The 40% Rule: A Navy SEAL’s Secret to Mental Toughness
1–10 of 77 posts
Re: The 40% Rule: A Navy SEAL’s Secret to Mental Toughness
#2One reason Navy Seals need to be good at this is that they are swimming 50m underwater in one breath. When swimming while holding your breath, your brain is telling you, stop, you're low on air, indeed, you can ignore than and swim the rest.
Re: The 40% Rule: A Navy SEAL’s Secret to Mental Toughness
#3One reason Navy Seals need to be good at this is that they are swimming 50m underwater in one breath. When swimming while holding your breath, your brain is telling you, stop, you're low on air, indeed, you can ignore than and swim the rest.
An interesting fact is that your brain has no idea how much oxygen you have left.
What it can sense however, is a build up of CO2.
Re: The 40% Rule: A Navy SEAL’s Secret to Mental Toughness
#4One reason Navy Seals need to be good at this is that they are swimming 50m underwater in one breath. When swimming while holding your breath, your brain is telling you, stop, you're low on air, indeed, you can ignore than and swim the rest.
The urge to breathe doesn't come because one is low on air, but due to CO2 buildup in the blood. Humans have no physiological detectors for blood oxygen levels, they can only detect CO2.
Normally CO2 buildup response is calibrated to be "early" in terms of oxygen, but the calibration can change (e.g. through hyperventilation) which can lead to blackouts and drowning since blood oxygen levels can drop below ones needed to keep brain "on" before CO2 buildup response even registers.
Ignoring the urge to breathe is definitely not a smart thing to do unsupervised unless one wants an early, watery grave.
Your response is misleading in that it implies "mental toughness" (utter bollocks) or a skill that some people have more than others. If Navy Seals (or anyone else) do this for real, you can bet your ass they do it under strict supervision, when training/competing (e.g. BUDS).
Re: The 40% Rule: A Navy SEAL’s Secret to Mental Toughness
#5Maybe not quite the same thing - but I do something similar. When I'm trying a new thing that requires physical endurance I set a pace in which I could "do the thing for many many hours" even though I know it's probably going to be much less than that.
For example - I recently went on a bike ride with friends where we climbed an unknown (to me) hill. I slowed down a bit to a pace I could maintain long term. I was one of the first to the top. :-)
Re: The 40% Rule: A Navy SEAL’s Secret to Mental Toughness
#6These techniques are useful when you have a large pool of young extremely healthy men. Then when they blow out knees, shoulders, back, etc you can just select the ones who didn't break. Claiming that this is a useful and effective way to train is a terrible idea.
The only reason this kind of article is useful at all is that virtually everyone who trains a sport fails to train hard enough. In other words, after you remove all the fancy language and rah-rah spirit, you are left with "You should probably try harder". And that's probably good advice.
My two cents.
Re: The 40% Rule: A Navy SEAL’s Secret to Mental Toughness
#7One reason Navy Seals need to be good at this is that they are swimming 50m underwater in one breath. When swimming while holding your breath, your brain is telling you, stop, you're low on air, indeed, you can ignore than and swim the rest.
When swimming underwater, brain should not be telling or ignoring anything, it should be totally empty. Idle brain consumes about 25% oxygen, even more when it is being used.
Re: The 40% Rule: A Navy SEAL’s Secret to Mental Toughness
#8"Who is this guy? I’ve never seen anything like it. And during the race, I kept an eye on him and around mile 70 — he weighed probably 260 pounds, which is quite large for an ultra runner — he had broken all the small bones in both of his feet and had kidney damage and he finished the race."
Running 100s at 260 pounds - and continuing through kidney damage and broken foot bones isn't tough - it's just stupid.
Re: The 40% Rule: A Navy SEAL’s Secret to Mental Toughness
#9In the early 2000's a short TV series followed a class of SEALs as they go through basic training. It's a pretty interesting documentary on how they manage to select only those who have the necessary skills for the job. The first episode can be found here [1], the other 5 are also all on Youtube.
Re: The 40% Rule: A Navy SEAL’s Secret to Mental Toughness
#10These techniques are useful when you have a large pool of young extremely healthy men. Then when they blow out knees, shoulders, back, etc you can just select the ones who didn't break. Claiming that this is a useful and effective way to train is a terrible idea. The only reason this kind of article is useful at all is that virtually everyone who trains a sport fails to train hard enough . In other words, after you r…
Absolutely on the first point. I believe the #1 thing the Navy wants from SEALs is people who just won't quit. The Nave doesn't train them not to quit, it just creates tests that search for this quality.
I'm unconvinced that the SEAL in question suddenly realized one day there was a "secret" to not quitting; it's just how he's hardwired.