6 Exercises to DOMINATE Selection
When you’re training for selection, choosing the right exercises is crucial. Between running, rucking, weightlifting, and calisthenics you have a lot of training to do. Your choice of exercise can make or break your performance in training, ultimately determining whether you will be selected.
In this post I’ll outline my favorite exercises to maximize your training, the criteria I use for selecting them, and then walk through real strength data from Navy SEAL and Air Force Special Warfare candidates at the end.
How to Decide Your Exercises
Where 90% of candidates go wrong is taking a powerlifting or bodybuilding program and doing it without modifications.
The bodybuilding routine maximizes muscle gain while the powerlifting program maximizes strength in the bench press, squat, and deadlift.
That’s great if those are your goals-but no rule says you must do powerlifting movements or tons of bodybuilding isolation work.
What matters most is performing selection movements as efficiently and effectively as possible-and those are your running, rucking, heavy carries, and load carriage.
With that in mind, here are the three criteria I use for exercise selection: Specificity, Skill, and Fatigue.
- Specificity: tells us how specific an exercise is for selection. Rucking or running, for instance, would be 100%. When we talk about gym exercises, a trap bar farmer carry would score high, while band pull-apart or tib raises would score very low
- Skill: tells us how much skill is required to perform the exercise. A dumbbell curl would score low since you can learn how to curl in seconds. While the clean and jerk can take several weeks or even a month to develop the technique before loading heavier weights
- Fatigue: focuses on how fatiguing the exercise is. A max effort set of squats will be brutal and requires significant recovery cost (especially as your strength increases), but a set of chest-supported rows, even if taken to failure, doesn’t require much recovery cost
The ideal exercises for selection will be high in specificity, have a low skill requirement, and have moderate to low fatigue.
The Two Types of Exercises
Preventative exercises that are low in specificity like tib raises and band pull-aparts still have a role.
This is why I divide exercises into two groups-there are prime movers which have high carry-over to selection performance. As an example, someone who deadlifts 155lbs will struggle when rucking with 80lbs. But by doubling his deadlift to 315, the improved stability and strength in his back and legs will result in improved performance. Thus, the deadlift would be a prime mover.
On the other hand, there are your support exercises, which, while they don’t have high carryover to selection, will strengthen weak muscle groups or reduce your risk of injury. Examples of these are calf raises, rear delts, and other isolation exercises.
Most Important Muscle Groups
One thing to remember is that none of the exercises we do in the gym will have 100% specificity-and none are necessarily right or wrong. So, rather than thinking in terms of exercises, it can be helpful to think about the top movement patterns you need to develop and improve
1. Hip Hinge – Lower Back
Hip hinge develops the lower back. This is crucial to your durability, both during training and for the longevity of your career. While you may feel upper back and shoulder fatigue during your rucks, I often find that discomfort is a result of compromised posture as the lower back fatigues and your back begins to fold.
2. Squat – Legs
While there’s no squat test at selection, you will have 65 plus lbs on your back for multiple hours at a time for days in a row. And to withstand that, you need bulletproof legs. The best way to develop them is through squat variations, lunges, and even targeted isolation work can help.
3. Pulling
Variation in your pulling movement patterns-both vertical like with pull-ups and horizontal like with barbell or dumbbell rows. Your pulling strength will be especially valuable when rucking, moving apparatuses, and carrying heavy objects.
While grip strength is critical for heavy carries, upper back strength is just as important. A strong upper back stabilizes your shoulder girdle, reducing the strain on your hands and forearms allowing you to grip longer and harder-so do your pulling.
4. Carries – Grip
You will be carrying heavy loads – both on your shoulders and in your hands. For the latter, you need a strong grip. Exercises like farmer carries and suitcase carries are examples.
You’ll notice that I didn’t include pressing here as a top movement pattern to improve. While I do include pressing movements like dips, weighted push-ups, and presses in selection prep, it’s for general strength development. I mention this because this differs significantly from what you would see in a bodybuilding or powerlifting program.
How Important is Weight?
Before we get into the top exercises, you may be wondering how many weights and exercise selections there are. Surely, you could do low-weight and low-fatigue exercises like machine presses, machine lat pulldowns, and back extensions instead of deadlifts and achieve a great stimulus, right?
Yes, you would achieve a good stimulus to the target muscle groups. But in the context of training for selection, the absolute weight you’re moving and the load on your spine does matter. Here’s why.
At selection, everyone will have the same 65lb ruck. If your back is only used to 45lb back extensions and your legs 35lb db lunges, even if you’re doing them to failure, your body is going to be far less than prepared than with heavy weight training.
The alternative is, you worked up to 275lb deadlifts and 225lb squats for reps. Your body will have acclimated to moving 4 times the weight of that 65lb rucksack through a full range of motion reps. That body will be far more resilient and prepared to move that 65lb ruck for hours at a time.
This is why absolute strength with free weights matters and calisthenics and machines alone aren’t enough. With that said, here are my favorite exercise programs when training my athletes for selection.
Snatch Grip Romanian Deadlift + Trap Bar Deadlift
The Trap Bar Deadlift allows you to load and strengthen the lower back and legs with weights heavier than a conventional or sumo deadlift. The benefit is a stimulus far greater than you can achieve with other exercises.
However, it does come with a recovery cost. So, for that reason, I also like the Romanian Deadlift and its Snatch Grip variation.
Romanian deadlifts place more load on the hamstrings and glutes. The snatch grip variation is phenomenal for stronger athletes or those who are closer to selection because there’s extra stimulus placed on the upper back to stabilize the weights, which results in lower weights and less recovery cost.
One pro tip for your deadlifts is to make sure to use straps. You don’t want your grip to limit your back and leg development.
Weighted Pull-up
Once you can do 8 clean unweighted pull-ups, start doing them weighted. Load as heavy as you can with good technique. I’m always surprised when I work with athletes who can do 10 or more pull-ups but have never tried to increase the weight through pull-up progression.
Start doing sets of 5 – 8 and add 5 lbs per week. You may surprise yourself.
Data from BUD/S shows the average SEAL candidate can do upwards of 10 reps with 25 lbs. That’s a good target for you to achieve.
Barbell Back Squat and Barbell Walking Lunge
The barbell back squat is a staple in my athlete’s training to build max lower body strength. There is simply no other movement you can perform to load heavier and drive more full-body stimulus than the squat.
The walking lunge is a great accessory that builds strength while moving in space. Specifically, while having weight loaded on the spine, you stretch the hip flexor while firing the other glute, hamstring, and quadriceps, similar to how you would when running or rucking
The Farmer Carry
It’s no secret that selection, especially in the Army relies heavily on your grip strength. While pull-ups, rows, and back exercises can develop it, you need to practice picking up heavy objects and moving them across distances.
Some of my favorite variations here are trap bar and dumbbell farmer carries. If you want to get even more specific for selection, suitcase carries are a great option as well.
Aren’t these exercises too fatiguing?
Now, you may be wondering, coach, aren’t these barbell exercises too fatiguing based on your exercise criteria? This is a valid point and where nuance in training comes in.
In my strongest athletes, I may do just two sets of barbell back squats per week, or even drop them altogether and do front squats and other variations.
The reason why is that fatigue is amplified by how strong you are. Not all sets taken to failure are equal.
Someone who can squat 405lbs for a 10-rep max will induce way more fatigue than some doing 225lbs for a 10-rep max.
Beyond a certain level of strength, the recovery costs outweigh any benefits of lifting weights that heavy.
So, that’s where you can substitute lower fatigue variations to the training or cut down the number of sets to even one or two. I have worked with athletes who did just one set of deadlifts per week.
But again, for most, this isn’t a concern unless you’re coming from a strength background. If you have questions on this, feel free to leave them in the comment box at the end of this post.
How Strong Should You Be?
Before I close, I want to leave you with some interesting strength data from real candidates:
The average Navy SEAL candidate could deadlift 1.75x their body weight and do 10 – 12 reps of weighted pull-ups with 25lbs, and they could do 10 – 14 reps of bench press with their body weight.
What sticks out to me here is that the deadlift numbers sound really low. Assuming the average candidate is 175 lbs, that’s a 305lb 1-rep max deadlift while doing 175 lbs on bench press for 10 reps.
On the other hand, the Air Force Special Warfare candidates could trap bar deadlift 345lbs for 3 reps and do 15 bodyweight pull-ups.
How To Put it All Together
If you’d like to combine these exercises and create a routine, watch my Ultimate Training Program video, where I outline how you can create a routine based on your strengths and weaknesses.
If you’d rather work with someone who’s trained over a hundred athletes and helped many get selected, you can apply for 1-on-1 coaching here.
