Thinking about Strength

Whoever said you can't smoke yourself in three minutes was wrong. I once heard an interesting theory about physical fitness. According to this theory, if you work out to 100 percent of capacity you die. That is, you exhaust all the energy in all your muscle groups and your body shuts down. Working out to 96 or 97 percent you pass out or go into a coma. So the ideal training intensity is about 94 or 95 percent of physical capacity.

Now, most people have mental safeguards against pushing themselves this hard. It becomes a bit uncomfortable right around 50 percent. Past that it starts hurting. The whole point of Navy SEAL training is to teach the candidates to push themselves past that fifty percent line, past seventy-five, past eighty, all the way up to ninety-five. It is a curved function. Hundred percent is a theoretical quality, for most intents and purposes it does not exist. Even those guys who go through hell week hit what they would have considered their hundred percent mark about day two. I passed my hundred percent mark several times at SAPPER school. That's because it was all in my head.

Today I did a three minute workout, thirty seconds each of clean and press 95lbs, pullups palms out, 28 kilo kettlebell lift (two hand), deadlift and raise 95lbs, chinups palms in, and 28 kilo kettlebell swings (two hands). Thirty seconds each. I felt like I was going to die. I made it, but I couldn't maintain the intensity. In a week or so I will try it again and I will do much better. I will not be any stronger physically, but I will be stronger mentally.

Strength is at the heart of everything that the warrior does and is. His physical strength, mental strength, and emotional strength flow from his spiritual strength, or they are nothing. People make a great deal of sportsmen, football players, UFC fighters, boxers and such. Time and again we find commentators talking about heart, or lack of heart. "Now it comes down to the crunch, it's all about who wants it more?" But this is not strength. Strength is not about how big your muscles are, or how much you bench. It is not about how much money you can make or what kind of car you can afford to drive. It is not the suits you wear, the football you can throw or catch. It is not in how you can stand on a line of scrimage and take and give hits. It is not about the risks you take, the thrills you seek or the fights you get into. It is not how many phone numbers you can get at the bar. It is not how hard you can throw a punch. It is not about how badly you want it.

I will tell you, there is no such thing as strong enough.

This is strength: When you are given a task, not something that you chose to do because it looked fun or cool, not something you chased after, but something given to you, and you accept it, neither asking for it nor shirking it, because it needs to be done, and when you can give your best to this task, because that is what is required, when you have forgotten why, and you no longer have the strength to want it, then you are strong enough. This is why there is no strong enough. Strong enough exists only in the past. I was strong enough for that trial, then. Now I am recovering and growing stronger before the next trial. I am preparing myself. You can never be strong enough before the fact.

Strength comes from realizing that you are not strong enough, and depending on He who is.

Strength is how much you can give of yourself. A man who fights for someone else is always stronger than the same man fighting for himself.

Keep this always in your mind when you train, especially when you train physically. There are physical aspects to physical training. You have to strike a balance between strength and power to lift and move heavy things and the endurance and stamina to go forever. However, remember that the real boundaries are always in your mind. In ruck marching only the first twenty miles are a physical test. In a forty mile ruckmarch, once you have reached twenty-miles you are done being tested physically. The rest is all in your mind. If you can physically go twenty miles, you can physically go twenty one. If you can go twenty one, you can go twenty two. If you can go twenty two miles, you can go twenty three, and so on, as long as need be, until you reach the end or you die. The physical test has already been passed. The rest is all in your head.

I've tried many times over the years to put together a training program for the wariror, a complete curriculum of body, mind and heart. It hasn't happened yet. The program for training the body and the skills of the body is very simple. It is just a matter of writing it down. Physical fitness, martial arts, movement, shooting, communicating, explosives, first aid, land navigation, all of these are easy to write about. So much so that it would be more like researching, compiling and editing than writing. Training the mind in observation, logic, general science and military strategy is also easy. We probably should even continue in the dual nature vein and include the liberal arts, along with philosophy and theology. In the physical skills training we could include carpentry, vehicle repair, electrical work, plumbing, farming or any number of other skills. To train the heart is a little more complex. By training the heart, I mean a conscious and deliberate effort to train the warrior to cherish the good, the true and the beautiful. There is no way to do it directly. He must do that himself. From the outside it can only be encouraged by exposing him to such things. On an even deeper level, moral training, the training of the will is essential. Without giving the warrior a strong sense of morality you have no right to train him to kill. That is a recipe for disaster, especially in this increasingly violent society.

The trouble is that the only aspect of training that can possibly be isolated from the others is skills training, and that is the training that most needs to be controlled and influenced by the rest. The other three, mental, moral and emotional grow from each other, interconnect with each other. That is what complicates them, the fact that it they are so close. I can't sort through them yet. However this I do know. The skills training must not under any circumstances be divorced from these three. The mental, emotional and especially moral training must constantly inform every aspect of martial training. Without it, you will only release walking time bombs on society. We have had enough of indiscriminate violence already.

I'm not old enough to write such a book yet. I've had a lot of different things I've wanted to do over the years, but one thing that has remained a constant over the years is that I want to teach. Particularly I want to teach young men to be warriors. There are so many young men with the warrior's heart. I myself am one of them. I've been learning for years now, and one of the saddest things is that I have never had a mentor.I have had many trainers, teachers, instructors and even leaders, but I have never had a true, solid, Godly warrior to take me in hand and teach me, and so my training has suffered. Everything I have learned I have picked up as I found it, following leads and trails, researching, teaching as I go, refining. Looking back I can only be amazed at how God has lead me and put me in the right place at the right time to learn more and more. Hopefully I will get the chance to pass that on some day. I believe that mentorship is an intrinsic part of warriorhood. No warrior will ever be complete unless he passes that calling on to the next generation of warriors. If the chain breaks, society is doom. Don't believe me? What would happen if all the cops in New York City went on strike for twenty-four hours? Unfortunately too many warriors do not follow God, and so do not reach their full potential.