G.3: Tasting Failure
I’m pretty confident I set a sprint-drag-carry record at CCAP in the fall of 2023. Not for time, but for fails.
I managed to face plant twice in a single run.
The ACFT at CAP is incredibly professionally run, with several video cameras recording everything just in case anyone wants to challenge the graders. I had zero issues with any of the grading cadre at CCAP and found every member to be unimpeachably professional. That said, I bet even they couldn't resist firing up the clip that night to laugh as they rewatched me eat shit two times — once on the kettlebell carry and then again just as I was starting the final run lap.
I’m not certain I’m allowed to say I took tripping ‘in stride’, but I was in a pretty good mood after. I still passed the SDC and did fine on the two-mile indoor track run to finish out. This positive attitude is in part because accepting and even embracing failure has been a part of my programming for years.
Forms of Failure
At its very core, exercise is about failure. It’s how we grow stronger, both at the macro-level — by having to learn new skills and movements — and at the micro-level. When you exercise, your muscle fibers get small tears under the strain. As the body heals these tears, our muscles grow and get stronger. Due to the almost magical antifragile nature of our bodies ‘When you lift weights, your body adapts to lift heavier weights next time’. While this may not be what Ernest Hemingway meant when he wrote ‘The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places’; none the less, it’s true.
Beyond microtears, challenging yourself means also being willing to break down your ego as well. As mentioned previously, a lot of the rocky rollout of the ACFT can be blamed on leaders who were unwilling to try and to learn new things. The ACFT had new movements like the deadlift, leg tucks, and yes that stupid 10# yeet. Instead of growing their readiness, too many soldiers opted to avoid even trying.
Be willing to fail. Find out what you cannot do instead of shying away from it. We had soldiers in Oki who would say ‘I can’t do a leg tuck’. Every one got my stock reply: ‘You cannot do one yet’. Then I gave them some movements to practice that would build up the muscles and techniques they needed to develop first. Getting over that fear of failure was the core of the ACFT Sprint workout from the first post in this series.
As a leader, your willingness to fail can be incredibly impactful, because your soldiers will see your willingness to test and challenge yourself and will come to emulate you. In Oki, I joined a pre-scuba test day without the train-up to see what I could do. I was surprised to achieve my first 50-meter sub-surface swim, and I crushed the three-kilometer fin — both events where my swimming background helped. Drownproofing? Not so much. But my soldiers never brought up my miserable performance in the equipment donning. They instead focused on my willingness to try.
It’s important to be smart about what sorts of failure you’re choosing. There is a line, one you should take care not to cross. Two signs you crossed that line are worth briefly highlighting: vomiting and injuries.
Vomiting is your body’s cardiovascular system telling you to take a knee, except it’s not asking anymore. Throwing up hijacks just about all of your body’s systems, meaning in the moment of crisis you are decidedly unready. If you’ve ever seen someone vomit on an objective you know just how dangerous this can be, as it takes multiple people out of the fight to secure and care for them. You can reduce some of the risk crossing that red line by building up your anaerobic tolerance over time. However, that will move the line, not erase it. If you or your team are throwing up in a workout, you crossed that line.
As I discussed last week, injuries are pernicious particularly because recovery takes time. During that time, your overall fitness tends to suffer. But ignoring injuries is even more catastrophic, since this leads to both exacerbating them and gaining injuries in all new places.
Remember that shoulder twinge I referenced? That was actually a lower back problem; specifically, my lower back muscles weren’t firing. So, my lumbar tried to pick up the load. Except the lumbar had its own work to do. What was left over went on to my lats and on through my shoulder, where the system was overloading my tendons that reached out to my arm.
After they diagnose your injury, PTs will give you things to aid the healing. These are often mobility and flexibility drills to aid myofascial release. Do them!
But injuries always take time, and that’s time where your gains, and your readiness, are curtailed. The better strategy is to avoid them in the first place.
Vomiting and injuries are bad failures. Good failures include the humbling ones I mentioned above. But finding failure is also a key ingredient to my readiness success.
‘Counting Coup’
It’s more than just knowing the difference between good and bad failure. My workout philosophy is something akin to what the Plains Indian’s did when they sought to ‘count coup’. Their goal was to touch their enemy, often with a short stick, but escape unharmed.
I try to do something similar in my workouts, except my opponent is my own anaerobic limitations. Instead of measuring my gains in terms of how many miles or minutes I’ve run, I measure how many times in a single session I can achieve that limit and escape back unscathed — i.e. without vomiting or getting hurt. The recovery part, breathing deliberately as I work to bring my heart rate back down, is part of my training. But it’s a part many people don’t appreciate. They just see it as rest when it’s recovery.
Here’s an example day from this summer:
Over a total of 61 minutes, I got up to an unsustainable heart rate on at least five occasions — high enough I had to stop to recover. My first ‘coup’ was in the warm-up on the rower, then I hit a second one in my last set of cleans. I hit that limit three more times throughout Fight Gone Bad — a workout designed around the timing of an MMA fight and one which often leaves you feeling like you just lost one.
I was only actively exercising for less than half the 61 minutes I was in the gym — not much more than 1/3 of it actually. In an army which thinks we need to train fitness to time instead of standard, this looks like a waste.
Every time I’m reaching out and touching my max heart rate, that’s helping me get stronger. But so are those recovery sessions where I’m working to get my heart rate back down again. I’m training my body to recover, so I can think and make decisions, and I’m training it to be ready to spike back up to max again. I’m training my body to do that repeatedly.
‘Put The Load Right On Me’
It’s hard to max out your heart rate with just body weight movements, though you can do it. A far easier way is to add weight to your workouts. It often doesn’t take much weight to feel the difference.
There’s a slowly receding aversion in the army to using weights to train. When I first joined up, exercising in the gym was outright banned in the morning. To accompany the ACFT, the army purchased a lot of basic equipment for units to train with. This gear wasn’t to train to pass the ACFT, it was to train your body to be ready. Unfortunately, too many soldiers still think lifting weights is dangerous.1
There are still plenty of critics of the deadlift running around the army. These skeptics typically cite concerns about injuries, which I’d argue are misplaced. First, if they were genuinely concerned about injuries, they would have been pushing to replace the sit-up in the old APFT, which led to a lot of needless injuries. Secondly, being ready inevitably means picking things up sometimes. Learning the right way to do it and training for it leads to increased readiness. I’ve already cited Nasim Taleb, a huge fan of lifting weights, but I particularly like Mark Rippetoe’s take: ‘The deadlift also serves as a way to train the mind to do things that are hard’.
The army long favored MICT (Moderate Intensity Cardiovascular Training) principally because ‘…it is simple, inexpensive, and can be performed by large groups with little or no formal training in almost any environmental condition.’ However, MICT doesn’t provide the benefits that high intensity gains can, in particular when combined with weights and functional movements — also called HIIT and HIFT. MICT also takes a lot more time for far fewer gains. Adding weight to your movements is going to improve your muscular strength, lean body mass, and skeletal health.2
And weights aren’t just a young man’s game. In fact, the older you get, the more important it can be to ensure you’re getting weight training in. In men over the age of sixty-six, well past the soldier’s mandatory retirement age, ‘…those who trained at 80% of their one-repetition maximum achieved gains in strength similar to improvements seen in much younger men’. If weight training is even helping seniors over ninety-years-old improve their strength and mobility, then not working out with weights is clearly the riskier choice.
Building Failure
Just adding weights to your workout is an easy first step.
Focus on realistic movements. I never practice the stupid ball throw, which is part of why I’ll probably never max it. But I do cleans, wall balls, and jerks because those are much more realistic movements. These give me the muscular power I need to still exceed the standard for the Standing Power Throw, while also ensuring I’m ready to pick up a variety of real things.
More than just adding weights to your workouts, you can structure your whole set around the idea of failure. Instead of aiming for constant and continuous slow movements, some of my most beneficial workouts are so short and sharp I have to put the weights down and recover. By scaling it up beyond what I can continuously cycle, I guarantee a heart rate that touches anaerobic: counting coup.
This will also build your mental readiness. Putting the weight down means you have to pick it back up again and that’s where your readiness really grows. Muhammad Ali once quipped, ‘I only start counting when it starts hurting because they’re the only ones that count’. You have to push yourself to start back up again. And when you know you’re just going to have to pick it up again, you eke out just a couple more reps.
Alternatively, you can structure the workout so that your sets amp up until you can’t keep up. These are particularly insidious smokers because they add ambiguity. Heavy is hard, but uncertainty is hell. You don’t know when exactly these sets will end, which compels you to build your mental readiness. Technically you can just stop any time. But you don’t. Meanwhile, you’re building a readiness mindset that is always looking to push that point of failure just a little further away. Just a few more steps. Just one more round. Always get the get the decimals of the next round.
If you aren't dreading the start of the set just a little bit, then it's not calibrated right. You should feel some apprehension, just not so much you don't actually do it.
Encouraging Failure
It can be hard to retrain our brains to enjoy failure. Culturally we’ve been bred to avoid it. We’re typically trained to feel shame at it, to shy away from the taste of it. I use a pair of simple tricks to help me adapt to the flavor.
First, as I mentioned last week, I use a system of box checks as a hack to ensure in my workouts. When I plan out my workouts, every part of the session gets its own box to check — as you see in the above screen grab. Checking each box gives me little hits of dopamine for completing each part of the total workout.
I also track how I do in my workouts. I don’t always get a new PR (personal record), but when I do, those dopamine hits are four times as large. This is in part because of the juxtaposition between how you expect to feel — exhausted post workout — with the way you actually feel — elated at a new personal best.
And anything can be a PR. First time doing a workout? Congratulations, that’s a PR. First time new workouts account for 20 of the 41 PRs I hit this year.
With 260 workout days in a year, I had a better than 1 in 10 chance of getting a PR on any given day. Your body will respond very positively to a sizeable dopamine hit, even if it only gets it 1/10 of the time. It’s the same feedback loop typically associated with bad things like gambling and social media use, only we’re hacking it for a good purpose. We’re using those dopamine hits to build healthy habits. You’ll find after just a few short weeks; your body is going to start to seek them out. Pretty soon you’re looking forward to getting your gains in and often your mood is at its highest point of the day right after you finish working out.
You're getting greater gains than before and now you get them in much less time. That may be blasphemy in an army whose fitness philosophy is measured in minutes and miles. But the science doesn’t lie.
Failure based fitness is why I don’t run.
Devil’s EMOM
Remember above when I said you should be dreading the start of the set just a little bit? I hate Devil’s EMOM. A lot. I never want to do it. But I make myself do it once a fortnight.
Devil’s EMOM isn’t a long set, and perhaps the hardest part about it is knowing the better the workout you did preceding it, the worse your score is now going to be. I just slip it in at the end of a day as one last kick in the ego.
The first time I ever did it, I only completed a single round. While my PR is just over nine, I tend to get less than five rounds before I can’t get a full round done in time. Remember, always get the decimals of the next round. Get the thrusters and as many pull-ups and burpees as you can, even when you know there isn’t time to finish that round. That’s where strength and readiness grow.
‘If you think lifting is dangerous, try being weak. Being weak is dangerous’. - Bret Contreras
Many of the resources in this post came from the US Army’s own Maximizing Senior Leader Health and Wellbeing’, specifically chapter three.
Cited papers include:
Shigenori Ito, “High-Intensity Interval Training for Health Benefits and Care of Cardiac Diseases - The Key to an Efficient Exercise Protocol,” World Journal of Cardiology 11, no. 7 (2019): 171–88, https://doi.org/10.4330/wjc.v11.i7.171
Wayne W. Campbell, et al., “High-Intensity Interval Training for Cardiometabolic Disease Prevention,” Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 51, no. 6, (2019): 1220-26, https://doi.org/10.1249/MSS.0000000000001934