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SEAL FIT
Training x Technique
Train Like A Fighter
So You Want To Be
A Navy SEAL?
Open to anyone looking to take their
personal fitness to a new level of
intensity, the SEALFIT program is also
producing the next generation of the
Navy’s most elite operators
By MIKE CARLSON Photography by JAMES LAW
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t first glance, the small city
of Encinitas, California,
seems like your typical laidback, SoCal coastal village
composed entirely of coffee houses
and yoga studios. It’s the kind of
place where a 60-year-old guy with
six-pack abs will walk by carrying a
surfboard.
Encinitas isn’t all lotus-eaters,
though. It is also the home of the
SEALFIT gym. Part workout regimen,
part mental toughness training,
part self-defense class, and part
life coaching, SEALFIT represents
more than just a gym membership. It’s a lifestyle for modern-day
Spartans. And, in some cases, it’s a
feeder program for BUD/S, the Navy
SEAL’s brutal qualification school 30
minutes down the road on Coronado
Island.
“Our ultimate aim is to build character, that warrior character who is
quiet, humble, willing to lead, a great
teammate, someone who gets the
job done, and upholds commitments, who does not quit,” former
Navy SEAL and SEALFIT creator
Mark Divine says.
A ray of sunshine peaks through
the clouds and lands upon The
Grinder, an expanse of concrete
flanked by lines of Concept2 rowers
and black powder-coated squat
racks. The stars and stripes snap
in the ocean breeze atop a 30-foot
flagpole. The daily 7 a.m. workout, a
grueling two-hour regimen, for Divine’s hand-picked crew of SEALFIT
members is about to start.
Divine’s journey is a classic tale. At
25 years old he was working as a CPA
in Manhattan after getting his MBA
degree. A former collegiate swimmer,
triathlete, and black belt in karate,
Divine was woefully unhappy in the
white-collar world. With very little time
to train, he could foresee a steady
decline into physical mediocrity.
“I felt like I needed to pursue a warrior path,” he says. “I didn’t know how to
articulate that back then, so I looked at
different careers I thought would fire me
up. I kept coming back to the SEALs.”
Divine matriculated into the SEAL
teams in 1990. He spent seven years on
active duty and 10 more years on active
reserve. During his time in the reserves
he helped launch a microbrewery, started navyseals.com, and opened his own
CrossFit affiliate, called US CrossFit. In
2006, he launched SEALFIT. His idea
was to share the experience of training
like a SEAL candidate and marry it with
the best practices of CrossFit, martial
arts, strength training, yoga, and his
own curriculum of metal toughness
development he calls Unbeatable Mind.
Divine’s menagerie of disciplines is
a holistic package that resonates with
people of all ages, and both genders,
who hail from all over the world. He
posts a daily online OPWOD (Operator
Workout of the Day) that has a robust
following, as do the Unbeatable Mind
online videos he produces. Several
times a year he holds SEALFIT immersion programs, known as Kokoro Camp,
that sell out.
“I think a lot of people don’t know
how to express the desire of following
a warrior path,” Divine says. “And our
society has lacked models for that that
until recently. It is nice to see CrossFit,
and the Spartan Race, and Tough Mudder, and those types of programs that
don’t profess to be easy, but instead
say, ‘This is going to kick your ass, but
you are going to grow from it.’ It’s the
same thing with MMA. You get into a
training session with a lot of guys and
who are doing an abnormal amount of
work compared to the rest of society.
You leave the training a better person
every time.”
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Exactly at 7 a.m. the SEALFIT training commences with a debriefing
around the whiteboard. SEALFIT shares
space—as well as gear, members, and
instructors—with Divine’s CrossFit
gym, US CrossFit. The SEALFIT workout will seem familiar to anyone who
has experienced CrossFit’s ideology of
constantly varied functional exercise performed at high intensity. Yet
SEALFIT departs from CrossFit in more
aspects than they share. For one, unlike
CrossFit there is no leader in a SEALFIT
workout. There is no coach yelling from
the sidelines. After the initial debriefing, in which the workout is reviewed
and discussed, it becomes a team
effort. Secondly, there is simply more
to SEALFIT: more modalities, more
volume, more attention to the needs of
the body and the mind.
“We invest CrossFit into our training
as work capacity, and then we do more
strength and stamina and durability
training, which is lacking in the CrossFit
model,” Divine says. “We believe that recovery, stretching, yoga, and breathing
is critical to a warrior. CrossFit develops
that horsepower, that metabolic engine,
and it does an incredible job of that. But
SEALFIT is not about creating a sport
athlete. We use hard functional fitness,
with these other attributes of stamina,
strength, durability, and mental toughness in our training program.”
Eleven men make up the class this
morning, including Divine and Lance
Cummings, the director of training at
SEALFIT and a 30-year veteran of the
SEAL Teams. All of them wear some
combination of fatigue-style utility
pants and boots. Several sport a special green T-shirt that indicates they
have completed Kokoro Camp, Divine’s
50-hour workshop that replicates a
small portion of SEAL training’s most
infamous trial: Hell Week. They look like
a cross between a class of frogman recruits and Tyler Durden’s underground
gang of truth-seekers in the movie
Fight Club.
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WE KNOW THAT
TO BE A SEAL
OPERATOR YOU
ARE MOVING
LOADS FOR HOURS
AT A TIME. SO WE
HAVE A STAMINA
COMPONENT IN
EVERY WORKOUT.”
While they all appear similar, the
motivations of the group vary dramatically. Dave is 41 and an entrepreneur
who exited the business world with a
considerable financial buffer and a mission to reclaim the physical strength
and athleticism he lost. Travis had
suffered a traumatic brain injury in a
bike accident and began using CrossFit
and eventually SEALFIT to test his postaccident boundaries. A 23-year-old kid,
who asked not to be named, is preparing to enter Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL Training, within a matter of
weeks. Divine has had several frogman
candidates go though his training in
preparation for the infamous six-month
crucible known as BUD/S and proudly
estimates that SEALFIT trainees have
an unofficial 90-percent-plus pass rate.
“Anecdotally, about one-third of
BUD/S graduates have used SEALFIT
to prepare,” Divine says. “If 200 people
are in a class, you will get 20 to 25
graduates, and one-third of those 25
have used SEALFIT. We have a growing
cadre of guys wearing the Trident or
in training. We are nearing 100 guys
already. And the Navy only mints 175
new SEALs a year.”
The workout begins unlike any
CrossFit WOD, with five minutes of
meditation and deep breathing. Divine’s programming is heavily flavored
by his experience with martial arts and
yoga. From there, they all grab a PVC
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pipe and begin doing mobility drills,
focusing heavily on the shoulders
since an overhead press is part of both
the strength and stamina portions of
the workout. Next, the members put
on 20-pound weight vests and grab
30-pound sandbags for a triumvirate of
drills. Incredibly, this is still only part of
the warm-up.
For 20 minutes straight, the team—
still wearing the weight vests—perform
five different functional exercises, using
moderate weight, performed quickly,
and with no rest. After a short break
they begin the strength portion of their
workout, which is loosely based off Jim
Wendler’s 5/3/1 powerlifting program.
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The last part of the main workout is
devoted to building stamina. It incorporates the lift that was performed in
the strength evolution, combined with
two other functional compound movements. Oftentimes an hour-long run
or swim is tagged onto the end of the
training day.
“In SEALFIT we bone-crush anyone
in workouts over 30 minutes,” Divine
says, noting that the majority of
CrossFit workouts are 15 minutes or
shorter. “We dominate in that field. We
know that to be a SEAL Operator you
are moving loads for hours at a time. So
we have a stamina component in every
workout.”
Today, the two-hour session finishes
with a designation Divine calls “durability.” It’s a conglomeration of moves
designed to make the body tougher,
grittier, less likely to break. It is basically all of the things athletes know they
should do, but usually don’t, such as
sprinting, stretching, yoga, and even
self-defense. Divine holds an instructor credential in Ashtanga yoga, and
through that he has developed his own
style called Warrior Yoga. He credits
yoga and durability training for getting so many of his students through
BUD/S, where injuries are a large part
of the attrition rate.
The mystique of SEALFIT generates plenty of curiosity, both from
the local CrossFit population looking
to kick their training up a notch and
from civilians and military from all
over the world. That is why Cummings,
a practicing chiropractor who holds
several exercise certifications, including
Army Master Fitness Trainer and Navy
Training Specialist, has instituted a
strict screening process for SEALFIT
candidates. The standards, which can
be found on sealfit.com, are formidable.
“I’ve had law enforcement and firefighters wash out after just 20 minutes,”
Cummings says.
The attraction of the SEAL teams
seems to cross all bounds of age, gender, and socioeconomics. Pro athletes,
doctors, and everyone in between has
come to Encinitas to prove themselves,
to test themselves.
“We represent something different in
our society, and people are intrigued by
it,” Divine says. They think we are special, but we aren’t. We are just guys who
like to work harder than the average.
‘Do today what others won’t, so tomorrow you can do what others can’t.’ I am
training to accomplish that.”
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Mark Divine
The Crucible
A LOT OF PEOPLE PAY GOOD MONEY TO GET THEIR ASS KICKED.
THE STIFFEST TEST IN SEALFIT, KNOWN AS KOKORO CAMP, REPLICATES JUST A SMALL PORTION OF BUD/S TRAINING, INCLUDING
HELL WEEK.
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF SEALFIT
A typical SEALFIT workout lasts about two
hours. It begins with meditation (what Divine
calls “box breathing”) and usually ends
with an ocean swim or long ruck (walking
or jogging with a heavy backpack). Those
two elements bookend a warm-up, and then
separate workouts develop work capacity,
strength, stamina, and durability. Since the
SEALFIT HQ is only a few blocks from the
ocean, the candidates often get wet. However,
for practicality sake, Divine rarely programs
water drills into the daily SEALFIT OPWODs
that are posted online at sealfit.com.
BASELINE (WARM-UP):
STRENGTH: Box breathing
Range of motion drills
Sandbag drills with weight vest (step-ups,
get up & press, 200-meter run)
WORK CAPACITY:
ROTATE BETWEEN EXERCISES EVERY MINUTE
FOR 20 MINUTES, WITH WEIGHT VEST
Frog plex (squat clean to overhead press to
back squat, with 115-pound barbell)
Tire flip
Sledge strike
Buddy pull
Buddy carry
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One-rep max push press
STAMINA:
FOUR ROUNDS OF:
8 reps push press
12 reps renegade row
1 15-foot rope climb
Kokoro Camp, held several times a year, represent’s SEALFIT training’s
biggest test. Candidates move into the dorm-like living facility at the
SEALFIT headquarters and train, study, and live the SEAL life. The camps
are either one week or three weeks long and are scheduled to finish
about six weeks before BUD/S starts, making it the perfect laboratory for
potential operators. Every camp culminates with 50 sleepless hours that
replicates the Hell Week experience.
“The Kokoro Camp is the hardest training in the world outside of
BUD/S,” says Mark Divine, the creator of SEALFIT and former SEAL
teams member who retired with the rank of Commander in 2011. “I had a
guy come all the way from Estonia and quit in the first hour of the camp.
Even people who quit say it was valuable because they now understand
a new normal.”
An exceedingly high level of physical conditioning is necessary to
participate in Kokoro. Before considering it, applicants should have
completed:
• 10-mile run in less than 1:20
• 20-mile hike with load in less than six hours
Within the first few hours of Kokoro Camp, candidates will be asked to
perform the following:
• 50 push-ups (40 for women), 50 sit-ups, and 50 air squats in two
minutes
• 10 dead hang pull-ups for men, 6 for women
• 1-mile run in boots and utility pants on road in 9:30
• Body Armor (a.k.a. “Murph”): one-mile run, 100 pull-ups, 20 push-ups,
300 squats, one-mile run, all while wearing a 20-pound pack (15 pounds
for women). Must be completed in less than 1 hour and 10 minutes
“In Kokoro, you put away the distractions from your life,” says Lance
Cummings, a former Navy SEAL and the Director of Training at SEALFIT.
“You are hurting and putting out and everybody is hurting and you can
see that everyone is drawing on you for inspiration and you are tapping
into them as well. I have been to Afghanistan and Iraq and 50 other
shitholes around the world where there are no distractions, and when you
come home those distractions that occupy your time are there, but you
can remain focused a little better.”
DURABILITY: 30 minutes of warrior yoga and
hand-to-hand combat training
BONUS VIDEO
Check out our tablet edition
for video shot on site at
SEALFIT.