Ep. 220-10 Nutrition Blunders that Crush SOF Selection Hopes & Dreams

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Hello, I am Kevin Smith, and you have found the Terminator Training Show, your one-stop shop for no BS training, nutrition, and health information. For more, please go to Terminatortraining.com. Thank you for tuning in and enjoy the show. What's going on, guys? Welcome to another episode of the Terminator Training Show. I'm Kevin Smith. Today is going to be a very in-depth breakdown of what I consider to be one of the most overlooked, and because it's overlooked, very costly concepts in all of soft selection prep, and that is nutrition. So I am going to break down 10 of the most common mistakes that I see with guys prepping for various different soft selections. And although I'm aware that different soft selections have different specific aspects to them, BUDS is not exactly like SFAS, RASP is not exactly like Marsock selection, Delta Force Assessment Selection is its own beast. Honestly, they are similar enough to where the nutrition concepts and the nutrition principles are pretty much universal and they apply to essentially everyone preparing for these selection processes. So I'm going to talk mostly about how I would go about. So I'm going to lay out 10 mistakes that are very common that I see all the time. And then I'm going to go about these mistakes talking about why they're mistakes as well as how to fix them and make sure that you are setting yourself up for success for these selections if you are preparing for them. And it's going to be more specific to the last few months getting into selection. So if you're like a year out from selection, a year and a half, don't get me wrong, these things will apply to you because eventually you're going to get there. And certain things that I discuss on some of them apply to if you haven't done this yet and you're inside a couple months of selection, well, you should have done it before. So if you have a little bit more time, if you're listening to this and you have more time, then that's perfect. You can start sooner. But either way, you can get a lot of good stuff out of this. And if you're even just a general hybrid athlete or maybe you've already done selection, a lot of these principles still apply because a lot of people just butcher the hell out of nutrition. And a lot of people overlook them, which coincidentally is going to be one of the first mistakes. And it is really, really costly. Unless you are a complete genetic freak, you can get away with a lot of dumb stuff. For most people, you can get away with piss poor nutrition, not just for selection prep, or not just for your physical fitness pursuits, but also it bleeds into your daily life. It also affects the way you look. It also affects the way you feel on a day-to-day basis, the way you think, the way you focus, your mental outlook, your general inflammation, whether you're in pain all the time or not. Nutrition plays a massive role in just about every single body bodily function. And so overlooking it is a massive mistake. And it can be very difficult. And I'm going to get into some things that are that people usually have difficulty with and tell you how to make it less difficult, but that doesn't make it less important. And also, guess what builds character really, really well? Embracing difficult things. Especially if by embracing that difficult thing, it's going to enhance your life. And with nutrition, it absolutely is. And it's something that you have control over most of the time. Of course, if you're at selection, you don't have full control over it, or other unique scenarios. But for the most part, you have control over what you put in your body and what you decide not to put in your body, and when you do it, and the type of things that they are, and how much of it or how little of it. So we're going to get into all of that today. And why listen to me? Well, I am a former Green Beret. I spent 12 years in special operations, and I have been obsessively studying strength and conditioning, nutrition, and other aspects of physiology for the last decade and a half, almost two decades. And I have been coaching individuals on an official basis since I've gotten out for about three and a half years. And before that, I helped a lot of guys with their training and their nutrition during my career kind of on the side. So I have had hundreds of nutrition clients at this point. And almost none of them, I would say absolutely none of them, actually, come to me and start working with me and are already as dialed in as they need to be. I have to make at least some minor changes, which is rare. What's a lot more common is I have to make some significant changes to what they're taking in. And for a lot of people, it can be literally make or break as to whether they are going to go up to go to selection and succeed versus not succeed. So I've seen my fair share of case studies and I've done my fair share of educating myself. I've paid for a lot of courses. I have a few different nutrition certifications, and although I am not like a PhD in this field, I definitely have done a lot of my homework. So I'll talk about some of the nuances and why I think, even though maybe you might hear some other things from other people, oftentimes zealots and charlatans, what I am laying down is usually going to apply to most people, and it's usually going to set you up for your best chances of doing the best you possibly can, showing up as prepared to these things as you possibly can, and having not an easy time throughout it because selection prep is not easy, but having less of a miserable time throughout it and guessing a lot less why the hell am I not recovering? Why the hell am I not performing? Why am I feeling like this all the time? Why am I fatter than I want to be? And so on and so forth. So, with that out of the way, let's hop into number one. I'm gonna try and make this a relatively brief and concise episode. No promises. I have zero script. This is all off the cuffed cuff. All I have is the list of mistakes. So if I find that something needs a little bit more nuance and more discussion, then I'm gonna do that. And that's just how it is. But I strongly recommend taking these to heart because there's a very, very good chance if you're watching this, you're making well over one of these mistakes, probably many or most of them. So the number one thing is kind of the general concept of what caused me to make this episode, and that is just taking it too lightly and overlooking it and not understanding the absolutely critical importance of getting dialed in with your nutrition during this time. Here's the deal a lot of people are able to get their training locked in. Honestly, if you're training for soft selection and you can't handle training consistently, like you make excuses, you push things off, you go off plan, you do way too much, you do way too little, really any of these low discipline activities, like you're probably just not the guy for the job. For the most part, guys are gonna be at least able to get their training in and adhere to, even if they're not on a great program, they're gonna at least be able to adhere to something consistent. So it that can work even if it's not perfect. Ideally, you get on a really good program. We have plenty of them. You can see links in the description. But even if you don't, you might be able to get by. However, that is usually your training if you're like really in the throes of selection prep, is probably gonna be 13, 14, 15 hours per week. And there are 168 hours per week. And what you do in the hours that you're not training, sleep is involved in that, but so too is nutrition, as well as the activities that you do throughout the day that can be pro-success or anti-success as in regards to fit physical performance and recovery and well-being. You just have a lot more time to fuck up. There's a lot more time to mess your nutrition up because you have to eat, everybody has to eat in order to maintain their ability to breathe and live through another day. But just eating to maintain and getting by is way different than eating from eating to actually maximize your performance and your recovery. So a lot of guys just overlook it and they don't think it's as important as it actually is. They get by, they eat, of course, and they're getting by, but they have no idea how big the gap is between getting by and thriving. And by overlooking nutrition, you're just never going to be able to fill that gap unless you start taking it seriously. So this one is more of a mindset and a sack the fuck up and really take this more seriously than you do thing, than a tactical tip or a tactical mistake. Some of these will be more strategic, like this one, other ones will be more tactical, but it is highly important as the first one to get out of the way and wrap your brain around, like really take this seriously, because it literally affects every single bodily process that goes on. And the more effective your body is working throughout this entire time, the more effective your training is gonna be, and the more effective your training is, the more progress you're gonna make, and the more progress you get you make throughout this whole time, it stacks and stacks and stacks throughout your entire prep, the more prepared you're gonna show up, and the more prepared you show up, guess what? We are dumbing this all the way down to the ultimate goal, which is getting selected. If you're more prepared, you are definitely setting yourself up for a better chance of reaching your goal of getting selected. So that's number one. Let's hop into number two, which is not tracking. Here's the deal: a lot of people these days on the internet, which absolutely could be a great place, but can be a terrible place, and this is an example of it being a terrible place. A lot of people are starting to claim that tracking your macros is gonna lead to or is even a current sign of disordered eating, which is absolutely insane. Let me give you a little analogy here. Let's say you want to track your finances, let's say you want to ensure that you are doing the right things as far as making sure that you bring in more money than you spend, set yourself up for success in the future, put your investments in the proper place, and so on and so forth. You want to be financially stable, you want to be financially comfortable. Would you just never check your bank account? Would you just never check what you've got coming in? Would you never check what you've got going out? You just wing it? Probably not. And the same people who say things like, oh, tracking your calories is disordered eating, do you think they would call someone disordered for tracking their finances? Absolutely not. In fact, they probably track their finances themselves. And that is because anything that's important to you, anything that you actually want to measure and ensure is going the way you want it to go and supporting you the way you want it to support you, it makes sense to track it and be aware of it. Now, I am not saying that you have to spend the rest of your life tracking every single morsel of food and weighing and measuring every morsel of food that you ever put in your body. However, if there is a single time to be very aware of what you're putting in your body, I would say it's probably as you go into what you are probably going to consider your most important job interview that you're ever going to attend in your entire life, aka soft selection. I'm guessing if you really care about this, which why would anyone go to this and go through the entire process of training for it as well as enduring it if they didn't care about it? Act like it by being aware of what you're putting into your body and how it's potentially affecting you, being mindful of, okay, I'm eating this much, I'm feeling like this, I'm recovering like this, I'm performing like this, my body weight's doing this, my body composition's doing this. Are these things all in my favor? Are these things not in my favor? What can I tweak? If you have no idea what you're taking in, it's gonna be really, really hard for you to troubleshoot things. So track and more specifically, ensure that you are being accurate with it and not eyeballing things. So, yes, that involves things like weighing your food. A lot of people will eyeball stuff or they'll like use their fist or they will like their palm of their hand, and that can be decent for like rudimentary measurements in absence of having a food scale, but it's not as accurate. Even sometimes people will use measuring cups and measuring spoons and things like that, which is a little bit more accurate, but the most accurate is by far weighing your actual food. And this is what I one time of your life, especially the last few months as you go in, if nothing else, that I would consider weighing your food. And the great thing about this too is like I said, you don't have to do it forever, but if you never do it ever to start out with, you never really gain that awareness. So it's gonna be really, really hard for you to intuitively eat in a way that supports your goals in the future when you're unable to track. You're just gonna have really no idea what let's say eight ounces of chicken breast looks like, or how many calories are in a cup of rice, or really basic things like that, fat content, protein content in let's say eight ounces of ground beef. So it's really, really great to gain awareness, if nothing else, and set you up for success in the future, because there's no reason. I mean, some people do like to track for their entire lives, which all the more power to them. And I don't think that's disordered unless they are making it disordered, like if it's ruling their lives and they're making these all their decisions based on whether they're going to be able to track their food and they maybe they freak out if they can't track something. Yes, you can definitely take it too far, but generally tracking your stuff for long periods of time, there's nothing wrong with that. But there's also nothing wrong with not tracking your stuff. For example, I just came off a cut where I didn't track my food the entire time. I keep a loose tally, but I didn't actually use my food scale for most things. I didn't use my macro tracking app, and I successfully cut down to like 7% body fat, which is kind of what I was going for. I am coming off the cut now because I'm about to enter a very stressful period of my life with very low sleep. My son is due in a little over a week. So being in a cut is a stressor, which I'll kind of talk a little bit about soon. So I decided to go back up to maintenance. But because I've tracked so much in the past, I was able to do that. And I used the scale and the mirror and my performance, how I was feeling, and kept a loose tally of how much protein I was eating, and kept a loose tally of how many carbs I was taking in, and also followed certain rules that I'll get into here in a little bit, like a one, two, three rule where you eat similar things throughout the day, you do your meal prep, you outsource your meal prep, and so on and so forth, and I was able to do it. But most people, especially when you have a really, really strict goal, like if I was prepping for selection right now, even though I know generally what I'm eating to pretty accurate degrees, I would still track because I would want to know exactly what I'm taking in. And I'm a pro at this. So let that sink in. Let's go into number three, which is piss poor planning and piss poor preparation. Every single nutrition plan that I have ever been a part of, whether I coached someone through it or whether I watched a friend or a loved one do it, or whether I've done it, guess what it involved? Some kind of planning and preparation. Honestly, pretty much any successful endeavor, whether it's work-related, fitness related, nutrition related, whatever have you, involves some planning. Family related, planning ahead for your family. Right now, we're about to have a baby, we're doing some planning and preparation for that baby. We're not just gonna wing it when he gets here. Generally, when you wing it, bad things happen. You make way too many decisions throughout the day, you fall behind, you miss meals, you eat too much sometimes, you eat the wrong food sometimes. I'm gonna get into specific food selections here a little bit later. But if you are just all over the map and you wing things, then you're gonna lose big time. Yes, there might be onesies and twosies out there that might be able to get it done, but it's just gonna add a bunch of commotion and stress and chaos to your life. And guess what? You don't need right now when you are in the most probably stressful period of time physically and mentally of your life. More commotion and more chaos. So, generally speaking, instead of making all these decisions of like what am I gonna eat, what foods am I gonna eat, where am I gonna go, what time am I gonna eat, so on and so forth, you just decide a couple times a week when you're gonna eat or what you're gonna eat, and you eat around the same times most days, and you eat around the same meals most days at most times, and you basically get rid of all that other noise that doesn't need to be there, but that is there if you don't plan and prepare. So, what does this look like? There are two main ways to prepare, and one of them is a higher bandwidth, lower cost, like money cost option. One is a much lower bandwidth, lower time, but higher cost option. And both are fine, whichever one you prefer. Generally, during this time, I would usually prefer the lower bandwidth, lower stress, higher cost one, because I want to chill and relax and not have to worry about doing this myself. But that's not to say that there's anything wrong with doing it yourself. So the former, the first one, that costs less but also requires more of your time is to DIY. It's to do your own meal prep. Generally, I like doing this twice a week. So essentially, what you're doing is two times throughout the entire week, you're deciding what you're gonna be eating for the rest of the week. You could do it on something like a Sunday night and a Wednesday night. I call this two-decision meal prep. You are making dinner on Wednesday night, you just make enough food for the next day's couple of meals. And it doesn't have to be every meal. It depends kind of on what your life looks like. If you have a pretty chill life, let's say maybe you're National Guard, you quit your job, or you maybe took some time off for your job to prepare for selection, you have all day. Maybe you don't need to do significant meal prep leading into the week. But say you're in the regular army or you're working a different job, or you're a very busy individual and you're on selection prep and you just don't really have the time to eat certain meals or to cook certain meals, or you typically make bad decisions on certain meals, or you typically skip certain meals, so on and so forth. I call these problem meals. Those are the meals you want to make sure that you prep for. So it could be lunch for you, it could be breakfast and lunch. For some people, maybe it's dinner. Identify that for yourself and ensure that you make enough food on Sunday night to cover those for the next few days. Then maybe Wednesday comes around and you do the exact same thing again for the rest of the week. Then maybe on Saturday, if you're kind of chilling out, you don't really have a lot of obligations throughout the day, you got more time. Of course, you can make your own food, you can maybe go out and enjoy some other food that you don't normally eat, that's fine. There's nothing wrong with you, don't have to be a perfect saint this entire time and live like a monk. Ideally, that would probably be a little bit more optimal, but I'm not I'm a realist. Like, I don't recommend everyone just never go out to eat ever or take get takeout ever. Like there's a time and a place for it, as long as you're not doing it all the time, it's honestly totally acceptable. And ideally, you can make it generally fit into your macros and not just destroy your gut. I'll get into some gut gut health stuff here in a bit, but that's totally fine. The other option, the higher price, lower bandwidth, lower time option, lower stress option, is to outsource. I have tried a lot of different meal preps in my life, and nothing comes close to Mega Fit. MegaFit has fantastic macros. They have options to either build your own, you can construct your own with the meat that you want, the starch you want, the vegetable you want, or you can get pre-made ones, and they're all really good. They all have great macros. Most meal prep companies, although many of them taste good, a lot of them have really what I would consider not great performance macros or body composition macros. They're more like lifestyle macros. So they're really high in fat typically, is what I'm trying to say. And some of them are low in protein. Some of them are like more keto, so they're like really, really high fat, almost no carbs, and moderate protein. This is not, I'm gonna get into some macro stuff here in a second, but this is not how you want to eat during selection prep. So if you want to try MegaFit and you want to go with the higher cost, lower bandwidth option, but you want to a little bit off that cost, go to the description below. There is a link that'll get you 10% off, or you can go to megafitmeals.com and type in TTM at checkout. That'll get you 10% off. But either of those are totally fine options. And then beyond that, I really like to implement what's called the one, two, three rule. So you have one breakfast that you eat almost every day, 90% of days. You have two lunches that you rotate. You could rotate week to week, you could rotate day to day, you could do a few days with one lunch, a few days with the next lunch, maybe your Sunday meal prep has one lunch, your Wednesday meal prep has another lunch, and then you have three dinners, same type of thing as the lunch. You're just a little bit more variety there. That is a great way to kind of just stay on track and reduce the noise from your life. And also, one caveat to this: this is not to say that you should eat the exact same breakfast, same two lunches, same three dinners forever. What I like to do is go like two, three weeks at a time, having a same or similar breakfast, same or similar two lunches, same or similar two dinners, and then rotate some small pieces of that. So like maybe you rotate what type of meat you're consuming in a couple of those meals. Or you rotate the starch. Maybe sometimes you eat oatmeal for breakfast, other times you eat rice and grass for breakfast. Maybe sometimes you have a certain type of fruit with your lunch, other times you have a different type of fruit with your lunch. It doesn't have to be like this perfect down to a exact morsel of food thing, but putting some consistency into your life is a really good thing. And a lot of people are like, oh, well, that's not really that fun to eat the same meal every single time. And guess what? Not everything you do every single day has to be fun. And the fact is, most people in America are extremely overweight. Literally, a lot of people are eating themselves to a faster death, like a sooner death than they could. And a lot of it is because they think everything has to be fun, like every meal has to be super savory and enjoyable in this amazing experience and exciting experience. It doesn't. In fact, typically boring diets are a lot more effective. And again, I'm not saying that. You have to eat like this forever, and I'm not saying that once in a while you can go out on weekends and enjoy yourself, but for the most part, keep things very, very basic and simple. If you're a master chef, yeah, you can spice things up if you want, if you have the bandwidth for it. But for the most part, just keeping things extremely, extremely vanilla is a really good idea. That's what I do. I have delicious meals every single time I eat. They're delicious, but they are not very complex and they're not like super fun and extravagant with a bunch of different crazy foody stuff. A lot of people are like, oh, I just loved food too much. And it's like a lot of people love food. And guess what? A lot of people who love food still maintain control of their body composition and the food they take in and their health and their performance and their recovery. You can love food and also make good decisions around food and still enjoy your life. Everything's gonna be fine. Just have a little bit of mental fortitude. Anyway, I think that covers planning. Very, very important. Get it done. Next one is gonna be under-eating. This one is incredibly, incredibly common. Almost all of my new clients are eating nowhere near enough calories at the time when they come and work with me that they eventually that I eventually want them to get to. They're almost all under-eating. And it kind of goes hand in hand with the next one, which is poor macro distribution, which I'll get into here in a second. But here's the deal: a lot of people just don't understand what it means to fuel a very high workload. In this case, a very high workload like training for selection, doing a bunch of running, doing a bunch of rucking, doing a bunch of lifting, calisthenics, strongman work, etc. And when you underfuel, you underperform. You get by, of course, if you if underfueling was like a death sentence, and no matter what, if you underfueled for your training, you just wouldn't be able to do it at all. That'd be one thing. But you can definitely underfuel for a long period of time and still get your training in. You're just not getting anywhere near as much out of that training, and you're not recovering anywhere near as much as well as you could be from that training. And also you are so much more susceptible to injuring yourself from that training when you're not taking in enough macronutrients, calories, micronutrients, etc. So, generally speaking, someone in this situation should probably be consuming somewhere between body weight times 17 to 22 calories. And that's a big range, and everyone's a little bit different here. It really depends mostly on your metabolic health. It does depend on your size, your height, your weight, however, and your body composition. However, there could be two people the exact same size that have the exact same workout program that take the exact same amount of steps per day that have the same activity level. Let's say they have the exact same activity level, and they could be, they could require significantly different calories. Significantly. I have many guys that are way lighter. So, like, for example, I brought two clients in recently. One of them weighs 190, one of them weighs 215. So 25 pound difference. The 215-pound individual was, when he came to me, eating considerably less than the 190-pound individual. And so if I had started him on the same amount of calories as the 190-pound individual, which I started him a little bit higher than what he's currently eating, but not by much. But if I started them with the same, even though he weighs more, he would be in a significant instant calorie surplus. And his ultimate goal is to lose weight. We started him on a little bit of a reverse diet to kind of build up his metabolism a little bit before we get into a cut. But that just goes to show it's not just height and weight. So it's a pretty big range. The key is to decide which number in there you're going to use. What I usually do is just base it on subjective metabolic rate. If you think your metabolism is slower than most people, then kind of go body weight times 17, body weight times 18. If you just know you have a fast metabolism, body weight times 20, 21, 22, and you get those numbers, and then I'll talk here about macros in a second. You eat that for I like to do two weeks, at least do 10 days. You don't change anything. You try to be as accurate as you possibly can with your measurements. You weigh yourself every day, and then you take the average weight. And if the body weight went up, then you were eating a little bit too much. If the body weight went down, you were eating a little bit too little. If the body weight stayed about the same, boom, you found your maintenance and you're in a good spot. Now, it's a little bit too late if you let's say you're really on the low end right now and you're three, four months out from selection, it's a little too late to go into a reverse diet. I will talk about eating at maintenance here in a second, but reverse diets are a little bit more complex, they take longer, they're not really a performance thing, they're a potential future performance thing because they'll improve your health and your metabolic health, and they'll allow you to eat more food without getting fat. But you really want to focus on performance here. And the best way to fuel performance is to eat at maintenance. Hands down, by far, the best way to fuel performance. So when you're a couple months out from selection, that's where you want to be eating. And one of the mistakes I'm about to get into is going to cover this in a little bit more detail. But it's really, really critical that you don't underfeed yourself because you're just opening yourself up to poor recovery, very, very inconsistent training performance. A lot of times people who underat also don't track, they have no idea that they are under-eating because they don't track their food. And they'll have like once in a while really good workouts, once in a while, really bad workouts. Sometimes they'll recover really fast, sometimes they'll recover really slow, sometimes they feel great throughout the day, energetic, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they feel all banged up, and sometimes they feel really fresh and spry. And oftentimes it's because when they feel really good, it's because they're eating enough. And when they feel not so great, it's because they're unknowingly not eating enough to support their workload and their overall daily calorie needs. So do not underfuel. Take this very seriously. If you want to get really, really in-depth on honestly, pretty much everything in this, and also specifically to this one, how much you should consider eating on a day-to-day basis during this time. I would check out my soft prep recovery guide, which I'm also going to put on sale in combination with this episode. It's going to be 20% off. It's only $25 as is, so 20% off, that's a pretty good deal. But the information for that will be in the description if you want to check it out. Which brings us into our next one, kind of similar, because calories are made up by macros, and this is poor macro distribution. So this is even worse if you're under-eating as well. But let's say you are eating the right amount. If you don't distribute your macros properly, you're also going to struggle significantly. And oftentimes, this is exactly what it looks like. Most guys who come and start working with me, this is what it looks like. They're eating too much protein, more protein than they need. To be clear, you can eat more protein than the recommended amount for muscle maintenance, which is about 0.8 grams per pound of body weight, and be okay. It's not unhealthy. But I'll get into here in a second why it's still not ideal for someone in this situation. But they're eating too much protein, they're eating way too much fat, and they're eating nowhere near enough carbs. So here's the issue with that. When you eat too much protein, which in this case again is 0.8 grams-ish per pound of body weight or more. Let me rephrase that. You want to be eating about 0.8 grams per of protein per pound of body weight. If you're eating one, 1.2, 1.25, 1.3, again, it's not going to be bad for you, but it's also not going to help you gain any more muscle or repair muscle any better. And all it's doing is taking the place of what macros that you could fill with carbohydrates. And I'll get into here soon why carbohydrates are so important. But you want to be able to, with your diet, ensure that you're eating enough protein and fat because they're both essential macronutrients, which means you need to eat a certain amount of them. But you also want to be leaving as much room for carbohydrates as you possibly can. So when you're eating too much protein, you're just taking that spot away from potential carbohydrates. Let's say you're eating 25 grams of protein extra, more than you need. That is 25 grams of carbs because both protein and carbs are four calories per gram. That's 25 grams of carbs you could be eating, but you're not because it's filled with protein. So ensure that you're not going overboard on protein. Fat is even more. Fat people just go absolutely off the rails with. One of my recent, honestly, this happens on a regular basis, but this is fresh in my mind. One of my recent clients was averaging 167 grams of fat per day. I since switched him to 55 to 60 grams of fat per day, depending on whether he's eating on a high day or a low day or a medium day. I like to calorie cycle my guys. So we basically cut his fat down by two-thirds. And that is super duper common, especially if you don't track. Almost nobody under consumes fat by accident. Almost everybody over consumes fat by a lot. And sometimes it's by accident. Or in other cases, maybe they are tracking, but they've heard in the past, oftentimes from low-carb zealots or keto zealots or carnivore zealots, that eating lots of fat is a really good thing. Or they just know that fat is an essential macronutrient, and they think because of it's essential, they need more of it. Like more equals better. And it's not. Once you have your bases covered, which I'll get into the exact amount that I kind of recommend here in a second, more fat is not better. Especially, especially in some cases it could be, like if you have hormone issues, or if you're a female, or if you're not very active, there are certain situations, but guess what? If you are training for selection, these situations don't apply to you. You need as many carbs as possible, and you need to make room for them by dropping your fat. The proper amount for most people, a really, really good range, would be something like 0.3 to 0.35 grams of fat per pound of body weight. You can get up to 0.4 if you want, but I honestly don't recommend it that you're just taking away more room from for carbs. And fat, here's the deal about fat, it's nine calories per gram, whereas carbs are four. So for every two-ish grams of carbs, that's about one gram of fat. So, in other words, if you take 10 grams of fat out of your diet, that is about 20 grams of carbs that you can add to your diet. 10 grams of fat's about 990 calories, 10 grams, 20 grams of carbs is about 80 calories. So it's not even, it's a little bit even less mismatched. It's another 22 grams of carbohydrates. So a lot of people, when they see things like 8515 beef, they think it's lean beef because 85 is pretty high percentage. Usually, if you do something 85% of the time and you do something poorly 15% of the time, you're doing a pretty good job. In baseball, you're doing an amazing job, but in life in general. But 85-15 beef is not lean. If you look at the macros, mainly because fat is 9 calories per gram and protein is 4 calories per gram. And also, like I said, carbs is as well. So if you drop your fat down like that, you're gonna open yourself up to what I consider the absolute most magic and also still unappreciated macronutrient there is carbohydrates. There will be people that you might hear on the internet that try to dispute the fact that carbs are the world champ when it comes to performance at anything that involves intensity or long durations, which, oh, by the way, all of your selection prep, almost all your selection prep workouts will, selection will itself, it's a very, very endurance bias event. There's gonna be a lot of intensity throughout your training weeks. But people will try to dispute that it's not really necessary and that people just eat too many carbs, and that you don't need a whole lot of glycogen stored in your muscles, which you get from eating carbs. And guess what? Almost every single study shows that that is complete bullshit. Usually people saying this are trying to sell something, or they're trying to just be contrarian and get more attention and get more arguments and therefore grow their page and become more well known. And not only does science and data back up the fact that carbohydrates are critical for athletic performance and recovery and injury prevention and also even hydration. Glycogen brings in water into the muscles, so carbs are critical for hydration. If you eat really low carbs, you're probably gonna cramp a lot and struggle just in general to perform, of course. But also, studies aside, data aside, success leaves clues. And 99.9% of high-performing athletes eat a lot of carbs. 99.99% of high performing endurance athletes eat a lot of carbs. And like I said, this is an endurance event that you're training for. There's a strength component, but guess what? Strong guys and jack guys, bodybuilders, strongmen, power lifters, crossfit athletes, etc., guess what they eat a lot of, a lot, a lot, a lot of, and drink a lot of carbohydrates because they are that critical. So if you want to recover and perform, reduce your injury risk as much as possible, ensure that you are not going overboard on protein and fat, and ensure that you are leaving enough room for carbs and you are going to thrive. And if you don't believe me, just do it for two weeks. Two two weeks. This is what I tell some of my clients that are skeptics at first. If after two weeks you don't feel significantly better, significantly, like night and day, then you can fire me and I'll give you your money back. And thus far, zero people have fired me. And almost all of them are like, oh my god, I cannot believe what I've been missing for so long. This is amazing. And yes, it is amazing. Carbs are for most people, if you are not used to eating enough carbohydrates, honestly, you're gonna feel more positive benefits from eating enough carbs. And I mean enough carbs, like you're basically filling in the rest of your macros. Once you calculate the protein and the fat that I just told you how to calculate, you're filling in the rest of your macros with carbohydrates. And if you eat, if you do that and you eat that many carbs on a daily basis, on a regular basis, you're gonna feel more powerful and profound effects from that than you would if you went on a steroid cycle, a PED cycle. And I am not joking. It is that that critical. So don't sleep on it. Which brings us into number six, which is a very significant mistake that I see a lot, and that is trying to cut and prep for selection at the same time. This one is pretty cut and dry, so we're gonna keep it relatively simple. But eating in a calorie deficit, which is required to lose fat, aka cut, is not the same as eating for performance. Eating for performance in almost every case is eating at maintenance. Maintenance calories, which if you eat at maintenance, you're not gonna get leaner. Very much. I mean, you might if you're there's no way to eat exactly perfectly at maintenance. If you're eating some days, maybe in a slight deficit, yeah, you might get a little leaner at maintenance. If you're very brand new to training, you can kind of body recomp around maintenance. But in general, during this period of time, you want to be eating for performance, which means eating at maintenance. Because when you're in a calorie deficit, you are not gonna perform as well, you're not gonna recover as well, you're gonna be higher risk of injury, you're not gonna feel as good throughout the day, you're gonna have less energy and vigor. You are also in a stressed-out state. You're being in a cut, being in a deficit is a stressor for your body. And guess what? Like I said earlier, this is one of the most stressful times of your life. Physical stress of training, mental stress of, oh my God, I have to go and do this thing in a couple months. Like this is really, really stressful. It is for everybody. And also, you have, let's say you have a family and you got kids, or maybe you have a newborn, or maybe you're going through some crazy stuff with your relationships, or maybe you have some job stress, maybe you're in the army and you're doing crazy stuff with a regular army, which is a lot of the reason that you want to go SF so you can do cooler stuff that actually makes more of a difference. Guess what? That's stressful too. So ideally, not going out of your way to add another stressor, aka eating in a calorie deficit during this time, not to mention all the other negative effects, is probably a good idea. So the problem is a lot of guys wait way too long to decide, oh, I need to go prepare for selection. Oh, and also I need to lose weight, I need to lose body fat. And this is a major mistake. Ideally, today or as soon as yesterday as possible, if you know you need to lose weight, and let's say you're at least a few months out from selection, you start getting leaner, like ASAP. And also beyond that, you maintain it for ideally the rest of your life. Honestly, it is not very you don't have to get down to where you're 7%, 8%. You I wouldn't recommend getting that lean. That's not very healthy. It's not great for performance to be that lean. But in the 12 to 14-ish percent body fat range is A, objectively healthier for males to be than 18, 20, 22% body fat. B, it's also going to make you more efficient. You don't have as much weight or fat to carry around when you're running, you're rocking, you're doing calisthenics, and so on. C, you look better, you look more presentable, and you give off the perception to others. Not that this directly matters towards your selection fate, but just I'm talking about general life here. You give off the perception to others that you respect yourself because eating properly and maintaining a sound nutrition regimen is honestly one of the most clear signs that you're disciplined. And being disciplined is one of the most clear signs that you respect yourself. That's just a fact. So, ideally, if you know you have some weight to lose, again, I would try and shoot to get down into that 12 to 14% body fat range, you can get a little leaner, that's fine too. If you feel good at 10-11% body fat, great. Some people can get away with being like 9%, they're usually genetic outliers. But getting down there in a reasonable manner, of course, you don't want to like crash diet, but getting down there and staying there for as long as you possibly can, especially at least until you get into selection prep, and then you can go back to maintenance and eat at maintenance throughout that entire time and support your performance, your recovery, etc., that is what you want to do. So do not wait. If you have waited too long, let's say you're two months out from selection and you're 22% body fat, A, you're probably not performing very well, you probably don't feel great, and you would be significantly better off if you were eight to ten percent body fat less. What I would strongly recommend doing, I mean, if you can crush all the standards and you're hanging out around 20% body fat, that's one thing, go, but make sure you get leaner in the future. If you are suspecting that your fatness, your current fatness, is messing with your current fitness, let's just say, then I would probably recommend I'd strongly recommend bumping your selection date to a later date and getting lean in the meantime, and then doing a prep, an entire prep, at a leaner, lighter, filter, more efficient, healthier, more presentable looking body fat percentage, and showing up to selection ready to go and perform. Because you're probably going to make a lot more progress if you don't have a bunch of excess body fat, if you have better metabolic health, if you have better insulin sensitivity, and so on and so forth. So don't cut and try to prepare for selection at the same time. I know this is definitely going to go in one ear, out the other, for a lot of people, but it is strongly advised against. Which brings us to the next one, which is poor food selection. So micronutrients are also really important. Not just calories, not just macros, but micros are also important. And a lot of people, you could have the perfect amount of calories, you could have the perfect macros, but if you're eating complete shit food, A, you're not going to feel great, you are also not going to perform as well, you're going to be more inflamed, you're going to be hungrier, you're going to struggle to maintain or like control your appetite because most processed foods are designed to make people want to eat more of them. I talked about this recently when I was discussing IIFYM in a recent episode. But that being said, you don't need to necessarily only eat perfect whole foods. Generally speaking, especially if you have a really high calorie need, it's going to be hard to get all of your calories on a daily basis from just clean foods. So this can kind of go either way. Some guys, and this usually results in under-eating, some guys will try and at all costs just eat perfectly clean. Other guys will just go off the rails and eat whatever the hell they want. A little bit of both is a good idea, but a lot more of the clean eating than the IFYM processed food eating would be a good idea. Something like 85-15, 90-10 for some people, maybe 80-20 for people who have really, really high metabolic rates and struggle to get their calories in. What this is going to do is enhance your health. It's going to enhance your performance, it's going to enhance your recovery because you're going to have the vitamins, the minerals, the nutrients, the fiber to enhance digestion. You're going to have better gut health, which is incredibly, incredibly important, which a lot of people overlook. You're about to go into a job that is not very pro-gut health at all. And if you're already starting to get that cascade going, you're already just ignoring it, and you're bloated all the time, or you have the shits all the time, or you're constipated all the time, or you have random joint pain, you can't figure out where it's coming from. Or oftentimes people have brain fog, really low energy, their mood will swing down and really good. Oftentimes, one of the main factors there is gut health. And a lot of processed foods that a lot of people eat these days and oils and additives. And seasonings and not necessarily seasonings, but like things that like restaurants or other takeout places will add to their foods are not very pro-gut health. So what you want to prioritize is pick it, kill it, grow it foods. So pick it is something like something you can pick off a vine. And it's similar to growing, but like you can pick potatoes out of the ground, you can pick pick blueberries off a vine, you can pick an apple off of a vine, grow it kind of the same thing. You grow produce fruits, vegetables, starches, things like that. And then kill it is animal stuff, and not just animals that you kill, like animal flesh, but also animal products like eggs and dairy, if you can handle dairy well. Those are gonna be the foods that you want to prioritize 80, 85, 90% of the time. And then when you have covered all your bases and maybe you need some more calories, usually it's gonna be in the form of carbs. That's when you can branch out and have things like rice krispies, which are just basically purely carbs, or you can have things like rice cakes. I would say rice cakes are pretty close to being a whole food, but technically they're a little bit more processed. But you can branch out and have bagels and other things that are like not the worst things for you, not gonna destroy your gut health, but also not very nutrient dense, but they still pack a good carb punch and they can definitely support your day-to-day needs if you don't feel like eating another massive bowl of white rice, for example. So, generally speaking, some top protein sources, red meat, lean red meat, actual lean red meat. I would say if you're gonna go ground beef, 96-4 or leaner, really, really lean steaks, top sirloins, top rounds, etc. You can do things like filet mignon if you can make it fit in your macros, that's fine too. Chicken breast, chicken thighs, there's more fat in chicken thighs, but it can certain in certain people's macros fit. White fish, cottage cheese, eggs, egg whites. Eggs, by the way, a lot of people kind of mess this up. They have a shit ton of eggs for breakfast, and then all their fat is gone for the day. Eggs are usually about one-to-one fat protein. So you'd be much better off doing something like two to three whole eggs and then filling in the rest to get your 40-50 grams of protein with egg whites or another lean source of protein of some kind. You can do whey protein, that's a great protein supplement. And that is a pretty good list of certain protein supplements or protein foods that I would recommend. For carbohydrates, white rice is hands down probably the easiest digesting carbohydrate source. Rice and grinds is a fantastic, super fast digesting breakfast, kind of an oatmeal cream of rice substitute. It's just absolutely delicious. I talk about it all the time if you've listened before. And I also have a discount code on that in the description below, TTM, or you can just click the link and it'll take you straight there. But I eat that almost every day. My clients eat it almost every day, and it's fantastic, and it's only carbs. You can do things like potatoes, yams, real sourdough bread, not the stuff you buy at the grocery store that has like 35, 35 ingredients, stuff that has two, three ingredients, stuff you make at home, or you go to a mom and pop bakery or a boutique grocery store, and it's the actual real stuff, and it tastes way better, and it's also just way better for you. So those are really, really good carb sources. Of course, fruit, you want to eat probably as much fruit as you possibly can. Fruit is fantastic, it's loaded with fiber and micronutrients, have a diverse variety of different fruit. If things like berries and things like that are expensive for you, that's fine. Frozen fruit absolutely works. What I like to do is when I make rice and grinds in the morning, I eat a lot of berries and stuff like that for dinner and whatnot. But in the morning, I love my frozen fruit because what I do is I make rice and grinds on the stovetop and it's super duper hot. And I would have to wait like 20 minutes for me to eat it and not burn my tongue off. So I pour my frozen berries into a bowl, and then I pour the rice and grinds on top of it, and then I mix the rice and grinds into it. And what that does is it cools the rice and grinds off because the berries are frozen, so I can eat it sooner, and it also thaws the berries out, so I'm not chomping on frozen berries. It's a win-win, and it's friggin' amazing. And then I usually add like a banana and some maple syrup to that as well. And syrup and honey, by the way, are great options too. If you're gonna have like sugary stuff, I would go with like syrup and honey, maple syrup, like actual real maple syrup and like raw quality honey. And then vegetables too. Vegetables are a little more of a wild card. Some people, if you don't have great gut health, or if you just know that when you eat vegetables, you kind of eat you feel bloated and they don't agree with you very well, at least certain ones, then you don't necessarily have to pound vegetables. And honestly, I wouldn't if they're messing up your gut. Now, you can get to a place in the future by working on your gut health where that doesn't happen, but for now, like it's not really the best time to worry about that. So, what you can do is cook vegetables. Usually that makes them a little bit easier digesting. And certain vegetables like carrots and cucumbers are usually pretty good. Like most people can handle those pretty well. But vegetables, more of a wild card. I wouldn't be going and eating, especially if you're struggling to get enough food in, even if you do handle vegetables well, I wouldn't be going and eating massive, massive amounts of them because they're very high fiber and they're very filling, and they might make it so that you struggle getting all of your other necessary macros in. So again, micronutrients, food quality, highly important. Don't overlook it. Next one, which is number eight, which is poor peri-workout nutrition. So around your training, pre-workout, during, and after. And a lot of people think that the most important thing to do around training is make sure they get enough protein. And it's not useless to get enough protein in, but the anabolic window where you have to get protein in, like ASAP after you're done training, really doesn't apply. It's not really a thing, it's kind of been debunked. Generally, you want to prioritize carbs around your training. If you are training early morning and you haven't eaten anything since the night before, yeah, you probably want to get some protein in after your training. Don't feel like you have to slam a bunch of protein before you train, but definitely consider carbs. And it will depend on the duration of the training session you're doing and the type of training that you're doing, and also just like your general overall intake as well as like how much you want to optimize. But generally speaking, you want to make sure that you're going into training with a full glycogen stores, which you get from chronic carbohydrate intake, and also circulating glucose, which you get from recent fast digesting carbohydrate intake, usually in the form of some sort of sugar. And around training, the best forms of sugar are things like dextrose or cyclic dextrin, clusterdextrin, kind of the same thing. You can also do things like vitargo, which is a fantastic intra-workout supplement. Tailwind is a good mix of a different type, a bunch of different types of sugar. Maltodextrin is acceptable. In a pinch, you can do things like candy, gas station candy, not the best, but it is better than just going and training fasted for hours and hours. And you really want to make sure that you have that like quick pick-me-up. Runner gels, fantastic. Runner gummies, fantastic. 10-15 minutes prior to starting a workout. Before that, you want to make sure that you're eating a good, solid meal. So let's say you're working out in the middle of the day, you have time to actually eat prior to. You want to keep in mind the following heuristic: low fat, low fiber, minimize the two F's. Fat and fiber are great. You need both of them to be healthy and thrive. However, around your training, you want to keep them low because they slow digestion down. When you start, let's say, a 90-minute ruck and you just had a meal that had 25 grams of fat in it and 15 grams of fiber in it, you're not going to be feeling very good when you start that ruck because all that food has not digested, it has not entered your bloodstream. Even if the stuff that you ate with that fat and fiber was really, really good pre-workout food, it's slowing that whole process down and it's gonna be sitting in your stomach. And your body doesn't really want to focus on digesting and also performing at the same time. So you want to eat stuff that is very fast digesting, it enters the bloodstream quickly and it's light, it doesn't weigh you down. So even this is like honestly a really good time for things like refined carbohydrates like bagels or cereal, like rice krispies, things like that. But just be very mindful of what you're adding to it. So, like if you're having a bowl of rice krispies an hour before you train and you put a bunch of whole milk in it and you eat three full, three, four full eggs on the side, then that's not a very good idea because you're adding a bunch of fat to it. Or if you're adding a bunch of other things that have fiber to it. So be very mindful of it. And then post-workout, you kind of want the same thing: low fat, low fiber, especially if you're training again that day. And it's really, really critical too to get carbs in as quickly as possible after you work out because it's going to enhance recovery whether you're working out again later that day or not, even if you're not working out again until the next day. You still want to replace those glycogen stores, replenish those glycogen stores as quickly as you can. And yes, that's going to happen to an extent if you are consuming carbohydrates inside your workout during your workout, but you still want to really, really optimize and maximize your glycogen replenishment. Also, consuming carbs during training as well as quickly after can kind of blunt the stress response. It kind of puts cortisol a little bit more at bay than usual. Cortisol is naturally, it's not a bad thing. It's naturally going to raise when you train. It's a stress hormone. Training is a stressor, and that's okay. But it can, when you train a lot, you have a really high workload program. And again, you're just a type A individual, so you're naturally stressed, and also you're doing all these other stressful things and you're stressed about selection, so on and so forth. You want to do what you can to kind of keep that at bay, keep it dimmed a little bit, almost like a dimmer switch. So carbohydrates, very, very important. As far as during, let's say you're doing something like either a lift followed by a repeat session on the same in the same session, like you're not splitting them up, or you're doing like a longer ruck or a longer run. I would consider something like 75 to 100 grams of carbs per hour. And probably starting a little lower. If you've never done intra-workout nutrition, you probably don't want to start there because your body, just like it gets used to training and other aspects of like adaptation as you go through the training process, your gut also adapts. So if you start with like 80 grams of carbs the first time, you're probably not gonna handle that very well. And you don't want to do this all at once either. Maybe like every 20, 15, 20, every 30 minutes, you take in 20, 30 grams of carbs, give or take, in the form of a gel, or you can sip on tailwind, liquid carbs, whatever have you. But start maybe in the 50 to 60 range, and then every few workouts or every few weeks, maybe you add 10 to 20 grams of carbs per hour per workout. And ideally, you can get up to about 100 grams of carbs and per hour, and that's gonna really, really make a huge, huge difference, especially if you're just used to having plain water and absolutely nothing. I haven't even talked about hydration, which is kind of a topic for a different day, but very important. But a lot of people just train on plain water, or maybe they train on like Gatorade Zero or something similar, and that is just not the time and place for it when you're in selection prep and you need every single possible substrate you possibly can get. So don't sleep on. I think there was one other thing that I was gonna talk about with peri-workout nutrition, and it is I am oh, yes, it just came to me. It is a lot of people will say things like, oh, well, I'm not gonna have this stuff at selection, I'm not gonna have my intra workout drinks, or I'm not gonna be able to fuel my training perfectly, shouldn't I practice it in prep? And it's a valid concern, but it is not a good idea. If you're going to AS, Delta Force selection, you will have plenty of access to all this stuff. You can bring it, but most selections you're not going to. But here's the deal: you want to show up to selection as prepared as possible. And if you're doing training sessions where you're intentionally not fueling them, and therefore you're not going to perform as well or recover as quickly from that training session, and it's going to be more of a stressor, and your injury risk is going to be higher in that training session. Do that week after week after week after week, and that is several training sessions you'll never get back that you underperformed because you decided to, because you wanted to practice. Instead, you want to fuel these training sessions as best you possibly can so that you perform as best you possibly can, so that you show up as prepared as you possibly can be, and therefore put give yourself the best chance possible. You cross the bridge of having suboptimal conditions when you get there. That is just a bridge you cross when you get there. And that is okay, just like sleep deprivation. You don't practice sleep deprivation. Most people have been sleep deprived in their life, so they know what it feels like, but going into selection, you want to recover as best you can. And when you're intentionally depriving yourself of calories and sleep, calories around training, or just calories in general, not a very good idea. So don't do that. Two more. And these ones are relatively quick. So number nine is trying to put on a bunch of weight last minute before you go into selection. So you'll hear things like for ranger school, because you're gonna lose a ton of weight at ranger school, you should go in kind of chunky. Do I agree with that? Not necessarily, but it makes a little more sense for ranger school because it's longer and you get even less food every day. So there's a little bit of merit to it for ranger school. For things like selection or really any like any soft selection, yes, you're gonna lose weight while you're there. However, let's say a lot of people do this, by the way. Let's say you're getting into your taper. You're two, three weeks out, you start your taper, you're dialing back your training, and you're like, okay, I want to make sure that I'm giving myself some extra fluff going into selection. So you're dialing back your training. You're not training as much, right? You're also gorging yourself, most likely, on a bunch of food. Typically, it's really hard to eat really healthy and eat enough on a daily basis to eat in enough of a calorie surplus to get really, really fat. So, what do a lot of people do? They eat a lot more processed food. And what does processed food do? It makes you a lot more inflamed. So you're trying to taper, you're doing the right thing, trying to taper, you're dialing back your training to allow not just fatigue and not just kind of nervous system fatigue, physical fatigue, mental fatigue to subside, but also inflammation. But inflammation is not going to subside anywhere near as much. In fact, it's probably not going to subside at all. It might even increase if you're just eating crap, trying to get fat. Getting fat intentionally in a short period of time like this is a great way to just feel really, really stiff and inflamed and sore and not great. And really sluggish, not mentally great at all either. So calorie loading, and a lot of people do this improperly too. They calorie load, they think they're carb loading, but they increase their carbs as well as increasing their protein as well as increasing their fat, so they're calorie loaded. So not only are you getting more inflamed during this time, but when you show up to selection, you haven't really been training all that much, so you're not quite as used to doing your running, your rucking, your pull-ups, your push-ups. You're still gonna do some of that during your taper. But you show up and you're let's say 10, 12, 15 pounds heavier, even if that's not all fat, which it's not. You can't gain that much fat in that short period of time. But let's say it's water weight, you're still way heavier. And it's gonna be harder to do pull-ups, it's gonna be harder to do push-ups, you're gonna be slower, you're gonna be a less efficient runner, you're gonna probably be a less efficient rucker. And that is not what you want because you're also gonna be more injury prone because you're 10, 12, 15 pounds heavier, and by the way, you're gonna go do a bunch of impact on that 10, 12, 15 pounds heavier body, and it is just totally not worth it. Just take your medicine, show up lean and mean, and strong, and not inflamed, and well rested, and well tapered, and accept the fact that you're gonna transiently lose a bunch of body fat. You're also gonna transiently lose a bunch of muscle, and that is just the way it is, and that happens to everyone. Whether they got super fat leading in or not, it's just gonna happen, and you are far better off entering selection in the same body composition and same size that you've done all of your training for than being this super water retentive, bloated, inflamed individual going into selection. So that is my recommendation to avoid mistake number nine. And number 10 is honestly just making excuses as to why you are a special case in which you just can't do this stuff, or why it doesn't apply to you. Like, oh, I'm extra stressed, or oh, I have this going on, or oh, I can't afford healthy food. By the way, you can't afford healthy food, you just haven't really thought outside the box quite enough yet. And you're just using this as as an excuse. And oh, by the way, healthy food is one of the most important things you could ever invest in. You are literally going to be a better, higher performing, healthier person across the board if you eat healthy food, and you're gonna be the opposite if you don't. And also, if you buy things in bulk and you go to the right place and you look for the right food, you can get healthy food for very, very cheap. And it is a completely invalid excuse. But either way, guys will come up with every excuse under the sun to say why they can't do this. And if you want to do that, that's fine. However, nobody else cares. The cadre at selection are not gonna be like, oh, well, this guy had this going on during prep, and so it stopped him from being able to care about and take his nutrition seriously. So let's just give him a free pass because he it because he didn't focus on this stuff and because he wasn't able to actually take it seriously, he's not performing to standard. But guess what? We're just gonna give him a free pass anyway because he's like a special case. That doesn't happen. It never happens. Low agency is an incredibly common trait in uh people these days in general, Gen Z, even millennial millennials, and uh basically what it means is like you're a victim to life circumstances rather than you being able to choose your own circumstances and make things happen yourself. Agency, high agency means you make shit happen. You take whatever hand you're dealt and play it to the best of your ability. Or if you don't like that hand, guess what? You fold and you get dealt another hand and you play it until you win, and you know that you have the ability to change your circumstances and chase your dreams and implement certain things in your life, aka nutrition, and not make certain mistakes, aka these nutrition mistakes that I just went over. You have the ability to do that if you're high agency. And guess what? Every single person who is a soft guy has more agency than almost anyone else in the world. You just have to. It is a required, non-negotiable trait. Low agency people are the ones who say, Oh, no one ever set me up for success with this, or no one ever taught me this, or it is what it is. I was just born this way. That just happens to me. I'm just unlucky. The other person's really, really lucky. I always get the short end of the stick. It's not my responsibility, it's not my fault. Yada yada yada. Life happens to them. In their mind, life happens to them. They're just passengers along for the ride. They don't actually have any capacity to make things happen. And having high agency is literally just a choice. You can snap your finger right now and decide to have high agency. So, high agency people, guess what? They're not gonna make excuses, they're gonna go do what needs to be done. And hopefully this list gave you a good idea of what not to do, as well as what to do instead, to make yourself as robust as humanly possible, showing up to selection, ready to go crush it, and walk home victorious. So thank you guys for listening. I know I said it was gonna be pretty short, but I get very, very passionate about these topics if you couldn't tell. But I think you guys probably should be able to bring some good stuff out of that one and apply it into your lives. If you guys have questions on anything I talked about, drop it below in the comments. And that is all she wrote for today, guys. Thank you very much for tuning in. I'll be back soon with another episode. Till then, Terminator Out. Thank you for listening. If you like this show and want to start crushing your goals, please subscribe so you don't miss an episode. And for more fitness content, follow me on Instagram at Terminator underscore training, or check out my website, Terminator Training.com. All right, guys, Terminator Out.