Developing The Mentality Of The Special Forces To Win Fights w/ Josh Fletcher (SSOF Ep. 34)

James de Lacey2:33

And it's an interesting one, like they're still cranking the Institute, right, where basically you're living in-house and things like that. They were looking for someone, what, a year or two ago, to run the whole program?

Josh Fletcher3:06

Yeah, when I joined up, that project was fresh out the gates. And India being India, they say it's going to happen in January, it will happen in June or July, and half of what they promise you. But it's a new startup, and what they actually put together from a facilities perspective is absolutely out of this world. I mean, it's certainly something India I'd never seen.

And now they've got some real good stability in terms of the types of programs that they're offering and running. What you will see in the next kind of three to five years is some of those real younger kids who have been there for years, they'll be maturing and coming up through the ranks and winning at major championships. So that's something you're 100% going to see.

There's a lot of politics and issues that they have to battle with, and their affiliations and their partnerships with the governing bodies is always a challenge for them. But in terms of what they can offer and their facilities, probably up there with some of the best in the world.

James de Lacey4:00

In terms of the sports side, we might come back to that, but I want to kind of steer this podcast towards special forces tactical strength and conditioning. Because there's always a, I guess we could say, a misconception between what special forces or tactical strength and conditioning or training looks like and how it is, I guess, used within professional or just sporting context.

So do you want to maybe dive into—I think what might be good is just going straight into how you guys actually trained, and then we can kind of build out from there.

Josh Fletcher4:28

Yeah, I think the most important thing for anybody listening and anybody who is intrigued and interested in special forces is they are a group of people that people aspire to and look up to. And unfortunately there's too many of their philosophies and mantras adapted without real context of understanding what it is they actually have to go and do.

Those guys are going to protect people. They're going to war. We are training people for sport, which is running around a field chasing a ball, or having a scrap with somebody in a cage. It's not going to war. It's a bit different to that. I know a fight is slightly a bit closer to the battle, but it's not the same thing. It's not life and death.

So there's this caveat to kind of everything that I'm saying, and there's some significant lines that need to be drawn in the sand. But in terms of the training we do, I think it really depends on what phase they're in of training.

So part of my job was to train their recruits coming through the schoolhouse to prepare them for selection. So if you want to think about selection, if you've ever seen the program Who Dares Wins—I know there's different variations of that around the globe—but essentially it's a TV program where they show random celebrities and people put through a 21-day training to see if they could make it through.

And essentially the selection processes that we were involved in were exactly the same, just a lot more violent. And essentially the content was pretty similar, but the guys going into that pipeline from military background instead of being either celebrities or random members of the public.

So what we did is when I kind of got on the ground, it was to really establish what is it you need them to be able to do, and then we track back based on what a week would look like, what each of their modules looks like. So they've got things like small unit tactics, which would be small movements, but on your feet. Small movements for an entire day moving as a group and as a unit, learning how to communicate, move, shoot, move. So they'd cover 10, 15, 20K a day doing that, but at this really, really slow, low pace.

And then we had to kind of build that into our training and our programming. So what is it they have to go and do? So what's the module they're in? And then we build our training around where they're at and what it is they need to do.

So then we would look at the week, and we knew that there were certain activities that they needed to be able to do in order to achieve some of the basic minimum standards that were part of their assessment structure. And we built a program to be able to ensure one thing really: that when they got to selection, that they dropped out of selection for reasons relating to mental weakness rather than physical. Physically, like robustness, physical strength, or physical endurance, whatever physical quality you want.

We wanted to make sure that they were solid. That was my job: to make sure that they were robust enough to be able to handle it. They didn't always have to be the fittest, didn't have to destroy every single test there was, but they needed to be robust enough to be still standing at the end. If they were still standing at the end, then they've obviously shown enough kind of mental fortitude throughout that process to be warranted to go into the schoolhouse selection process, which is a six to nine month one.

So we look at, like, a classic week. It would be pretty much a Monday to Friday. They needed to ruck, which for those you guys who don't know, it's just loaded marching. So a big bag on their back of a certain load, and they need to be able to do that at a set pace, a set distance in a set time on undulating terrain.

So we had to build that into our programming. So we would always do a longer ruck on a Friday—that would be our longest one—and then we would incorporate two resistance training sessions, one regen session, and run twice within the week.

So some of their runs in the selection process were longer, so I won't—it varies year to year, so some would be up to eight or nine miles, and some would be a little bit shorter. So obviously one of the biggest factors and variables we're considering is time on feet, and coupled the time on feet with what they actually do in their day. If they're in small unit tactics and or land navigation, they go out and get lost, and some of these dudes are doing 23K a day because they get lost.

Walking around and they have to send out a party to find them and that's just how it was. But that means that we have to change our training because otherwise they'll just break. So we would adapt the week based on which group of people were in which module, but essentially normally it'd be a Monday they would do a resistance-based session. Tuesday would be a ruck and a run, so they would do their ruck first—sorry, they do their run first, which normally be something sort of tempo-based run.

Interestingly, I never ran them for any more than 1K, any one particular interval. So we built up to 1K intervals. We did four of them to prepare them for up to nine-mile runs. We never did any more than four because I knew that the accumulative load and the accumulative volume of training that we were doing throughout the week was going to be building the capacity needed to handle those runs.

And then we did a tempo ruck, which is to get them used to the speed which they were going to be walking at. And that was literally like 20, 30 minutes where we would just go out, the load on the back, and we'd walk at the exact pace that they were going to need to be walking at, round and around and around and around in a circle. Simple as that. Wednesday was off-feet conditioning, just low-level and recovery.

Thursday would normally go again and do some resistance training, and then occasionally we would bolt on a bit of a run at the end of that as well. But that would again be pretty small and short and sharp. And then we did the long ruck on the Friday, and that was the training week. But that would be a classic training week if you're in, I don't know, a classroom-based module. But if you were out doing land navigation or something like that or small unit tactics, we would change that slightly.

James de Lacey11:46

You also mentioned the mental aspect too. It's interesting because the training week you described there probably flies against the face of what most people envision a Special Forces training week to be. A Special Forces training week, I think most people kind of envision as this hardcore obstacle courses, crazy training loads, just hard training, and basically like hell week every day of the week.

So I guess from your perspective then, the training you're doing—you obviously mentioned the mental side—do you think that that kind of training can instill some kind of mental fortitude into these guys, or is that something that's innate in them, or are there other ways to develop that mental capacity?

Josh Fletcher12:21

Yeah, so the misconception is that what I'm describing is a train-up for them to go into selection. And selection is where they hit that 21-day period. Within that 21-day period is a hell week, which is just like exactly as you're imagining, just absolutely disgusting, the most savage thing you'll ever do in your life and that you can probably imagine. All sleep-deprived and calorie-controlled. So you got 21 days there which we were training them up to be able to tolerate that 21.

So that the guys who go in, the guys who come out the other side, they go into a six-to-nine-month schoolhouse where things are a little bit calmer. But they are then going through the exact modules that need to be learned in order to—you almost have to earn the right to go to school, that's basically what I'm saying.

James de Lacey13:25

Gotcha. And 21 days is earning your right to go through.

Josh Fletcher13:25

So yeah, you're through selection, but as soon as you get through selection that doesn't mean anything. You're now in the schoolhouse and now you've got to prove yourself for six to nine months continuously. And that's not all physical because they are aware we can't smash everyone every single day. But during that 21 days it's almost like gloves are off and they do what they got to do.

So what we found from the physical training side in the build-up—so an eight-week preparation course to build them up for that 21-day selection—what we found is that the guys that we were training, they've got this point here that's like their individual ceiling. So a lot of people were coming in and they weren't even hitting their own individual ceiling.

So our first job was to get people to reach their individual ceiling, and the next job is to extend their ceiling, raise their ceiling. Because this is the type of people that we're looking for up here—we're not interested in below the line, we're only interested in these guys up here.

So it was twofold really to try to upskill them and help them to understand that they can push themselves further than they think they can, and their limits are further and their limits are kind of up here rather than physical. We would kind of try to balance that and monitor and manage that, but our job wasn't to be shouting at them or bashing them all the time. Our job was the physical training, the recovery. So other guys go and do that, and that was their job.

So we were quite aligned with that, definitely in the first year, where it was really clear as to the physical training was the priority, and the physical training took priority because everybody understood that that was what was going to keep people healthy during selection.

James de Lacey15:16

Yeah. And it's interesting, as you mentioned, it's those 21 days that's kind of like that's the hardcore stuff that goes on, and then outside of that you don't really have that training again. Is that what you mentioned there, you then go into almost a program that you go into, more stable, more solid program?

Josh Fletcher15:16

So they will train every day, but there's flexibility and mobility as what that looks like depending on the module. So we would have three phases in the schoolhouse year, which was essentially based on developing something, maintaining something, or recovering from something.

So for example, when they were up in the mountains, that was savage training in minus 16 and knee-high snow. We're not going to be pushing them and absolutely flogging them, but we did get them outside walking. We actually had to walk them around to keep them warm.

So they do a small courtyard, we do a lap actually to walk snow down, then we would get on the floor and do a mobility exercise. They'd get up, they'd do a lap, they'd get down, they'd do another one. Up, move around, and they do their movement prep every day when the snow was coming down and it was up to kind of chest height. Or we had to do that in the hotel in the corridors on the staircases.

So essentially, that was a maintenance period where we were maintaining some sort of patterns. We weren't putting any stimulus into them, but we were maintaining them in order for them to go out every day and do what they needed to do, which was learn to ski, move around—like tactical movements in the mountains—and all the different activities that they had to do. So that was kind of a maintenance.

And then when they finished these really savage modules and we had maybe like a four-week training block, we would do at least the first week as a recovery block, and then we could push them for two. And then we would kind of taper them back down for whatever the next module was. And if the next module was a classroom-based one, we know that we could go pretty hard, which means we could do two recovery blocks—two week recovery—and they could do a three-, four-week hit of intensity. We'd back them off, and we would just move it up and down depending on what we knew was coming.

James de Lacey17:42

Nice. And I wanted to get your take on, I guess, the idea of that hard, almost hell week style training into sports performance. I think it's all over the world really, but I guess it's more advertised in the USA with coaches having a hell week or teams doing something in the preseason, or even fighters doing something in their fight preparation where they just have a week where they just absolutely bash themselves for whatever reason. And I want to get your take on kind of that idea taken from Special Forces and put into sport, a sporting context.

Josh Fletcher18:17

Yeah, it's just a misconception. I mean, what sport lasts through a week? What sport actually lasts for that duration nonstop where your sleep's involved in that? And it does—it's just a bit dumb, really.

I understand that you have to go to a dark place, but you can do that in a way that's going to facilitate the sport. So obviously in combat sport, a lot of you guys will have come across shark tanks before. So if you don't know what it is, you keep the one guy in the middle and you keep rotating the opponent, and whether that's grappling or boxing, whatever it might be, that's an effective way to develop skills under fatigue and to do something that's very sport-specific.

And it's just outdated. It's outdated, and it's not sensible to take these ideas and these philosophies and apply them to sport because they're not doing the same things. And if you go and employ some sort of hell week in your training, then you're going to run around and chase a ball around. You're not going to go down range and fight. And they do hell week because they need to know—they need to weed out the people that aren't supposed to

Be there. There's a 75% dropout rate in Special Forces from the minute they walk through the door all the way through to the ones who graduate. And it's almost to the left to the tee, they actively want to get rid of 75% because they're just not cut out to be there. They don't deserve it and they shouldn't be there because they're not safe. So you can't compare it. It's not even apples and oranges, it's like apples and flipping bricks. They're so different it's untrue.

Is there a place for training people to fatigue? Yeah, maybe. Can you do it in a sensible way? Yes. Can you do it in a sport-specific way? Yes. Can you do it in a way that is actually going to benefit them? Yes, you can. And that is just smart and intelligent planning. But it's just a bit misguided to think that you can pull something out of there and plunk it in there.

I do understand that there is some value from shared suffering, if you want to put it like that, and camaraderie that you get and the teamwork that you will get from that shared feeling of grafting to an incredibly high level. I get that, but at what cost? Often there'll be a lot of people picking up injuries, there's huge spikes in volume from going and doing these training camps or these visiting an army camp and all this sort of stuff.

I think that you can recreate it quite easily and you could do it in a safe and controlled manner. And I think that it's misguided. They're not going to war, they're going to play a sport. So for me it's a bit of a nah.

James de Lacey21:34

I think the issue is as well it's not so much just that week, it's what happens the following weeks after. Because you've just, as you mentioned, spiked this huge training load of doing whatever it is that week of usually it's mindless stuff too, because you can't thrash someone with sports skills. There's got to be some kind of hard running, I don't know. I guess the classic college football one is burpees and push-ups or whatever they do for hours.

Josh Fletcher22:04

If you think of some of the activities at military, like if we're talking about going and doing the types of activities that they might do in selection, you've got like log presses and they've got like sit-ups with the giant logs and carrying logs, heaving these giant logs around. You go do that at rugby players, you've got dudes who have pretty much man for man got some sort of shoulder history or impingement.

You're going to get problems. And you're going to have those problems, they might get through the week, but they're going to be dormant and they're going to inflame something which is going to kick in when they go, "All right lads, good week last week, let's get back to normal training, passing." "Oh, I'm in trouble."

Because I've been lifting a log, I don't even do military press in my program because I don't want to do it on a fixed bar. I only use a single-handed kettlebell press instead because it's safer for my shoulders. Yet I've gone and done 50 or 100 reps on a telegraph pole. It's just illogical. But when you're doing it and you survive the week, you don't attribute the injury to those events.

This is why a lot of strength and conditioning coaches are just like, "Oh, Jesus Christ, what are you doing? Why would you do that?" There's much more intelligent ways to program your training to get the physical adaptation you're looking for than flogging yourself to within an inch of your life.

James de Lacey23:35

I've had to shut down army camp talks in some of my roles previously. I was lucky enough to get my way there, but damn, I know what you mean. That it sounds, I guess from maybe a coaching perspective, it sounds good because, "Hey, I'm going to put my players through this, I'm going to see who the leaders are, I'm going to see this, I'm going to see that." But if you're just doing, if you're actually preparing for the sport itself, then you're developing the skills and you're going to have better players instead of just tired, injured players.

And then you wonder why, I don't know, during a fight or during whatever is happening in a match, why they're doing this or why don't they know what to do here, etc., etc. You've wasted precious time doing something else.

Josh Fletcher24:34

It's another thing to think about when you consider team sport: each player has their own physical needs. And there's no way that, pick a rugby player, you know a Manu Tuilagi, there's no way if they're on an England tour and they go to a military training camp that he's not going to want to get involved. But he's so finely tuned that he can go ping at any point. He probably doesn't do any contact in training whatsoever. He has to restrict all the types of movements that he does because he's just so giant. He has a bespoke program.

But there's no way you're going to be able to tell him, "Sorry mate, you can't take part in that military camp, that team build exercise because you're going to get injured." I think now the coaches are becoming a bit smarter, especially at the highest level, that they'll be talking very clearly closely with the military guys as to what they're actually doing and how to get value from types of exercises and activities. But yeah, there's a lot of cringeworthy stuff that still goes on for sure.

James de Lacey25:28

Is there anything you've taken from working in Special Forces that you've been able to bring into sports performance?

Josh Fletcher25:28

Yeah, there's a lot actually. I mean, a lot of it is to do with a mentality side of things. And some things that I've almost got a list of things that should be left alone because that is military, that's for going to protect country's people and kill and help people, help save lives. And that is chasing the ball around or having a fight so you can win a belt. Like, they're polar opposites in lots of ways.

So some of the things that I would, that I've left behind and like would advocate people to leave in the Special Forces world: they say it's mission, team, self. And so the mission always comes first, like because whatever they're doing is above them as individuals and it's above any single member of that team or that team as a collective. So the mission always comes first. I think they see that as a greater purpose and that's often what you'll see in the films, so that they genuinely live that, especially higher operating teams. Mission, team, self.

So team is obviously the group of people that's made up of the individuals, and the individual is the last person that gets considered. Like, you put everybody before yourself. Now, I flip that on its head and I think sport should flip that on its head. Yeah, you take that mantra, but flip it. It's self, team, mission.

Because if you get yourself right, if you get yourself and your preparation to a high-performance level and your well-being, you look after yourself, your self-care, your preparation to that nth degree, then that will have a positive impact on the team. The team is the sum of its parts, individuals. And this includes the S&C. They need to look after their own well-being as much as anybody else. Then the mission takes care of itself.

If everybody's together, aligned, they've done their work, they've done the correct work to the right level, and I'm talking not just about the training but also the recovery and the mental prep, the physical, the technical preparation. If everybody's done what they need to do, then the mission should take care of itself. So that's one thing that should be flipped on its head.

I took a lot about the reflection, and I've actually got a practitioner journal which I've created based off a lot of the Special Forces ideas. And that's around reflection on the sessions that they do. And I use this with my athletes now, and I have done. I did in the military as well. It's three up, three down.

So when you're reflecting on your own training or your own sessions, if you're watching this as a coach or even as an athlete, you will say three things that went well and three things that didn't go well and/or that you want to improve for next time. Often we're so driven for more and better, we're so driven for performance that we focus on the things that didn't go so well.

The problem is when we do that is we don't reinforce the positive habits. We don't reinforce those things that went well. So we prevent ourselves from reaching, from sustaining that high performance, and we prevent ourselves from creating super strengths out of those things that go well if we are too negatively focused, which is very common as coaches and practitioners.

If we're too negatively focused, then what we do is we have just this revolving door of things that went well, but they keep changing. And this three up, three down philosophy came from, I was fortunate enough to go on an NQ, so NATO Special Forces Headquarters Mental Performance and Resilience course. And one of the stories that they told was about a 12-man ODA, so that's Operations Detachment Alpha. That's a group of people that go into, that's a group that goes down range and how they break up the Special Forces guys, at least they did at the time. And they...

They would go in and they would clear a house. So clearing a house is essentially just doing whatever needs to be done when they're in there. That might be eliminating a target or it might be extracting someone, hostage rescue, that sort of thing. So they would go in, they would do their run through in training and they would go house to house to house. So they do their run through, then they do a debrief, run through, debrief, run through, debrief.

And the psychologist working with them at the time, they would step back and they would listen to the debrief. And they were the most critical group of people that they'd ever come across, so focused on improvement because the stakes are so high. And what the psychologist found and observed was that whenever they came back out, they had very easily listed off 5, 10 things to work on. But the things that have gone well, they didn't, they gave lip service to, which meant there was just this revolving door of things that weren't going well.

And what they noticed is after maybe the second or third run, they started to repeat themselves. So it was the things that they hadn't changed and hadn't kind of simplified. So the psych said to them, "Hang on a minute, boys, let's just chill on the negatives. Let's go three up, three down. You can only go with three." And what happened is they started to ingrain and solidify the three things that were going well, and they were able to repeat those run after run after run.

And the three things that weren't going so well, they made meaningful change to and they made sustainable change. And instead of there being this revolving door of the same things going wrong, they were able to stack up their learning in a smart, intelligent, and logical fashion. So the outcomes just went through the roof for them, really.

So that was a philosophy which I took and implemented into my training, my feedback, my reflections with my athletes. Where there's a hard line, it's three. You can list down 20, but you're only focusing on three, the three biggest things that are going to move the needle, and no more. Because that's going to prevent you from reflecting negatively. It's going to allow you to really highlight what's most important. And also it's going to be really impactful for you drawing a line under getting out of your own head, especially at the end of the day or the end of an evening.

James de Lacey31:58

I'm going to link that your practitioner's journal up in the description here because that sounds like it's as perfect for combat athletes looking to improve, essentially, performance. But would you use that reflection after every session you do or at the end of the day?

Josh Fletcher31:58

So I do both, or I did both of my, it depends when you see them if you're using it as a coach or an athlete. So and how you want to do it.

So reflection is a tricky one because imagine, and this is why I really hate these New Year's reflections and New Year's resolutions, because you make those reflections based on how you feel that day. Your reflections, basically how do you reflect on February the 29th? How do you reflect on that on December the 31st? It's too far away. You can't remember unless you've kept a record or a log.

And this is the micro, meso, macro. A macro is a year's worth of reflection. Your meso is your monthly and your micro is your weekly or your daily. And what you do is when you get to the end of a year, you look at what you did each month and how you reflected. And then if there's some interesting notes from each month, those reflections each month based on what you've done each week. And the reflections at the end of the week are based on what you've done each day.

So I really encourage people to reflect in that fashion because it allows you to look back objectively and accurately at a longer period of time. So yes, I encourage people to reflect in the short term, immediately after the session. So that's almost a micro level, and hot debriefs are brilliant for that.

Hot debrief is a real firm, fixed, fast. So as an example from coaching, it might be, or let's use a combat sport example. You need to, in second round you drop your guard three times, keep guard up. Got it? Yep, good, done. Bang. Everybody knows in the hot debrief, that's how I'm going to talk to you. Everybody's not offended because they know it's going to be direct, it's fast, it's quick.

You're going to do it, done. It's not for discussion. And if you say, "Well, no, I don't, I didn't actually," we'll talk about it later. Good. It's just closed down and then we put it in the bank and we deal with it later.

So you can hot debrief in any way you want, but as long as both parties are clear on what that looks like, then you're solid. So the hot debrief is really important at the end of each training session. We would do three up, three down: boys, three things that you thought went well, bang, bang, bang. Three things that we thought didn't go so well, bang, bang, bang. Okay, cool.

More often than not, the three things that didn't go so well that they want to improve will be the first things that come out of their mouth. And that's always, more often than not, easier for athletes to focus on as well. But we can start by constantly engaging in it. Then we get to the weeklies and the monthlies, we're looking at the big wins, the small wins, and the habits.

So what are the recurring habits, good habits, bad habits? Well, I've started to manage my nutrition a bit more effectively. Okay, cool. Good habit. Bad habit: I'm still sleeping past my alarm every day or going to bed too late. Okay, we've got a record and a log of that, and we can see the next week and the next month whether those are starting to change. And we're also starting to celebrate our wins, be those big or small. So we're shifting towards a more positive way to reflect rather than our natural bias to be negative.

James de Lacey35:06

Cool. Yeah, I'm thinking of this from, I guess, an athlete's perspective because I think most people, we've got some coaches that listen to the podcast, but a lot of combat athletes. They might be looking to implement this kind of reflection to help, I guess, with the mental side of their training, which I guess, would you also reflect after non-technical sessions? For example, if you're just doing conditioning or just doing strength training, would that also count as something you would reflect on? Or would you just, or this solely be, okay, this is reflecting for sports skills?

Josh Fletcher35:32

You can reflect on absolutely anything. I reflect on my day. I'll get to the end of the day and say, "What went well today? What was I happy with and unhappy with?" And what it does is it bookends the day. So it closes it off. You write it down. This is what it's all about. It's a journal, so you write these things down. Once you've written it down, it's out. It's out of your mind. It's on the paper. It's a way to process and dump off the things from the day.

So if you've gone in and you've got three sets, four reps to do on the back squat and I don't know, some push presses after, and you go in, you nail, you hit your lift. Well, what's to reflect on? Session went well. Nailed all my lifts. Technically spot on. Okay, cool, dead simple. Things to improve: maybe I could have been a bit more accurate my rest times. Maybe I could have fueled up a bit more effectively before and I missed my stretch in at the back end of the session. Or I missed my mobility. I raised the load too quickly, something like that.

So you can do it. It doesn't always have to be really strict and firm. What it does have to be is something that you can log down so you can keep a record of, like a training journal. And it needs to be something that you can refer back to, so that when you reflect in three, four, five months' time, you can look back and say, "Oh, okay, I was in a pretty good place back then." Or, "I'm not surprised I got injured because of this. I didn't look at my own advice," that sort of thing.

So reflect as you see fit, but ensure that you're following a bit of a process when you do it. And three up, three down is a great way to do that. Start, stop, continue is another way. And there's tons of different methods, but ensure that you're writing it down is critical.

James de Lacey37:47

Nice. Is there any physical training-wise you took from special forces that you're able to apply within sport?

Josh Fletcher37:47

Yeah, definitely. So one of the biggest things was an accumulation of load having a capacity-based impact. So as I mentioned, these guys had to run nine miles in selection. In the second year I was there, the dudes messed up, so they had to run nine miles twice. They had to do nine miles, they had a little bit of a break, and they messed up the first nine miles for reasons I won't go into. But they got made to do it again, so they did 18 miles.

18 miles, right? The furthest that they'd ever run in one single occasion in training with me was 1K. The most amount of intervals they'd done was 4 x 1K intervals. Yet every single one of them survived 18 miles of total volume on one day with a very short space of time.

Time in between, and every single one of them got a better time on the second nine than the first nine. And how does that add up when they've done no long distance running at all, never ran more than 1k in eight weeks? It's the accumulation of volume. It's the impact of slow rucking. They did long distance rucking, which is basically, like I said, walking at set pace, but that's like 4.5 miles an hour. That's over half the speed that they would have been running at.

So the accumulative volume of all of the training added together, the micro doses of conditioning, the low rest between strength-based work, the low Zone 1, Zone 2 cardio stuff on the recovery days, the ruck marches two times per week, all of that bundled together and appropriately recovered from gave them the capacity to be able to build their aerobic base essentially.

So your aerobic base doesn't just have to be built from running on a treadmill, bike, something deliberate. You need to think about it as the sum of all the parts, and the physical training in itself, the technical training has a massive impact on that as well. So that was a huge element I took from it.

And the next one, I suppose, was basically the availability. The most important factor for us was to get every single person there. And if they didn't improve their physical testing scores, I was more interested in getting more people to the door of selection than having every single person improve on their pull-ups, push-ups, or run scores. I wasn't as bothered by that.

They would take care of themselves. What I cared about was ensuring that, let's say in year one we had a 40% dropout rate, I wanted a 30 or 20% dropout rate in year two, and that was my goal. So ensure that there was more people available to be selected to fight, to turn up to train, to engage. And that was really important.

Then it is just looking at the types of injuries and looking at the prevention methods that you can put in place. So a really good phrase that I coined from there was left of bang. So left of bang is a military phrase that describes what happened in the buildup to a catastrophic event or a serious event, so an explosion, a firefight, a big issue, a big problem, a big situation, and what were the events that led up to that.

And then how can we adapt and adjust our standard operating procedures in order to mitigate that risk and try to ensure that the severity of it is nowhere near as high? So we're trying to remove it if we can, reduce it if we can, and then if it does happen, make it nowhere near as severe an outcome.

And it's exactly the same. We can steal that and we should apply that to all different scenarios in our lives, in our training. So from a physical perspective, it's okay, let's just think about a punch. We can reduce and mitigate the severity of that by having a strong neck, and a strong neck is going to reduce the chances of that impact leading to some sort of concussion. The impact of a little bit of agility or mobility is going to allow us to move slightly out, that extra tiny little bit out of the way because we've got a little bit more thoracic mobility to be able to drop back out the way.

We can talk about these different things all the time, but that's what the standard operating procedures are. It's looking at your training in so much detail that you can say what's the highest risk things that are happening here, and how can I get a handle on that and adapt my training and my lifestyle to support that?

James de Lacey43:21

It actually makes me think of, I guess, in submission grappling obviously leg locks are a huge factor nowadays. Heel hooks, man. You see knee injuries in pretty much every single bloody competition you go to now. And obviously if you get caught deep and don't tap early, it's inevitable that something's going to pop. But if you're doing heavy strength, lower body strength training, full range of motion, at least that's something that's going to thicken and strengthen the tendons and ligaments that could potentially give you that extra millisecond of time. That kind of sparked that in my head there as well.

Josh Fletcher43:58

Our example of that was where are the most common injuries in the military setting? And it comes from ruck marching. Ruck marching: it was ankle, knees, lower back. It's not uncommon in all sports, but what was it? All right, is the repetitive strain. What does that come from? It comes from the amount of time they have on their feet. Okay, let's be conscious of that. The amount of time they have under load, let's be conscious of that. Let's be conscious of the training age that they have. Let's be conscious of how many times they've had load on their back in their history.

One of the most injurious and the most challenging factors: we'd have studs turn up, these absolute studs. They'd fly through every test. You put a bag on their back, they couldn't move. They were useless. But everything else they could do. So okay, how do we get left with that? We need to provide a pre-plan for them to get here.

We need to get left of that bang. We provide a plan. I really don't care whether you can come in and do two pull-ups, but if you can't walk with a bag on your back, you might as well pack off and go home. You need to build in marching two times per week at this load.

Week one, you do, let's say, five kilos for three miles, and the next day you do five kilos for 3.5. The next week you keep the same distances but you up the load, and we're just trying to prepare people. And that was tissue tolerance, and it's no different to what you're talking about. And we did the same sort of thing with ankle stability and strength. We had people saying, what on earth are we doing?

This is ridiculous. And then we go out and we talk to the instructors as to what sort of the injuries that people are normally getting when they go and do their marches. Ankle, ankle, ankle, ankle, ankle. No ankle twists, no ankle turns. And what's happened? No one's twisted their ankle. Well, we're doing quite a lot of work to support this, so yeah.

James de Lacey45:41

And this might be highly hypothetical, theoretical, but you mentioned obviously the accumulation of volume is that thing that built the capacity. Is there a way, theoretically, that you could see it being applied to combat sports in terms of training?

Josh Fletcher46:13

Yeah, of course. It's understanding and knowing where they're lacking. So it might be that if you were to consider heart rate, so it's very difficult in combat sports to keep a heart rate belt on the whole time, but if you think about the intensities and the zones, it might be that the vast majority of work is done in Zone 2-3, 2-3-4, and you actually only need to hit a bit of five and a bit of four, and that's all you need to do from a conditioning perspective, and then you've covered the whole spectrum.

It might be that to get a full understanding of that, you need to look at, okay, let's actually really deeply look at what a two-hour jiu-jitsu session looks like from a physical perspective and let's fill the gaps. Well, I didn't observe you absolutely blowing out your ass at any point whatsoever, or I didn't observe you—we managed to put a heart rate belt on you and it was clear that you didn't get into high Zone 4-5 at all. Therefore, let's just smash some Zone 5, 4-5 intervals.

Let's look at the whole week, mapping out Monday to, however many days a week, Monday to Friday, Monday to Saturday. Let's map out the whole week and let's see what it looks like and how hard you would say that was, intensity-wise. A really good idea for that is if you start to look at things just basically like RPE times minutes.

So times minutes, and the athlete can do this. Just take out a piece of paper, and if you've got a squared piece of paper, that's even better. You look at a session and you map Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. If you've got two a day, it'd be A.M., P.M. And then you do what color you thought it was.

So red, amber, green is light, medium, hard. And then you can start to say, well, out of a 30-minute, 60-minute session, 10 minutes of it were really hard. Okay, so you scribble in that 10 minutes as red, and the rest of it stays or whatever intensity you thought it was. And then you look at that, and when you can represent it visually, you're thinking, I don't have much red in here, or there's only 10 minutes or 15 minutes worth of red work throughout this.

Yet I know that if I've got to go hard, I need to know I can do that regularly and consistently, and that ability to change gear, you want to know that you can do that, especially later on into a competition.

So you can visually represent how, in a non-scientific way, athletes are going to be watching this or listening and say, yeah, I can do that. I can take three colored pens—red, amber, green—and I can say I've got my...

Green work in there, which is my regen, my recovery work, my walk, a really slow jog. I've got Amber, which is the majority of my Technical Training, so that's taken care of. All I need to do in my physical training or my physical conditioning is actually just attack some Red Zone. As simple as that. Well, I'm simplifying it, of course. Well, what does that sound to you?

James de Lacey49:05

Yeah, no, that's exactly there. I mean, a lot of the way I've written the programs for Sweet Science of Fighting, I think some people probably are listening, they're geared towards people who aren't training full-time. So as you mentioned there, you might be getting a lot of your Zone 2, Zone 3, whatever it is, through technical training, which people are. But maybe they're only doing three, four times a week of that Technical Training, and that's when the nuances coming too.

Because obviously a lot of the, I guess, practitioners and researchers working with high-level athletes have the, I guess you could say, advantage of a lot of that stuff being taken care of within technical training, which is true. But then if you're not doing enough of that technical training, then as you mentioned, if you're coloring in your squares, you probably see you only have maybe, I don't know, four green days with some red in there.

You're like, "Okay, well, you know, that's all I've got, four hours a week. You know, maybe I need to do a little more of that green to build whatever it is, that base and whatever else."

Josh Fletcher50:28

Yeah, I think it's a gap analysis, really, isn't it? Where do you struggle? It's reversing it, reverse engineering it, working back from where your biggest problems are. What's your biggest pain point? "Well, I really struggle to keep up with these dudes who just go bonkers in the last 30 seconds of the bout." Or, "I get gassed real quick because people come out the bat and go nuts in the first 30 seconds, and then I'm [expletive] for the rest of the round." Or, "I struggle in the third round."

There'll be telltale and key signs here as to what type of work you need to do. It might be that if you're blowing up in the second round, third round, or you know, totally useless the third round, you need to build some more capacity and your ability to handle, tolerate that higher intensity work for a more consistent block of time. Some intense interval training might be the way forward.

We essentially used hit training and varied intervals consistently throughout our training and our buildup to manage time on feet, and we manipulated intensities quite a lot to ensure that we built the capacity. Because we knew that all of the lower level stuff and the capacity-based work was going to be coming from other areas. And that relationship that you have with your coach is really critical, really trying to understand and map out, "How hard is this going to be?" because I want to know, for this reason, not so I can sandbag it, but I want to know so that I can plan the rest of my training for the week or the month and fill in my gaps really.

James de Lacey51:59

So yeah, this has been an insightful podcast, lots of actionable tips and information for fighters and coaches out there. But if people want to follow you, Josh, and find your – I'll link your Journal down the description too – but if people want to follow you, where can they find you?

Josh Fletcher52:28

Yeah, so I talk a lot about practitioner well-being on the social media. So that's my company, Career Blueprint. I also do quite a lot of different consultancy and programming for different athletes as well. So on Twitter, you'll find me at Coach Blueprint One, and on Instagram it's Career Blueprint. So Career Blueprint, my website is www.yourcareer-blueprint.com. And yeah, that's pretty much where I hang out.

And yeah, there's tons of different – I could talk about this stuff all day, I suppose. But I think we've given a fair few nuggets, haven't we?

James de Lacey53:00

Yeah, for sure. For sure. I'll link all those up in the description too as well, so people can visit you on all your different platforms. But thanks for coming on, Josh. I really appreciate you sharing a lot of the Special Forces stuff.

Josh Fletcher53:31

My pleasure. My pleasure.