One of the best ways to prevent injury and ensure that you can give your full effort in training is to harden your body. By toughening up your bones, muscles, ligaments, and joints, you decrease the chance of injury, improve your performance, and increase your adaptability in dynamic situations. In this Operators Association guide, we’ll introduce the top three methods for hardening your body, and give you strategies and exercises that you can use to start getting tougher today.

Mobility training isn’t just for gymnasts and professional athletes – it’s one of the most crucial aspects of injury prevention. It improves your mind-muscle connection, increases freedom of movement, shortens recovery times, and makes your body more efficient. Despite this, mobility is one of the most overlooked aspects of a daily training routine, with many people omitting it completely.

Stretching both before and after your workouts will yield great results for your performance. Before you start training, focus on stretching just enough to loosen up your muscles and prepare them for the strain of exercise. Pre-workout mobility exercises should be dynamic (done while moving. Post-workout stretching, on the other hand, should be static and performed with the goal of getting a deep stretch. Make mobility training part of your daily workout routine, and you will quickly begin to feel a difference in how you exercise and recover.

Developing a resistance to the elements – otherwise known as tempering your body – is as much psychological as it is physical. By developing resistance to external factors like heat, cold, and rain, you decrease your chances of getting sick while also building mental toughness.

You can immediately start hardening your body by making tempering part of your daily routine. Small adjustments to your lifestyle and training make a significant difference in developing your resistance to the elements. Start taking cold showers and working out in the rain to train your mind and body to handle discomfort. Over time, you will start feeling less affected by these environmental factors. Eventually, they won’t impact your performance at all.

During selection, exposure to the elements is one of the most influential factors in deciding who passes and fails. Many people simply crack under the pressure and discomfort of being cold, wet, and tired. Developing a resistance to the environment and tempering your body eliminates one of the biggest selection failure factors and sets you up for success.

Like mobility training, joint stability exercises are another overlooked aspect of many people’s workout routines. In selection, you will usually be training on rough, unstable terrain. Whether you’re rucking through a forest during Land NAV or carrying boats on the beach, there is a high risk of joint damage like sprained ankles, runner’s knee, and rotator cuff injuries.

If you want to decrease the risk of getting a selection-ending injury, you must stabilize your joints and get them used to being under pressure. Start training on rough terrain – do runs and weighted rucks on dirt paths, fields, forest trails, and other uneven surfaces. Over time, this will strengthen the stabilizing muscles and ligaments responsible for keeping your joints correctly aligned and injury-free. You can then supplement these exercises with more explosive, higher impact workouts like box jumps, sprints, overhead presses, squats, and martial arts that force your body to stabilize under high pressure, dynamic movements.

If you want to make it through selection, you have to prove that you belong there. Hardening your body is crucial, but you must also be strong. Unfortunately, in today’s world of online fitness and health gurus, it’s tough to tell if you’re getting the correct information and exercise routines to help you improve. 

OA Workout Programs are the solution. Developed and customized by special forces cadre, our training programs are optimized to prepare you for the challenges of SF selection. Whether you need to improve your 5-mile time or crush your rucks, OA Workout Programs are a must-have for any aspiring operator! Get started today.