd fill that entire thing up with nothing but protein powder creatine explode and you would just bring down a deployment with you and that's what you would supplement so if you had to go out say you were going to be pushed out

for two weeks out in the middle of nowhere living out of like a Modified tent no AC just sucking it you'd bring a jug of protein with you shake up bottles of water just get something in you yeah something like that and sometimes there's no Fitness to do so we Mark out 100 yards like I'm going to do 300 yards of lunges I'm just going to do deck of card push-up pullup pyramid sit-ups something to maintain a physical presence just so you don't atrophy and do a lot for the mental Spirit too sure of course

being Connected like I can ground you we had an old guy that he grew up with my father and he always carried a comb in his back pocket Vietnam dude he's like no matter how bad it is no matter how bad you are no how physically taxed you are if I pull out that comb and I comb my hair I comb my mustache I represent myself he's like I'm good and it's funny because I've seen a bunch of dudes in UFC doing that getting their hair out of their face reorganizing like prep Powdered up like

okay you're ready to go so that little bit of re-energizing I used to car one of my back pocket that's a bit of self-care so exercise as a method exercising nutrition as a method of self-care real far down range in the mental health aspect it's the one thing you can always connect back to like when I've lost sight of everything else I can reconnect my physical vessel y through physical exertion yeah nobody's making Me do this I'm doing it right now because I want to do it I'm trying to realign my focus with myself and

I do it through physical pushing what is the single worst Food SL trining setup you've ever seen has it just been down to MREs ever oh yeah oh yeah okay yep down mr's no gym single kettle bell single what single kettle bell oh yeah who got the cbell over there that's really we had a dude who brought it with him he Brought he was one of those Dragon door dudes with pavle back in the day and he brought out I think an 80 lb kettle bell and that was the only thing we had living out

in tents living eating MREs three times a day just it's all you have we did that for you know three weeks four weeks three weeks four weeks doable but not Ultra fun well I mean like if you look at the guys the initial push through fuia the Marines back in the day there's no Fitness there's nothing been In Mar for months dude yeah and until you build that base up until it's secure enough to bring in tractor trailers full of gym equipment and Hesco Walls like there's no Fitness there's no gym if you're getting shelled

regularly exactly right you got to build it all up but the US does a really good job of buying some high-end gym equipment which I'm am so thankful before that's amazing to hear if you walk Neil Robert's gym in Kandahar or in um in bam that gym will Rival any gym in the country God damn you walk in you're like dude there's not a single thing you need in here dumbbells up to 150 I mean like all the way they have everything Scott plan the trip Afghanistan gym tour you'll have to get you in there

I know a guy excellent um for folks currently watching this involved in Special Ops are just soldiers just going on deployment again going down range can you give some tips for how to stay on Top of as much nutrition and fitness and Recovery as possible given the highly imperfect circumstances they're dealing with I tell everybody get into a routine that mirrors your home routine as fast as humanly possible so if you're one of those guys who wakes up in the morning you immediately train I do the exact same thing when I get overseas we usually

sleep 24 hours to try to get on whatever your Rhythm cycle is going to be what the hell and I mean that by just You don't leave like if I land and it's so we fly from Virginia Beach we stop in Germany we land in Afghanistan and it's 9:00 in the morning and my real time we typically be sleeping until 5:00 p.m. and then we'd all wake up you just stay up that entire time until the following day so now you're up for 36 hours whatever it is now I go up at 5:00 now I'm

on a full cycle got it it's like well if I know I'm going to wake up at 5: now I'm going to wake up at 3:30 I'm Going to lift I'm going to go eat then I wake up officially is everybody else is asleep unless they're training I'll go get my fitness get a shower then I walk in for the brief and then my full day starts instead of waking up at 5 a.m. now I'm waking up at 3:00 p.m. I sleep the time in between if you get on that Rhythm you can massage it

a little bit left and right and then you figure out your sleep optimization and that might be you do a really long push through the Night instead of going to bed at 5:00 a.m. you've now pushed until noon still got in reserve not what you do maybe that's a rest day instead of just getting 3 hours of sleep waking up my typical 300 p.m. I'm just going to sleep through this entire thing because I'm so tired the physical exertion my cortisol levels are through the roof like I'm already having to take drugs to follow sleep

I don't want to have to do that sleeping you have to sleep but don't Sacrifice all your physical component I feel like a lot of guys do that they're like I'm just so tired I can't do it what is the difference between trying to rest yourself and then just completely abandoning your routine yeah you'll feel very well rested in a few days but then in a few weeks you'll degrade your physical capability and the psychological stuff that goes with that's just no fun what about nutrition um protein powder is a big deal yep uh Protein

powder is a big deal they typically always have white rice I haven't been to a CH hall right now that doesn't have even packets of tuna so a lot of guys will go tuna and white rice just to try to get it in I mean they've got Taco Tuesday they'll have cheeseburgers but they're frozen patties they're dog a lot of guys me specifically I eat for texture basically only and a lot of that stuff like I don't want to eat like I'm not trying to Eat scallops right now that are flown in from wherever they

taste like typically get sick so so I I try to find the most simplistic meals I can eat that I can eat consistently and I try to get them in three times a day supplement protein on top of that that seems pretty straightforward and doable in most cases it is and I mean you'd be surprised like um solders Angels is a really good 501c3 would mail you whatever you wanted so if you were in a place with no Supplementation you couldn't get to a GNC on base or whatever you hit up these organizations and NOP

fly it over they'll send it over on us well I mean thousands and thousands of dollars with the stuff they're amazing people Red Cross does it too a lot of companies will reach out and they'll hook everybody up but a lot of guys will get in this weird they'll try to do some wazu Diet overseas some keto intermittent fasting and it's so Irregular your schedu and you never really really know it's like don't try to do a wazu diet don't try to train for a marathon or some Ultra don't do that right now now's not

the time because you don't know what tomorrow is going to bring truly it changes so much if you just have something consistent like I'm going to take my next six months and just do a maintenance phase something that's compatable maintainable that I can go the course this whole deployment With no real Peaks or valleys like I've been if I've been training for deployment this whole time I'm on a natural progression and I'll Plateau I'm not trying to make exponential gains on employment it's not reality if I think I'm going to increase my V2 Max do

I'm not worried about that right now I'm trying to be as optimal as I can for as long as I can and then when I come home I'll rest and rebuild and then rebuild like crazy yeah but you're saying stay As close to your routine of Fitness and Nutrition as you can because if you can't there's nothing that ground you anymore and right now you're in a foreign place your wife's not there the Creature Comforts it's your first time ever being away from home for some of these guys and it's so foreign it's such a

culture shock to you that they're out a rhythm for months for weeks it's like if lifting is your thing if working out is your thing if grappling is your thing Every place has a wrestling wrestling mats everybody does BJJ there's banana bags hanging from every gym that's a big thing you have to get in your routine for not just the physical for the mental health you have to be able to ground yourself cuz if not it's chaotic man you're hearing bloodb Bank calls all day long you're hearing you know mortars going off in the camp

next door to you your Sirens going off you're like man it it can be depressing if you let It and if you get used to it you're like soon as a Tuesday man I can't control any of that the only thing I can't control is my output in being in best optimal mental state I can be to absorb all this other negative shit's being poured on top of me real quick CU we have a whole talk about mindset after this in a slightly different context how do you recover play video games chat with the guys

play cards read a book listen to You know look at your iPad or whatever sleep with the understanding Underneath It All That a mortar could just land on your building and parts of you fly off is that something that after you're down range long enough enough you're like whatever man was going to happen it's going to happen this between God and I it is it something some people can just pull off pretty easily and they're like whatever on day two or Some people on day 90 are like shaking and haven't slept and need to go

home is there anything you can tell people as far as like I had some of the best advice ever gives very very not nearly as serious I again stand in kneel in reverence to all people who have ever been abroad defending our nation but like one of the best pieces I ever advice I ever got was from my friend uh Dr meliss Davis who was a World Champ BJJ black belt and I started jiujitsu And we were already really good friends and she goes listen no one I'll tell you this I'll tell you this your

first year is going to suck understand it will suck and it'll get better after for me because of my grappling background in wrestling and because I was super jacked 6 months later I was like I'm never ever quitting Jiu-Jitsu ever but 6 months to that I was like every day I was like stupid Japanese ceremonial attire the am I doing it's 100 degrees this is Dumb I don't know what I'm doing my joints hurt everything sucks and if someone just told me like dude you're going to love Jiu-Jitsu and off I if that guy lied

to me or it just ain't me but if someone like Dr Melissa Davis said Hey listen a year is going to suck just suck it up what amazing indispensable advice is there any advice you can give like that to folks that are going to be going down there to see some is there any way to prepare Yourself for it at all or is it just like is going to hit you wrong or it's going to hit you right you got to get used to the reality that a lot of that's out of your control and

you'll see guys when they first get over there we'll I'll be walking on the cowall we'll say it's 500 yard STP chall we're all walking Sirens go off and you hear and you'll watch the new guys not our new guys but just random people will Sprint to these concrete bunkers and we Just keep don't even break conversation just walking like what a chance it's going to hit me I'm not running like I'm trying to get the CH hall now the line's thin now I can get through chow and I can come back and watch Game

of Thrones to try to decompress but the unknown sucks because it is dangerous and that mortar can land on you at any moment the more times you go overseas just greater probability it's going to happen to you but after a while You do kind of get in that I don't give a anymore I'm not getting up from this TV I'm going to watch this thing right now I've got to go out and there's known dudes that I can watch on ISR with machine guns and suicide vest that I'm going to be actually fighting in six

hours yeah I'm not worried about this Mort right now like I'm trying to finish this episode right now so you just have to accept like I suppose you got to control the things you can't control Yeah and you run around like a a wild man freaking everybody out I get it Man dive to cover when you know but how many times you going to do that I mean because it happens all day long so are you getting out of bed every single time to me it's like a a s 17 in blackjack you're going to

hit it or not you better have a repeatable pattern you can't just willy-nilly every time you want to now you're running out like that just builds inconsistency I'm just staying in my bed And we've had dudes come really close calls guys getting blown off at treadmills like treadmill next to him mortar hits it boom blows every out of the gym whole wall comes down yeah what do you do next day they put the wall back up hit the treadmill on same thing can't change it too much and it it sucks man especially with the guys

that have never been there before just everybody else on this entire base the cooks the civilians the the guys run the Generator they're under the exact same threat you are we're alling it together like just just get used to that and most people aren't ducking when the mortars come they get used to it and they're like this base is so big they don't know where they're lobing them right now where the chance it's going to hit little old me right here and you just get used to it and so your advice is as soon as

you can adopt that mentality of like I signed up for this this is how it Works if I'm freaking out all the time I'm no good to my team I'm no good to myself so when it's chill time and is kind of happening I don't know about I just keep doing what I do I mean con breeds calm and if the entire group is calm they're not sprinting up I'm damn sure not about to be the one guy like everybody get excited fellas anyone yeah no dude just be nice and chill damn Cal breeds calm

and people who are not nice and chill in living situations like that Do they last I've never personally had to deal with we've definitely had guys that were um really easy to amp up they get really excited but not for stuff like that so living in chronic fear of imminent death 24/7 is not a sustainable human capacity no and most of those guys who live like that that we call them it's sound derogatory fobbits guys who just live on the fob and never leave it they never leave the wire they get flown in and Flown

out you basically work a death job so it wouldn't matter if you were in Seattle Washington or in Syria like your job is the exact same you're never going to go outside those are the guys that I feel freak out the most you'll be in the middle of the chow hall and they're running around freaking it's like they're coming incoming yeah bro theying a Denver omelette you know what I mean like sure I'm not worried about like I don't even Know why you're sweating that thing if it comes in here and hits us right now

sure what are you going to do and I suppose the thing is somebody could say well well yeah but they're just like they're just thinking and they're smarter than the rest of you guys and they're just trying to get safe and increase the marginal probability of safety but I guess what they're not calculating into that is the guaranteed not probability but guarantee of insane Accumulated mental and physical fatigue from having to do that all the time and live at that high cortisol stress level that's that's a huge cost that if you weren't interested in paying

you can always walk up and go I can't be here anymore I'm no longer safe for everyone else they send you home right or they keep you around for a bit and then send you home it's all unit depending yeah I mean a lot of guys will they'll throw some PTSD card I'm freaking out they'll Send them home but I mean you got to understand dude on some of these bases it's not uncommon to get shelled or mortared anywhere from five to 50 times a day so if you're freaking out about it after a while

people like you just doing this wrong yeah dude like just stop man like just get over it just you got to get over it longm a you as soon as your deployment ends you're done yeah just go home and take it off yeah the RP hypertrophy app has dozens of pre-made Workout templates to help you build a plan faster than any other training software allows but you can customize each PL exactly to your needs by prioritizing and deprioritizing any muscles you like to train choosing the exact exercises you'd like to use and customizing the volumes

you employ at every single step of the process if you're looking to bring up lagging muscle groups look no further than the r p hypertrophy app click on the link in The description of this video to get started lastly mindset on a very very specific thing because you could talk mindset and you do on your channel and we'll be hopefully more in the future folks like to hear from that sort of thing um I have a specific mindset series of questions and it's about what kind of mindset what kinds of mindsets are good or very

not good to take into three Specific timelines into your combat training and this almost certainly can apply to anything in Fitness generally the mindset to take into just learning combat training the mindset to take into what do I have written down here how what's the best mindset for okay you know some Basics how do you practice and refine those skills and then lastly what's the mindset for I already feel damn good at this what is the mindset there that gets you to that next level Versus getting complacent and you thought you were the but you're

really just like highkey mediocre so first question to you DJ is what are some good mindset places in the universe in the universe of your mind to occupy when you're entering in to combat instruction for the first time this is how you operate a pistol this is how you operate a rifle this is how you try to choke a dude to death this is how you strike This is how you run around that scares the out of me every single movie I've ever seen about the military that starts with like drill or whatever basic I'm

like oh my God and they're asking guys to like remember what was on that wall at 300 p.m. and I'm like I would suck total dick at that it just seems like what kind of mindset can you possibly bring into there short of just like wide-eyed shock and just don't up and do what everyone else Is doing being a professional student what does that look like to you if all you had to do in this world was to learn that information how well could you do it there's no nothing else drawn bandwidth no wives no

kids no mortgage none of that if you just had to sit down and retain all this information in a digestible format how well could you do it pretty damn well and if you just focus on being a really good student Understanding all the concepts you can put your own polish on them as you're retaining the information and then over years of doing that you can kind of pick and piece out things that don't apply to you that are thoughts and theories and that guy's never really done it's not really a thing this is more just

a training artificiality they're trying to Compound on top of this to create duress or stress or whatever it's going to be but the professional student mentality Never in my opinion never goes out of style if you're a white belt forever that's one of the best mentalities there's always room to grow there's always room to learn there's always people inside of this room that are better than me at something and I'm trying to download your information upload it into me yes and if you're maintained humble keep your eyes and ears open you can absorb some significant

Pearls of Wisdom by just Sitting in a room with highle people yes so it's your first little bit of combat training you have nothing to prove cuz there's nothing to prove cuz you're nothing yet you don't know anything you know they're not trying to evaluate some kind of deep underlying worth the G man Johnson picked that drill up real quick but Emmer's over here sucked at it like nobody gives a you're both nothing and one of you is nothing plus .1% Point just be a sponge yeah and what not so great opposite of that mindset

things have you seen really hamper people's ability to open up to new knowledge when I was with this this is how we did it when I was with this unit this is what we did when I was with this team this what we did well this is what so and so says shut the up nobody cares people always ask me that they're like hey I'm I'm going to try to join the ranger regimen I'm going to try out for This SWAT team can I come to a CQB one-on-one school with you no like why they

don't give a what I'm saying they shouldn't whatever they do they're going to teach you the exact way they want to do it and once you understand exactly what they want we can polish from there but the initial insall that is on them the last thing I would ever want is a guy to come through selection training like well when I was in uh buxy Mississippi swad this is the way we did Our entes I don't give a I don't ever want to hear that ever again it doesn't matter that's not what we're doing right

now you want to call audibles do it on your weekends you're playing air off with your kids don't do that right like know a lot of people have that they have some prior background some prior experience and a lot of that is good when you become more of a finished article now you can draw on That experience but you're not promoting it during the upload phase right now I don't need to hear about what you already know you know nothing I'm teaching you everything if you have some closet skill like Hey we're teaching you combatives

I don't care if you're a brown belt and Brazilian Jitsu right now we're not talking about that yeah right now this is what we're doing we want to see how you how you adopt these policies these This train should be easy for you so shut up and do it it should be easy right and then when we get later on in training you want to break out some of that break out some of that sure but right now let's just upload our own information what about folks that come in either two laks a days ago

and they're like yeah I'm a sponge but it should happen by just accident or guys that are too neurotic and detail focused and like I don't know if I can Disassemble and reassemble my weapon quickly enough like dude you already like what the hell is wrong with you just go to sleep now have you seen the the two sides of that coin what is the happy medium there the happy medium is guys who aren't afraid to make mistakes but are in fear of making the same mistake twice like they're not afraid to hang it out

there and get it cut off they just don't want to keep making the same mistake over and over and more Often not the smartest guys in the room are the worst at doing the actual job like the guys that went to MIT we've had a bunch of those guys they suck at CQB they're too analytical they're not athletes no but they're so smart that they're processing so much information except for the alligator closest to the boat right now they look out and they see all of these threats math problems are going off in their head

and it's like I just need for you to move just Just take a step let it naturally unfold like right now you're too intelligent and you're making this complex problem so much more complicated than it needs to be and we see that with everybody else people that are so analytical they can't overlay their reality on top of it all you see is black and white yes so understand try to understand the real scope of the problem in front of you that's being presented to you in training understand that that's the Whole scope execute against that

problem set as well as you can it's okay to make mistakes learn from them but don't try to predict second and third and fourth order problems and get super extra credit that's something you'll be able to do when you're a legit MC and then you'll be like oh okay I know all this front to back but don't try to like over stress your cognitive mechanisms when you're first learning something be Attentive don't be laxidasical but don't try to be like oh I can figure out two steps ahead here and really impress the instructor like he

does doesn't really want to be super impressed he just wants you to do this thing well now and then he'll progress you to the next thing you get a lot of people try to jump the progression yes seeing skydiving a ton like well if I've got the money I can buy fancy parachutes and I can do this and I can do that you're skipping The progression man and the progression is there for your safety it's for you to learn step by step by step and not only to retain the information to build that that rock

solid foundation to be able to withstand all this pressure and all this duress we're going to put you under but also it gives you the ability to go back to when you were brand new capsulate that information and then transition it to somebody else if youve jumped the entire progression would it say that all The you learned as a white belat you just skipped it and you're like I just want to see that black belt right yeah we get that every now and again at ji- Jitsu like black belts are just really good at white

belt stuff man exactly but a lot of people don't see it like that like I want to see the secret Playbook to where you guys are doing Flying arm bars and omop plaus and all this I want to see that right now like bro you can't get off the ground no you Can't even pass guard basic guard no yeah but they want because of because of funding because of natural athleticism whatever it is they want to be able to jump the progression and hit the end State fastest that's not how you get there patience for

the process one step at a time is a big deal being obsessed over forcing yourself to adhere to the progression is in my opinion that's Secret Sauce people that want to stay at white belt for 25 years they progress Much much better and they become much better instructors like they don't have any ego in it it's like I'm I'm a student the entire time every class I ever go go to I learn so much more because I'm watching all of these people move through time and space different body types different learning procedures everything so if

you're a student the entire time I upload so much more information than you do yeah when you're already in the groove And you know some things and maybe some of that training comes down to you now it it's not just being instructed to you you're expected to train yourself up by yourself or the training is a bit more advanced maybe you are the process of Special Forces development where you get to choose kind of there's a term for this that no doubt you know like where you're going to specialize sort of um what is a

really good mindset to Bring to that other than just the white belt mindset over again is there are there any specific nuances you've noticed with people's preconceived notions from their already being trained up decently hampering them or or what's the best way to get through that intermediate phase of your abilities you have two things going for you one is you already feel like you know some on your good days on your bad days you're like I don't know anything at all and These guys expect me to be able to wheel and deal right off day

one how do you deal with that what's the best way to go about it and what's some ways to go about it that you've seen really break people down and get in their way I've seen a lot of people feel entitled because they're naturally good or because you've been around for a couple years and you think you should know it so we'll say you got a guy that's that's been on a Seal Team for 5 Years he's right in that middle of the road he's good he's not great he's experienced but not not a super

experienced guy and now he wants to take on a new skill set we'll say wants to go to sniper School MH and he doesn't do well he's struggling the entire time and it really with him because he's been naturally good his whole life he was captain of the wrestling team he bang the prom queen he did this he's had nothing but success his whole life made It through buds one shot never failed anything his whole life now he gets this one spot and he can't pass the 300 Win Mag test over and over and over

he's never had defeat in his whole life and he can't wrap his head around you need to just really sit down and isolate and obsess over this craft and not look at the entire picture right now we need to bring this thing into the micro in just obsess right now and same as white Bel exactly cuz that's all they know there Is no Macro for that you need to zoom in on this one thing right now if you were professional and this was your only job which it is and you are like how much time

would you spend on it all my time there's no weekends off there's just thinking about this one thing and practice it knowum over and over and then I remind the guys brother you're not supposed to know how to do that right we've never taught you how to do it right now your ego is telling you you Should be able to do that you've never done it before D like guys you've never jumped out of an airplane you're not supposed to be able to do this right that's why you go through training if it was easy

everybody would do it you have to go through this progression and you don't want to fail that's your issue you're going to fail you're designed to fail that's why we're here that's why I give you multiple TS that's why we actually train you that's why we Don't just test you we train you this is part of the progression every single person who's ever picked up that gun has felt the exact same way you have and when you relate it back to him night everybody everybody even the best everybody Carlos Hathcock anybody you want to name

has been in that exact same position going I don't know why the I can't do this I can't call when right now like my holdes aren't working like God damn it I'm going to fail this Course everybody's been there it's part of the progression that's why it's hard that's why selection course you're not supposed to just walk in and we talk about that going through selection guys who are naturally really really gifted in my opinion and I don't harp on anybody for being a freak athlete it's impressive by me but if you've never had any

struggle through that entire selection course it's not really a selection course it's like you've never Really been tested yeah if you grab an Olympic Swim and you throw him in the buds and he never struggles with anything is it really it really a challenge no well it's dope to be able to do that at a high level except when three of your toes got blown off and you have to drag another buddy through the thousand meters of Dark Water going to be like I'm feeling proximities of muscular and cardiac failure incoming that I could just

drown both of us could Die but I've never had to work through this before cuz it all came easy bad time to have your first difficult moment out there yeah I guess the idea of training to me was always like make so many insanely difficult hum humiliating debasing Faith destroying moments for yourself and training that when you're out there in that real you're like man I could smoke a Sig through all this exactly I've already been there before it's like right now I'm Just trying to stacking up micro winds I'm trying to be as super

successful as humanly possible because I'm being tested I'm coming back through adversity every single time and understanding that you're not supposed to know how to do it by designer right now your ego is what's going to keep you from progressing yeah just stop and understand it's hard for a reason dude yeah like that thousand me Coro shot it's supposed to be hard supposed to be Hard it's supposed to you up yeah it's not impossible all these other guys did it you'll do it too just stay with the process maybe not on your first try yeah

do not lose motivation right now it's part of the process last series of questions when you're already good and then two things you know it cuz you are and everyone around you knows it not only are the guys next to you on the teams Like dude that's that guy but in the community in your family everyone knows you're a MC what is a not so great mindset to fall into by default if you're that guy I'm sure you've seen it a handful of or two times maybe with yourself I've sure sh been in that situation

you know show up as a brown belt everyone's small you're like I'd toast everyone here I'm not going to learn like uh maybe not the greatest thing to do and Then what are the mindsets that even for that person at the very crest of amazing allows them to either stay amazing for years to come or better yet more often incrementally become even more amazing cuz amazing you hit and you're like I did it but there are other mountain peaks that when the clouds clear you can see are higher than yours how do you get to

those what's the mindset getting me to that instead of me being Mr amazing and everyone's Like yeah that guy's cool and all but he's not moving up in the world anymore and see for the first one uh we call it believe in your own you tell yourself you're the best other people tell you're the best you start to believe it next thing you know you're sitting on a pedestal it's like more often than not you need to kick that thing out from underneath yourself and realize there's always room to grow there's always room to progress

and even If it's not physically tactically emotionally and spiritually you got plenty of room to go have you motivated everybody else behind you to keep that same Pace you've kept for 15 years okay pause so now we're talking about if you're really good at your but are you making other people on the team as good as you are you a leader cuz you good by yourself is dope and everyone thinks you're awesome and tells stories about you but what if you're that guy That not only are you dope but the guys that served along with

you were like dude that guy taught me so much that's a bigger Difference by far than just one dude with one gun is sweet but a mortar lands right there and there's no more dude or gun five of your guys 10 of your guys you manage to train up close to your level because you're around them so long oh my God that's a force yeah you've created a culture that's going to keep going long after you're gone right And you see it with great teams all the time we do it with SWAT Team guys and

Special Operations dude you take out their number one dude like a training scenario down man most teams crumble and you see the teams that are set up for Success they drag him out same way if he'd be Charlie 6 they just drag him out of the door keep keep working the problem they don't give a he's dead it doesn't matter he's a great dude they've been chasing him this whole time But if he's out of the equation he's not going to respawn right drag him out put him in the ambulance let's go back to work

that's what they do yeah that's what you need to be able to do and a lot of that not believing your own is knowing there is always room to grow and more often than not the people that isolate and they obsess with their craft I love it and I appreciate and I did that for so long but you see a lot of those guys because once you hit that Level you typically have a wife you have a family you have extra commitments and all that and nothing in your life has a great component to it

it's all how's everything going you're like good great you know fine how's your home life like it's fine well how is it really like well really I'm drinking a bottle of Jack a night I haven't talked to my wife in 13 days and she's living in a days in motel it's really not great but well how's work it's great well how's it Really like I hate my leadership we haven't done a meaningful op in six months and funding's getting pulled so I mean actually it's pretty terrible there's no really work home balance like the guys

as they make that progression when they want to make those incremental jumps it's when the Family Support is behind it and I talk about the dials and switches it's so easy to be a 22-year-old kid be a Navy SEAL a SWAT team guy and go it's the only thing I'm going to do I'm going to flick on that light switch I'm going to live this at 100% and you never toggle it off you never have a dial so now you introduce a wife she's competing with your dream job then you have kids they're competing bandwidth

from your dream job you start to resent them then every time you come home it's some colossal fight it's some blow up you're like I can't wait to get the out of here again you go back to work now it's toxic there now toxic On both ends if you don't have something you go dude work as right now it's been for 6 months but my relationship my family has never been better that'll give you that mental and that emotional reset to give you the bandwidth to go back to stomach through the bad times you're like

my best friend was my T for 10 years and was like every day I went to work was Bliss it was Harmony I could have eaten sandwi just 3 days a Week and never cared my family life is toxic now it's in Reverse now my family life is baller I go back into work work's not very good but because my home life is good I can weather the storm to keep myself in a positive mood still be uplifting still be motivational still be hungry to train you know thirsting to become better every single day that

1% better mentality every single day I'm showing up with a purpose to get better to me that's how you get past that you Have to set up little opportunities to give yourself the bandwidth to be better and a lot of that is it's not believe in your own there's always room to go always have you ever seen folks in that position at a very high level of operation for whatever does they do put too much pressure on themselves or is it typically not enough always almost always too much always too much what are some tips

this is easy to say just chill out just relax but There's two things to say about that one it's easy to say and more difficult to do and the other is you can do it on paper but not do it in real in in reality so for example way less impressive than you've ever been through but my wife and I are we're Workaholics straight up there is no dancing around anymore and we like have a big special event coming up well it's the Mr Olympia we're going to be at the Olympia and we're there for

two weeks Before one week before one week after tons of collabs it's insane level of work you're like Delirious by the end of it usually we get sick and then had this opportunity recently where it was like okay so we actually blocked off the week after for a vacation no work it's in the company calendar an opportunity came up I looked at my wife she's like you're a idiot and I was like I'm going to do it cuz I'm not competing in bodybuild anymore and I have more Bandwidth I knew I was supposed to say

no but God damn it opportunities come up it's so hard the other thing is I'm supposed to be chilling out and watching movies what am I doing sitting in front of a movie but I'm thinking about Sport Science and I have ideas for the YouTube channel and for the next book and the next podcast and I'm writing them down I'm putting them away I'm writing them I'm relaxing but I'm I really relaxing is that a thing that happens with Special operators can't assume it it doesn't what are some good tip I want to know DJ

help me out bro this has helped me out by proxy time this is my own personal therapy at this point you got to build in you got to build in the opportunities to kind of decompress and you know I like to build mine and I'm not saying I've been doing this for 20 years I I definitely didn't I let the obsession take a hold of me and I don't regret it and if my wife was sitting on The couch You' tell you the same thing I told her long before we got married I'm not leaving

this job for you I'm not leaving this job for our kids I love it too much and I will not sacrifice one ounce of it for you guys I'm job first exactly I don't regret it but there are moments where I could have been better because if you talk to her about how bad I was towards the end I was spitting Venom all day dude anything that took my conscious thought away from that Organization I resented her and kids included it's like oh you know our first day of school it's like I'm not going to

that do I have to go to school I thought I was done with that send the kids there's a bus for that right yeah like you'd self justify it and at the end of the day it's like do I regret it yeah but not really because I needed to be that good I needed to be as good as I possibly could to be sitting on this Couch and not get killed so what I tell dudes now something I adopted a couple years ago is the transitions from one spot to the other to a a natural

and normal progression of dialing dial I knew you were going to say the dial so dude like I'll leave my house it's 10 minutes door to door from my house to work I change everything I'm listening to the moment I pull out of that house I change a radio station whatever I'm listening to I'm going to the gym I'm Going to do my Cal plunge 20-minute walk protein shake a lift a shower I'm going to do everything I'm not thinking about my kids I'm not thinking about my wife don't call me when the kids are

getting on the school bus I just want to say goodbye to you I'm not answering goodbye for what I'll be good God right like I'm trying to be selfish right now because everybody else is about to draw a bandwidth for me in reverse the moment I walk out of that Place at 5 5:30 and I'm driving home I power that back down I put my phone on do not disturb and I put on Chris Stapleton some e Ludo I put on something I'm going to change my entire mindset and I start pre- rehearsing conversations that

I'm going to have as soon as I walk through the door so I'm hi honey so I'm engaged I love you like so when the garage door opens one or two things going to happen my 11-year-old is going to sprint out of that garage and Grab me or my 6-year-old is rain or shine 365 days a year that is going to happen how am I going to meet them is it with my cellone in my hand trying to finish the text is it me mid conversation screaming at somebody is it me browsing YouTube or G

no as soon as the garage door goes that whole thing Powers down I'm going to give you undivided attention and if that's for 10 minutes and then I have to get on a work call I have to do something I'm trying To make this first impression as good as I possibly can and really it resets my whole my whole mindset for going home the rest of the night it's like I made that first interaction really good that's a positive win okay where's my next kid at positive win where's my lady at hug eye contact all

of this positive win okay if in 45 minutes somebody pings me and I have to take it at least I gave them that initial block like I am putting forth all of my yeah man I'm Trying to do it because I don't want to drag who I am at work and if I'm in some toxic conversation and I have it the entire way when that garage door comes open they're meeting me with that I'm not talented enough to dial it down real quick I've need minutes to be able to focus on it so you look

at your average cop average whatever your time is purpose built my whole day is purpose built to give me the optimal instate and after 5:30 my optimal inate is a better Father and a better husband 1% better every day so if I do that it gives me the bandwidth to where I go back I can obsess over work I'm just thinking about this I'm not thinking about you and ballet recital or Spanish class at 5:30 I don't care about any of that and I know it sounds up but I'm not thinking about my family throughout

the day I'm not think up at all what the hell it's also like if you're thinking about your family what for Is that helping them no they're not around to absorb your wisdom that you've generated for them they're not and also you're not doing your job well so DJ I really love that it's it's um very airtight compartment sort of approach well everybody has it's in your natural day it doesn't involve you getting in a cal plunge you have to buy some piece of equipment use the natural transition points if you worked in Google and

you had to work from one side of the Building to the other use that entire walk put in earbuds drown everything out don't be on your cell phone and walk walk yourself through what you're about to step into is the person I am in this room in 302 the same person I need to be when I get to room 705 no they need to complete well I have to switch my whole mindset my whole mentality of thinking before I walk in here if not they're going to get both barrels of the dude was in 305

and they don't want That they don't deserve it I got to be able to operate dials instead of switches and for me that helps and the other thing I do I tell everybody the universal is the be a pro if you imagine yourself in the middle of Super Dome on a lazy Susan spinning around 360 and you're going to represent whatever you are so if you're a doctor a lawyer Sports scientist a bodybuilder a SWAT team guy Navy SEAL a Delta whatever it wants to be one representative of that Entire demographic is going to walk

on that stage and spin around at 36720 you're going to speak you're going to give a little presentation and the entire world is going to see what you look like how you represent how you care yourself your physical vessel mentally spiritually emotionally how you articulate your speech your your vocal cues your ocular cues how you interact with normal people they're going to to see one representative to motivate the Rest of the earth to be you are you that guy that should be on that stage if not why not what can you implement to be the

guy who deserves to be on that stage is it just how you care yourself you could look the part but you're so toxic the moment your mouth opens up no one wants to be around you is that the guy I want on my team is that the dude I want be the team leader of this no do I want some pacifist no like you have to be this hybrid approach approach it's Ever evolving that never realizes you've hit the Finish Line there is no Finish Line it goes on for infinity and if you understand that

about the 10year mark of doing the thing you're obsessed with you realize you're never going to be the finished article and that's how you know you've hit the right thing to be obsessed over because you don't care it's the struggle it's the journey that's made it so much worth it right it's like by the Time I hit 10 years in teams I realize there's never going to be a rank a position that's going to be any higher than I am right now I'm never going to hit a level where I can sit back and cruise

and go that's it I'm good like I've done it all I've shot enough rounds I've jumped enough times I've Dove enough times done enough missions like there is no getting better than this that's never a thing and at that 10 year mark once you Realize that the hunger the progression the obsessions what's going to carry you through the rest of your career it's like that's what I love the most when you get organizations and jobs and careers that drive that into you it's mesmerizing for me because I see it like that dude is still churning

right now and he knows he's never going to be the finished article that's what I love about it like you've never made it never it's one constant state of Evolution I don't have the skill set to end a podcast on a note better than that DJ where can people find you if they want to learn more about what you're doing contract your company services to train them up for special ops the whole deal where are you located still out at Virginia Beach Virginia you check out gbsr group.com gsgroup gear.com we you T tical nylon we

got a physical training component we do for tactical athletes Mobility focused uh that's on training Heroic but yeah give us a a follow on IG YouTube We're on all social platforms I love it dude thank you so much for your time I feel like I benefited a crapload hopefully you guys did as well and uh hopefully we'll see you again dude I'm so stoked to be here thank you so much for having me pleas been an honor