Individual Fitness Programming for SEALs, Marines, and Regular Joes

Yeah, yeah, we all know functional fitness is great and Rich Froning is amazing, blessed be his name, but is it right for everyone?  I would say yes, but you must tailor your personal programming for your own needs.  If you are a military member this is going to be fairly wide and varied.  An infantryman will have different needs than logistics personnel, which will have different needs than an assaulter on a SEAL team.  Keep reading this article to learn how to assess your individual needs, and set up your own, individualized fitness program.

This article will cover some methods to assess your fitness needs, and create a program that will respond your own goals and challenges.  Primarily, this is written for folks in the military, but anyone can apply these same principles to achieve whatever goals they like.

Needs Based Assessment 

The first step to designing any workout out plan is to take a good hard look at your life, your challenges, and the tasks you must be able to perform.  Now, functional fitness is a fitness program that by its very nature is broad and inclusive, allowing it’s practitioners the ability to perform most physical tasks well.

By definition they will not be masters in any one domain, i.e. they won’t be the strongest, or the best runner, but they should be pretty dang good at each.  If we have any military member do functional training, they will have good generalized fitness.  Now, we need to layer on top of this their specific physical fitness needs.

The first example I will give you is as an Infantryman.  As many long term readers of this site will know, I was an Infantry Officer in the Marine Corps, and as such I have first hand experience with their needs and challenges, as well as designing training programs for them.  The best way to figure out what areas we need to focus on is to decide what the three biggest physical fitness challenges they will face are. For the infantryman these are the following:

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1. Movement Under Fire

2. Rucking

3. Patrolling

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I know this isn’t really clear to my nonmilitary folk, so I will break it down.  Movement under fire is generally the last 1000m or so when a unit must maneuver while taking fire.  This generally involves a series of sprints, or buddy rushes, where one person provides cover fire while you get up from the prone, sprint forward 10-15 m and then you go prone and provide cover fire.  Basically, this is running in 60+ pounds of gear with burpees interspersed, yum, yum.

Next, we are going to talk about ruck marching which is it’s own special form of hell.  Many of you all will no doubt be familiar with competitions such as GO RUCK, and it is fair to say that these are similar to what happens in the military, but the loads are much heavier for the infantry.

I remember as a platoon commander prior to a company hike I weighed all my gear that I would be carrying and it came to 96lbs!  Now as the platoon commander, I had one of the lightest loads, I had no machine guns, or mortars to carry, only my personal weapon.  Combat loads can easily range upwards of 120lbs.  This puts a huge strain on the joints and the back specifically.

The last area we are going to speak about is patrolling.  Basically this is walking around with a little less gear than rucking, providing security for your area.  This can be as short as a few hours or as long as a few days.  Physically it is not a intense as the other two challenges, but it does last much longer.

Identified Needs

So now that we have discussed our big three needs, we need to look and see what bodily systems them, so we can come up with a plan for those specific systems.

Movement Under Fire: is primarily anaerobic in nature, requiring brief bursts of speed, lasting for approximately 10-15minutes.

Rucking: is primarily aerobic in nature, requiring sustained effort for 1-6 hours, this will require excellent muscular endurance

Patrolling:  is primarily aerobic in nature, requiring sustained effort from 1-12+ hrs

From these needs we can see that two of our biggest challenges are aerobic in nature; however, our most import challenge, movement under fire, is purely anaerobic.  This is great, because now we can really hone in on the specifics of a program to address these needs.

Program Design

We will be using a standard programming template as our baseline fitness plan.  It will cover all of our needs in terms of strength, endurance, etc.  Next we will layer our specific needs identified above, on top of that.  See the template below:

As you can see we have general WODs being done, but several workouts a week are designed to increase aerobic, and anaerobic output specifically.  I find it more productive to work the anaerobic system harder, because to produce this level of output you will need to use your aerobic system concurrently.  So in effect, we are getting taking care with two of our goals with one style of workout.

Keep in mind that this is only a weeks worth of programing, and there isn’t much direct strength work.  Rest assured it would be included in a full training plan.  This is just an example, demonstrating how you can integrate specific workouts for specific needs.

Example Two 

Now we kind of got into the weeds above so it would be clear how to identify needs, then program for those requirements.  This example will be much quicker because you are all now certified experts right? For this example, we will be using a SEAL team member who expects to be deployed somewhere in the middle east, conducting kill/capture raids.

Needs Assessment 

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1.  Controlling People on Target

2. Movement from Insertion to Target

3. Climbing Obstacles on Target

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Identified Needs

Controlling People on Target: this will require significant strength, power and muscle mass, as controlling combative adults is very difficult

Movement from Insertion to Target: depending on the raid this could be sprinting from the helo to the target building, this is generally 400m or less worth of sprinting in gear

Climbing Obstacles on Target: this is very common in urban areas.  The target might be surrounded by a wall/fence, or you might need to climb to the primary breach point.

From these needs, we can see that our athlete will need significant strength both to climb obstacles and control people.  They will also need to specialize in anaerobic training with a time frame of 2 min and under, i.e sprinting to their target.

This example highlights how poor a traditional military PT plan would work.  Running 5 miles then doing some calisthenics will not prepare you for these challenges.

Program Design

This program will look a lot like a power lifter’s program with a fair amount of work done every minute on the minute, or with planned rest intervals to tax the anaerobic system, as well as generate muscular hypertrophy.

Recap

As I stated above this article is really written for military members, but this method of identifying needs, and designing a program will work for anyone.  First you must identify your three biggest challenges, then figure out what commonalities they have, and what areas aren’t adequately addressed in a standard fitness plan.

Once you figure those deficiencies out you can program specific workouts that will help you achieve your goals.  Remember, you shouldn’t worry too much if your program design is the best it could be.  The short answer is no, it could always be better, but that doesn’t matter.  Hard work on a good program is a million times better than no work on the best program.

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