Darkhorse Benefits is a special operations veteran-owned charitable organization. Many of their members are former medics who are actively involved in the tactical medicine community as instructors.Not long after Russia invaded Ukraine, Darkhorse medics traveled there to train, advise, and assist people ranging from soldiers to schoolteachers in tactical medicine. They’re helping to bring in life-saving equipment like tourniquets and first-aid kits, and they’re training people to use them. In this episode, we talk with one of those medics, a former US Navy SEAL and SOCM medic named Kevin.In our conversation, Kevin discusses things like the work Darkhorse is doing in Ukraine, what the conditions are like, and some of the most common injuries that they're seeing with both soldiers and civilians.You can learn more about Darkhorse and help them bring much-needed medical equipment and training to Ukrainians by going to darkhorsebenefits.comYou can also follow them on Instagram at @darkhorsevets to see updates on their work in Ukraine. 

Injuries happen. Even if your training program is well thought out, sometimes you’ll run into small issues or you’ll injure yourself playing your sport or doing your job. These inevitable setbacks, while annoying, don’t have to crush your fitness and lead to long periods of doing nothing followed by the long slog just to get back to your baseline. Fixating on your limitations is the same thing as surrendering to them. Don’t do that. Every path has obstacles. The most successful of us are simply better at finding our way past or through them. Over the past twenty years we've had our fair share of major injuries, and helped hundreds of clients work around them.  In this podcast, we discuss the lessons we've learned and how you can more effectively work through your own injuries. 

The goal of programming is not to develop specific abilities, but to develop specific skills.The difference might seem trivial - it isn’t.An ability is the raw capability to perform a task. It means you have the physical tools to run five miles at an 8-minute per mile pace. A skill is the capacity to predictably display that task in a specific environment. This means that you can run five miles at an 8-minute per mile pace regardless of the situation. We don’t care how fast you can run if you aren’t also reinforcing an ideal stress response, psychological and tactical strategies, and moving with good enough technique so that you won’t break down over the course of months of repetitive work. Your run times matter, of course, but they’re only one part of a much more complex set of skills that need to be developed. The main problem that any skill solves is how to produce a consistent outcome in different situations. This may seem obvious, but most trainees preparing for a SOF selection assume that if they can ruck a long distance, run a fast 2 mile, tread water and do water comp drills during training, they can just replicate that in selection. So, why is this so often not the case? Because a selection environment selects individuals with a set of skills, not just physical or mental capacities. Think of the difference between shooting a basketball on an empty court with no one defending you vs trying to make a shot in a game in front of 30,000 fans and some freakishly athletic guy sprinting to block you.Training is the empty court, selection is the game.  

Tom Satterly is a former Command Sergeant Major from the US Army’s Delta Force, also known as The Unit. During his 20 years at The Unit, Tom fought in and led countless high-profile missions including the capture of Saddam Hussein and the Battle of Mogadishu, also known as Black Hawk Down, which was the longest sustained firefight since Vietnam. That 18-hour firefight ended with Tom, along with several of his teammates, running the Mogadishu Mile to safety.Tom’s career sounds like a Hollywood script, and he’s literally been portrayed in movies because of it. It’s hard to imagine doing more in the world of special operations than he did. But that lifestyle comes at a cost. In the early days of Tom and Jen’s relationship, Tom was struggling with the physical, mental, and emotional toll of his two decades of intense training and combat. It nearly broke him, and it nearly destroyed his relationship with Jen. Tom and Jen met while Jen was working at a special operations training company. She noticed a pattern that was shared by the Navy SEALs, Green Berets, and Army Rangers that she was working with. That pattern was the same one that was affecting Tom, and in turn, affecting her. She wanted to know what could be done to help these special operators deal with the effects of post-traumatic stress, and what avenues there were for getting that help. So, she delved into health and wellness research and certifications in order to answer both parts of that question. She learned about post-traumatic stress, she learned what could be done about it, and she began doing the helping. As she and Tom worked to heal as individuals and repair their relationship, they began helping others to do the same. They founded All Secure Foundation in 2017 to help special operators and their families navigate the maze of treatments and modalities of healing from post-traumatic stress. They worked with hundreds of operators and their families and soon became a provider of education, awareness, and programs.On this episode, we talk with Tom and Jen about their story and All Secure Foundation.  Resources and links:All Secure Foundation Tom's highly-recommended book, All Secure (amazon affiliate link)

There is a distinction between pain and suffering. Pain is what you experience, suffering is how you respond to it. Pain is built largely out of nerves and your brain telling you something is wrong. Suffering is you telling yourself something is wrong. You can suffer without being in pain, and you can be in pain without suffering. Learning to separate the two is an important part of what training is.

Todd Bumgardner is a human performance coach at a tier one special operations unit. He works with operators during their qualification course. To do this well, he must balance their immediate physical training needs with the demands of their qual course, and ensure that he keeps them at a high level of performance without impairing their readiness for crucial work-related tasks and tests like CQB training. On this call, we discuss how he does that. If you'd like to stalk Todd, you can do so here:Instagram - @todd_bumgardnerInstagram - @humanpredatorpackmuleInstagram - @beyondstrengthOnlyFans - (classified)Email - todd@beyondstrengthperformance.com

18-Delta, the Special Forces medic qualification course, and SOCM, the Special Operations Combat Medic course, are among the most difficult schools in the US Special Operations pipeline. The people who attend these courses are special operators who have already been through their selection programs, and in some cases have already gone through several work-ups and deployments with their units. They’re smart, motivated, and highly-capable people. And yet, only about half of them will make it through a given course. It’s just that hard. On this call, we talk with two different graduates of this course. A former Green Beret and 18D medic named Jack, and a former Navy SWCC and SOCM medic named Chase.We discuss what this school is like, what to expect if you’re a student on your way there, and some of the best practices for successfully completing the course. Some of the resources we discussed on this call: Complete Anatomy Study AppMental Skill: SegmentingMental Skill: Compartmentalization Khan Academy free online courses, such as this one on calculating units and dosages.  Supermemo and Anki spaced repetition flashcard programs

Special operations selection teaches you to rethink your relationship with pain. The discomfort of doing something with a painful but partial effort isn't meaningfully different from the pain of giving it everything you have. One is just slower, and when it's over you wouldn't really remember the difference.For the world of SOF selection to become your home, and to eventually succeed in it, you have to think of pain not as something to be avoided as often as possible, but as a component of a strategy. There is productive pain that helps you get something done, and there is useless pain.You can hurt fast, or you can hurt slow. When it's over it's all just a blur of suffering and the subtle distinctions won't have mattered. What will matter is what you accomplished with that pain.

Eustress training is a way of training your body to do more work, easily by raising the baseline of movement or exercise that you can do without stressing your body out or making a significant demand on your recovery capacity.This means that you can eventually train harder, recover faster, and when you want to really push things in the gym or in your sport, you have a higher output potential. Since you’ve trained to make heavy workouts feel easy, you’ll be able to do even more before it feels really difficult.Eustress training also has several other benefits. For instance, It helps to build a high degree of control into your perception of sustained effort, teaching you how to make hard things easy. It allows you to refine and dial in techniques and mental strategies.It reduces recovery time - allowing you to shift emphasis to other physiological demands and training inputsIt increases specific work capacity in the movements trained. It helps to develop a better sense of interoception, or the ability to sense what is happening within your body and predict how future events will feelIt also helps to develop a general skill of self-regulation, or the ability to manage your stress response under difficult conditions. If you prefer reading or want to refer back to something mentioned in this article, click here. 

Over our lifetimes, as years of experiences accumulate, we can begin to formulate a universal lesson: No matter how many bad things you went through in the past, you were still alive when they were over. This isn’t really something that you consciously decide. It’s something you teach a deeper part of your brain through practice. You have to know it, not just know the words for it. As this settles in, it begins to alter both stages of the stress appraisal process. You’re more likely to accurately understand the scope of what is happening, and you’ll know that no matter how it plays out, you’ll have the capacity to handle it, even if things go badly.This shifts your sense of control away from needing external events to occur in a certain way to knowing that regardless of how those events go you can still dictate your own response to them. Once you know that even the worst-case scenario is manageable, you gain freedom.By letting go of your need for things to happen in a particular way, you gain the ability to accept and work with them as they are. You’ll know that it doesn’t matter what the world throws at you because you’ve got what it takes to handle it, even if it hurts.