How to Prepare for Army Special Forces Assessment and Selection (SFAS)
Training for the Army Special Forces Assessment and Selection course to become a Green Beret is a formidable challenge. This comprehensive guide will help you train for the ACFT (the initial fitness requirements) and SFAS and be ready for the Q Course after selection.
Understanding the SFAS Selection Process
While straightforward, the selection process for joining the Special Forces is a long and grueling process that requires an intelligent and well-thought-out approach.
There are two primary routes to attend SFAS:
- Currently serving (active duty or National Guard): Submit your application packet and wait for a date. You must include fitness screen numbers. These consist of 2 minutes of hand release pushups, max dead hang pullups, 2-mile run, max plank time, and 6-mile ruck time. Guard units tend to have an internal vetting process that we won’t dive into here. These are often a massive advantage, as they help trainees prepare for team events and land navigation, which make up two-thirds of SFAS.
- 18X contract: This is a direct path to SFAS for civilians. If you qualify, you undergo infantry basic training, airborne, and the Special Forces Prep Course before attending SFAS. This route is beneficial because you get an additional 6 weeks at the prep course (same place as SFAS) and get a lot of hands-on experience with land navigation and instructor feedback.
Components of SFAS
Once you have a clear runway to selection, it’s time to start preparing for all the other components beyond the ACFT. Special Forces units work in small teams and often coordinate with foreign military units and civilians to fulfill their missions. The SFAS structure reflects this, with two-thirds of the selection process dedicated to cognitively, socially, and emotionally challenging scenarios while demonstrating high physical capability.
- Week 1 – Physical Screening: During the first week, you’ll need to pass the ACFT, 5-mile run, 4, 8, and 12-mile timed ruck (you don’t know which one it is when doing it), obstacle course, and many other physical gates.
- Week 2 – Land Navigation: This week is dedicated to land navigation. These are pass/fail events where you must collect enough points to continue to team week (the last week of selection). The purpose is to screen for attention regulation, decision-making, and problem-solving under stress.
- Week 3 – Team Week: The final week is dedicated to team events where you’ll be paired up and asked to accomplish various tasks like transporting a random collection of heavy objects over long distances. Peer and cadre reviews significantly affect how your performance is graded during this phase. Communication, social skills, and emotional intelligence are keys to excelling.
SFAS is about much more than being good at exercising
SFAS selection greatly emphasizes peer and cadre feedback in selecting the right people for their teams. Outside of being physically prepared for the rigors of SFAS, you must have the leadership, communication, and emotional intelligence skills to operate as a team member and work with foreign units and local communities. You must be adaptable, conscientious, and communicate well in high-stress situations with people with different perspectives. These are not skills that you want to leave to chance. Many people make it through SFAS but are not selected to attend the Q-course. These 21-day non-selects often have the physical tools but are lacking in some other domain, usually communication and emotional regulation.
For this reason, our SFAS prep process heavily emphasizes the mental side of training: everything from adaptability and resilience to more nuanced skills such as emotional regulation, communication, and dealing with interpersonal conflicts. We’ll touch on these concepts, but they are outside the scope of this article. You can listen to our podcast, pick up our book, or sign up for the app for more information.
If you follow the guidance in this article, you’ll be prepared to be at the top of the pack in all physical events.
The pipeline involves three stages:
| Stage | Description |
| Fitness Screener and Application | Submit an application with fitness test numbers to qualify |
| SFAS (Selection) | 21-day intensive physical and mental screening |
| Q-Course | Approximately one year (depending on your specialty) advanced training/qualification course |
This process is highly challenging. Only a few candidates pass each stage. We’ve been training people for SFAS for the past decade with a very high success rate, so we know what’s required for a candidate to earn a Green Beret.
Overview of the ACFT & other pass/fail fitness components during week one of SFAS
The ACFT, or Army Combat Fitness Test, includes several key components. Achieving competitive scores in the ACFT requires surpassing the published minimum standards. Here is a breakdown of the competitive scores (not minimum scores) for each component:
- Hand-release pushups: To max this test, you need 58-61 reps (depending on your age)
- Pullups: Target is 15+ reps
- Plank: 3:40 or above
- Sprint, drag, carry: Max is under 1:30. Most people max this and are in the low 1:20s average.
- Trap bar deadlift 3-rep max (340) is max
- Ball throw (10-pound overhead throw): max is 13m
- 2-mile run: 13:20 is competitive, 14:00 = minimum
- 5-mile run: 35:00 or below ideal
- 4, 8, & 12-mile ruck (50 pounds + water): 12-:00-13:00 min/mile average pace is competitive
Some of these events are not part of the standard ACFT but are tested during week one of SFAS. This means you’ll do them in a semi-fatigued state, often after completing many other physical evolutions. You should be able to max the ACFT and all other components any day of the week. Hitting these scores requires an intelligent training plan and a lot of preparation.
How long should you train for SFAS?
The most crucial factor for success in training for SFAS is the time you dedicate to serious preparation.
SFAS is not a tryout. It’s a job interview where you demonstrate that you’ve been preparing for this role for a long time because it’s important to you and you’re a professional. Our successful SFAS clients typically spend at least a year preparing for selection and, in some cases, over two years.
By doing so, they’re never concerned about passing the minimum standards, such as clearing the sub-14-minute benchmark for the 2-mile run or a 12-mile ruck at a 13-minute/mile clip. Instead, they’re concerned with setting new personal records or hitting excellent performances near the top of the class.
If you’re going to SFAS, it’s going to be stressful. You will worry about things. But what you worry about is up to you. When it comes to the ACFT and initial test gates in the course, your training runway determines whether you will be worried about passing or excelling.
Physical Adaptations for SFAS Selection
The reason for this comes down to physiology.
You’ll need the physical adaptations required to do things like:
- put out a fast 2-mile run,
- ruck for hours on end at a fast pace,
- contribute to day-long team events that require leadership, clear communication, and problem-solving,
- or do a 12+ mile ruck at a 12 min/mile clip with 50+ pounds on your back
All of these depend upon a massive aerobic engine. Essentially, this is how much oxygenated blood your heart can move per beat and how well you can distribute that blood to working muscles and bring it back. If you haven’t trained to make this a physical reality, no amount of “wanting it more” can help you.
Effective Aerobic Training Strategies
Effective aerobic endurance training doesn’t just push the ceiling of your performance. It raises the floor. Well-trained people at a given level of effort (i.e., a given heart rate) can move more blood and, thus, do more work. A pace that a haphazardly-trained candidate can only hit with an average HR of 165 might be sustainable for a well-aerobically-trained agent at 130 bpm or less because each one of their heartbeats is more powerful. This means that any given effort is less costly and easier to recover from and opens up new performance levels at maximal effort.
This cardiovascular fitness requires structural adaptations within the cardiovascular system. You’re changing the size and thickness of your heart’s ventricles and the density of the networks of tiny capillaries that manage the final delivery stage of blood to your muscles.
Just as rebuilding a house takes longer than slapping on a new coat of paint, cardiovascular remodeling takes a lot of time.
The volume of time required is in two forms:
- Session duration. Many (though not all) aerobic training sessions require multiple hours.
- Training consistency. You must stack these sessions like bricks in a wall for weeks, months, and years.
Your physical fitness in SFAS indicates underlying behavioral characteristics
If this sounds like a lot of work, it is. And that’s the point.
Operational effectiveness aside, this is a key part of selection for any special operations unit. Physical testing during the ACFT and initial days of selection reveals critical behavioral characteristics. The cadre seek individuals who demonstrate patience, resilience, and willingness to endure long-term challenges to achieve their goals. And they’re happy to send home the ones who don’t fit that profile.
Strategy: Train for Selection, not just the ACFT
The 2-mile run and pushups/pullups are the most common failure points in the ACFT. The 5-mile run and 12-mile ruck also filter the pretenders from the herd. Passing these is not good enough. If you’re not in the top third of the class, your odds of getting selected at the end of SFAS are very low. Additionally, many people will fail to accumulate enough points during land-nav week or get peered out of team week. Training should focus not only on performing well on the ACFT, but also on developing the broader capacities needed for the entire selection process.
Much of our discussion about training for SFAS will revolve around how to do well on the longer rucks and team events since these are the primary limiters, but you must have a blend of training that gets you fit enough to crush the ACFT and the rest of selection.
Your training for the timed rucks will carry over well to the other demands of selection (land nav and team week), so it’s important to train this capacity extensively. The aerobic base you build while rucking supports your performance in everything else, and there’s no shortcut to developing it. It takes hours of work, stacked up over months and years.
The ACFT is not selection.
This brings up an important caveat: Passing the ACFT doesn’t matter if you break in selection. We often see this, including with people we’ve successfully prepped who were unsuccessful in previous attempts while training on their own. Their past training focused on passing the ACFT, but once they got past that gate they were performance dropped or injured midway through their course.
Passing the ACFT, even with high marks, doesn’t mean you can handle the back-to-back-to-back events in selection.
SFAS is a challenging course. It’s biased toward long days full of cognitively and emotionally demanding tasks. You can easily be injured, and the long days will break you down if you’re not used to putting in the mileage.
While the capacities needed to do well on the 2-mile run and pushups/pullups can be supported by effective training for SFAS in general, it doesn’t work the other way around. If the only thing you train for is to pass the ACFT events, there’s a good chance you won’t be prepared to handle the demands of selection.
Passing the ACFT and other physical barriers in week one of SFAS is how you punch your ticket to start selection. Your performance stats in the ACFT have very little bearing on how you’re evaluated throughout the course, outside of how they correlate with the rest of your physical performance. Remember: The measure is not the target. Keep the goal the goal.
Build an aerobic base of running and rucking independently
It’s critical that we not confuse the test for the training.
Timed runs and moving at a 12 to 13-minute/mile pace with a load on your back require proficiency in both running and rucking. While running is secondary to your ability to ruck, you still need to be a proficient runner, which means you need to be running consistently for 12+ months to perform up to standard.
The timed 4, 8, and 12-mile rucks are peak events where you’ll display a combination of capacities. But, there is a distinction between developing and displaying something, which rarely happens simultaneously. It’s one or the other:
Develop a skill and then display it.
Practice, then perform.
Raise the floor, then push the ceiling.
Develop running and rucking through specific training protocols, then learn how to exploit that foundation for timed events.
Running and rucking can be safely and effectively developed for a long time without redlining your runs or ruck-running, which happens in the final months of preparation before the ACFT and mainly before selection.
Once you add peaking protocols for running and ruck-running/shuffling into your rucks, your performance is determined by how well you develop them separately. If you don’t build a solid foundation of running and rucking before you show up for SFAS, you’ll severely limit your performance and set yourself up for injuries and frustration.
The majority of your training time will be focused on two goals:
- Become a fast runner for relatively short distances so you can run 2 miles in under 14 minutes or faster.
- Become fast and efficient under a somewhat heavy (approximately 50 pounds dry) ruck so that you can move comfortably with a heart rate in zone 2 or below at a pace faster than 15 mins/mile on flat ground for 12+ miles.
Once you can do both, you’ll have the foundation to do well on your timed runs and rucks. You will also have the more generalized aerobic abilities needed for the rest of the selection process.
Tailoring Training to Individual Profiles
There is no one-size-fits-all program for ACFT and SFAS training. Each candidate requires a personalized approach to address their unique strengths and weaknesses (for more on this concept, read Average Fails Everyone).
The ACFT and selection require a wide range of capacities working together; each individual will have a different combination of these characteristics.
One person may have excellent strength (which generally contributes well to rucking under heavy loads after sufficient training) but weak conditioning.
One person may be good at long-distance events, but their 2-mile running pace is barely faster than their pace for six miles.
Another might be an excellent runner but get crushed under the weight of a heavy ruck.
Somebody else may be able to move well under a ruck all day but blow themselves up on faster runs like the 2-mile run.
Same destination, different paths
You get the idea. The same destination requires a slightly different path for each person. Everybody is trying to get into the same room, but they need their own key to unlock their particular door.
For more on individual characteristics of conditioning training, read Conditioning 101: A Guide for Special Operations Selection Training.
Because the details of any individual’s ideal program are variable, we don’t have a magical progression that accounts for every performance aspect and how it evolves over time.
Generally speaking, programs are highly divergent in the early stages (a year or more out from selection). They gradually become more similar as each trainee addresses their limiting factors and builds a more well-rounded physiological profile. So, how you start training for a selection will likely be more variable than how you finish once you bring everything together.
We have dedicated articles for each physiological aspect of training for the ACFT and SFAS. Rather than rewrite them all here into a 15,000-word mini-book, we will briefly summarize the key considerations and then direct you to the specific resource for each section.
This is a lot of information to process. Check out our training app if you’d rather have us do it for you.
Running Technique for the ACFT
SFAS is not very run-heavy. Besides running from place to place, you’ll do a 2-mile run as part of the ACFT and a 5-miler as part of week 1. Beyond this, everything comes down to your ability to move fast with a ruck and carry heavy things. For this reason, we spend the minimum amount of time necessary to develop running, and no more.
Becoming proficient at running while balancing all the other competing demands is difficult, so we focus on how you run first.
Running is a technical skill.
The biggest mistake people make when it comes to running training is thinking that all you need to improve is to go harder for longer. But without addressing your technical skill, you’ll significantly limit your progress and set yourself up for frustrating injuries like shin splints and knee issues. This is almost always avoidable and easily correctable with better running technique.
This means you have to think about running better, not just more.
The article linked below provides information on the technical aspects of running. Our app also offers a course on running technique that is available as an on-demand resource and is threaded into the early weeks of our programs.
The problem with Zone 2 Running (for most people)
Zone 2 running, where you constrain your intensity to a specific heart rate range to target aerobic adaptations, is a popular concept but often misguided. We need tons of zone 2 aerobic volume to develop our aerobic capacity. However, very few people can run a decent pace long enough to hit the volumes needed for zone 2 development. It usually becomes a slow, joint-pounding slog. So, we prefer having our clients get their zone 2 work from rucking (particularly earlier in their training progression) and spend their run training focused on technique and pacing. This produces better results in the long run and is much easier on joints.
This does not mean that you should do all of your runs at maximum effort. A good deal of your running should be spent building a foundation, with some individual focus on the side of the spectrum that you need more depending on whether you’re more limited on delivery or utilization. In other words, some people benefit more from dedicated speed work than others.
Read here for a full explanation of run training and how to incorporate it into your program: Running Programming for Special Operations Selection.
Rucking Technique for SFAS Prep Training
People often underappreciate rucking as a technical skill. Like running, our training app includes a course on improving rucking technique, and our programs include lessons from that course.
The article at the bottom of this section offers advice on improving your rucking. It also includes a video with tips on improving your gait mechanics, breathing more efficiently, and taking strain off your shoulders during long rucks.
Rucking is your primary zone 2 aerobic training source for your SFAS/ACFT prep. We outline the progression and frequency guidelines below. SFAS is very ruck-focused, and you will sometimes spend the better part of 24 hours moving with a ruck on your back. You’re going to have to build up to a lot of mileage. As your training progresses, you should start doing open-ended workouts that include other specific aspects of the selection course and have you put in 4-6 hours or more of rucking in a training session.
Your capability under a ruck has the most influence of any variable in SFAS
SFAS is a ruck-heavy course. Most of it depends explicitly on your ability to move fast and efficiently under a ruck. But beyond that, the cardiovascular fitness you develop while rucking supports everything else.
This includes things ranging from sustaining a fast pace on timed runs to your recovery between events to how much stamina you have during long weighted carries during team week.
This is why, in studies on success in Special Forces Assessment and Selection, rucking performance is the strongest predictive variable for success. Rucking itself is obviously critical, but because of the interdependent nature of aerobic fitness, being good at rucking also means that you probably have the aerobic capacity to do well enough in everything else as long as you’ve got a decent balance of training inputs.
What does the research say about what matters most for success in SFAS?
Here’s what researchers concluded in a paper titled Physical Performance, Demographic, Psychological, and Physiological Predictors of Success in the U.S. Army Special Forces Assessment and Selection Course:
Physical performance predictors are presented in Fig. 2. Road march 2 and road march 1 times accounted for the largest proportion of variance in selection outcome (R2), followed by the number of land navigation coordinates found, run 2 time, run 1 time, APFT score, obstacle course score, and number of pull-ups. When predictors were analyzed continuously, a one standard deviation increase in each physical performance variable predicted candidates were 4.78 (road march 2), 4.54 (road march 1), 2.44 (land navigation), 2.18 (run 2), 1.96 (run 1), 2.22 (APFT), 1.65 (obstacle course), and 1.49 (pull-ups) times more likely to be selected.
Here’s Figure 2 from that paper:
The further to the right the little bar, the more strongly performance in that category predicts your odds of success in SFAS.
To succeed in SFAS, you’re going to need a lot of time under a ruck
So, while putting in enough training time to ensure that you can excel at rucking will probably give you the aerobic foundation to hit the performances you need elsewhere (with intelligently balanced training), the same can’t be said for maxing out some other physical capacity, like deadlifting or doing pull-ups.
While more extraneous performance measures will correlate with being generally physically prepared, they should not be specific training targets beyond ensuring that they are not limiting factors for you. This is an application of Goodhart’s Law, the idea that a measure is useful as long as it doesn’t become a target.
In other words, people who can ruck well are usually pretty good at the other stuff, but being good at the other stuff doesn’t mean you can ruck well.
Incorporating open-ended workouts
As your training progresses, you should start doing open-ended workouts that include other specific aspects of the selection course (hello weighted carries) and have you put in 2-3 hours or more of rucking in a training session.
The goal of most of your ruck training is to move as fast as possible (under 15 mins/mile) with a zone 2 heart rate (we discuss identifying heart rate zones in the rucking article linked below). The better you get at this, the better your performance will be once you start testing faster rucks toward the end of your training. Don’t rush this process. Build the foundation before you try to exploit it. Otherwise, you’re just hammering the gas pedal in an ‘81 Honda instead of building a bigger engine.
While you’ll sometimes carry a much heavier pack in selection, you don’t need to do that for most of your training. If you’re new to rucking, start with a pack weighing around 20-25 pounds and work up to about 50 pounds (plus water). While you may be asked to do some heavier rucks or carries during selection, training for them during prep is not worth the wear and tear. You’ll be fine in these events with enough relative strength and an aerobic foundation.
Remember, the test is not the training.
Read here for a full breakdown of rucking training and how to incorporate it into your program: Rucking 101: A Guide for Special Operations Selection Training.
Strength Training for SFAS
SFAS selection is not a powerlifting contest. Remember the goal of strength training: to support everything you do in training and selection. A better deadlift only helps you to the extent that it helps you handle a loaded ruck, improve your work capacity, carry heavy stuff around, or avoid injury.
In other words, don’t optimize the wrong thing. You need to be strong enough to handle the demands of selection and support your training, but fixating on becoming stronger than necessary involves inevitable tradeoffs. You only have so much time and recovery capacity, so unnecessary strength work can easily distract you from more important things. Nobody cares about your max squat if you can’t keep up on runs and rucks.
The amount of strength training you need will depend on your physiological profile. We typically use one to three weekly strength sessions for clients, depending on their limiting factors.
Read here for a full breakdown of strength training and how to incorporate it into your program: Strength Training for Special Operations Selection Prep.
The Importance of Breathing in Selection Prep
Breathing is an easily overlooked yet integral part of everything you’ll do in prep training, during your ACFT and SFAS. Like running and rucking, we can see major benefits from learning to do it better, not just more. How we breathe doesn’t just affect how we move oxygen and carbon dioxide in and out of our lungs. Respiration directly influences how we move blood in and out of the heart via changes in thoracic pressure gradients. It’s also a key driver of posture, how we distribute tension throughout our body, and how we regulate our stress response.
It’s crucial during Special Forces Assessment and Selection training because it significantly affects how efficiently we move under load and how much tension and discomfort we accumulate while doing so. It can make the difference between a relentlessly locked-down lower back and steel cables for traps or manageable, minor discomfort after a long day.
It also dramatically affects your ability to recover efficiently during and after beatdown sessions. If you can’t breathe effectively while continuing to work, you’ll slowly fall to pieces during these sessions, and the events that follow them—fatigue and stress responses compound, impacting your cognitive performance and decision-making.
Read here for a full breakdown of breathing mechanics and how to incorporate them into your program: Breathing and Performance: Incorporating Breath Training into SOF Selection Prep.
Don’t Powerlift Your Way Into Aerobic Insufficiency
While being strong (to an extent) correlates with your overall physical performance and ability to manage the heavy carries in SFAS, over-specializing in powerlifting can impact your conditioning in ways you might not expect.
Heavy barbell lifting puts us in a max-effort/max-force production posture. Spend too much time here, and your resting posture will eventually reflect this position (flat upper back, large lower back arch, anterior hip orientation, ribcage flare, forward head). When that occurs, breathing mechanics become compromised, and accessory breathing muscles do the brunt of the work to move air, further inhibiting breathing mechanics when under stress.
The respiratory system is the bridge between the cardiovascular and muscular system. So, if your breathing is limited, the burden will shift downstream to other systems.
The thoracic pump mechanism
Every time you inhale and exhale, the pressure gradient within the venous system in the thorax around the heart alternates. If you can’t fully inhale and exhale, this will lead to poor eccentric filling, lower stroke volume, and decreased cardiac output.
When cardiac output (the volume of blood your heart pumps) drops due to poor breathing mechanics, your heart has to beat faster. This leads to less time between beats (less rest) and a stronger contraction at each beat to try to move less blood faster. Both of these factors contribute to cardiac and systemic fatigue over time.
In longer-duration, steady-state work, this often presents as cardiac drift, where your heart rate slowly creeps up despite no increase in output.
During higher-intensity work, your heart is less capable of creating enough force to drive blood through working muscles effectively. The slower blood flows through tissue, the longer the transit time and the lower cardiac output becomes as blood pools in working tissues, leading to massive drops in power output and a feeling of ‘pumping out.’
If you can’t breathe effectively when exercising, your conditioning will suffer at all intensities and durations.
All capacities come with trade-offs. There are no “more is always better” relationships in real-world physiology. Max strength matters and barbell lifts are excellent tools, but they are just one part of the puzzle.
Building Work Capacity
Pushups, pull-ups, dips, weighted carries, planks and other core, and other high reps calisthenics such as burpees, squats, lunges, and whatever the instructors that year want to make you do are a part of the consistent beatdowns you’ll face in selection and the ACFT.
Most of these events aren’t pass/fail moments. But, if you can’t handle the volume effectively, you will accumulate fatigue and eventually fail something that matters. For instance, if you go through a 30-minute beatdown full of lunges that smoke your legs, you may survive, but you’ll struggle on the unknown distance ruck immediately after, setting you off on a downward slope of subpar performance.
Include work capacity training in your program anywhere from once to three times per week, depending on your personal limiting factors.
Read here for a full breakdown of rucking training and how to incorporate it into your program: Building Work Capacity for Special Operations Prep.
Movement and Injury Prevention while Training for SFAS
What we do only matters as much as how well we do it. The training volumes required for selection prep and the rigors of selection itself mean that minor movement issues get magnified and can quickly become career-ending injuries.
Movement work isn’t glamorous or the most fun way to chase dopamine, but it’s a crucial part of long-term training. Over the years, we’ve learned that it separates professionals from amateurs. The pros get it done because it’s part of their job. The amateurs put it off until it’s too late.
In our app, we have a movement assessment tool that walks you through a series of drills to assess your individual movement characteristics, which then provides you with a series of drills based on your results that you can integrate into your daily routine so that you can move better, recover faster, and be less prone to injury. For more targeted issues like knees or shoulders, we’ve also got a Bulletproof Joints series that will help you assess your needs and identify the most effective drills to help you move and feel better.
Learn more: Movement Capacity, Fidelity, Variability
Mental, Technical, and Socio-Emotional Skills in Special Forces Assessment and Selection
Green Berets aren’t just good exercisers. During selection, instructors will evaluate you on a wide range of skills and capacities, from land navigation and team events to how you interact with others.
Land navigation week: Attention regulation, decision making, & problem solving
Special Forces Assessment and Selection has an entire week dedicated to land navigation. These are pass/fail events where you must collect enough points to continue to team week (the last week of selection). Cadre monitors your location and vitals to ensure that:
- You don’t cheat by taking roads or parallel them, and
- You don’t sleep or do anything else silly they explicitly tell you not to do.
So, don’t try to cheat. If you’re fit and have done the work to prepare, you can breeze through this week. The cadre has seen every trick in the book after seeing thousands of trainees pass through land nav week. You won’t outsmart the system, so don’t try.
The reality is the cadre doesn’t really care about your land navigation skills with a map and compass. It’s 2025, and modern warfare doesn’t involve much (if any) time spent with a compass in your hand. However, land navigation tests your ability to think critically, hold multiple pieces of information in your head while working hard physically for hours on end, and troubleshoot and apply principles when things inevitably go sideways.
Land Nav is as much about the underlying skills that support it as not getting lost in the draws
So, while practicing land navigation is very important, the underlying skills of regulating your attention, stress response, emotional responses, and internal dialogue are the foundation. Our training app integrates these into the training process via daily mental lessons that give you explicit actionable steps and build upon each other over the months to build the basic mental skills necessary to excel in land nav week.
We’ve worked with people who did zero land navigation prep but had the underlying mental skills and fitness to stay regulated breeze through land nav week and seen those with lots of experience in land navigation fall apart because they weren’t able to manage themselves and apply those skills when tired, hungry, stressed, and with a 70-pound pack on their back.
The most intelligent and successful approach combines building fundamental mental skills and then using those to improve your land navigation skills. The final step is to stress test these via open workouts and field trips where you replicate a long-distance land navigation course in a stressed state (after a big workout, with limited food, and carrying a heavy ruck).
If you feel your land nav skills are lacking and want high-quality in-person training, we recommend Dr. David Walton’s Land Nav Musters. Dr. Walton is a former Green Beret whose doctoral research focused on SFAS. You can learn more about him in our interviews with him in episodes 72 and 73 of our podcast.
Team week: Communication, social skills, and emotional intelligence
Cadre will evaluate your communication and leadership skills throughout Special Forces Assessment and Selection. Even if you’re an enlisted soldier, you’ll be working on a team where all members are expected to speak up and contribute to solving complex problems, not just being a fit, capable body. You cannot fade into the background during team week and get selected, no matter how much you put out physically. You could single-handedly carry the 500-pound contraption they are asking your team to transport a few miles, and you’ll still get poor marks if you don’t communicate and work well with others.
To do this, you must be comfortable speaking up and voicing your idea or keeping the group working toward consensus, even if you’re the least experienced or youngest member. It’s not unusual to have officers, Rangers, SEALs, and other experienced enlisted soldiers on your team during team week in Special Forces Assessment and Selection. You must be confident and capable of speaking up and contributing when you’re tired, hot/cold, hungry, and stressed. Even if you don’t have good ideas, you should be helping keep the group regulated and working well together. This could be cracking jokes to keep the mood light, motivating someone struggling, or keeping the group collaborating and avoiding unnecessary conflicts. You need a variety of skills depending on the situation and demeanor of the individuals in the group.
A good leader is also a good teammate and a good listener
This also means listening to others, attuning to their intentions and emotional state, and working with people. You can’t knife-hand your way through selection, screaming orders at everyone around you. You must be a good teammate, whether that means filling a void in leadership or diligently following a sensible plan created by somebody else.
You’ll also need to be good at public speaking and articulating your reasoning, from decision-making to conflict resolution. We cover some generalized components of autonomic regulation in the mental skills exercises in our training app that apply here. But public speaking is a unique skill set that is important enough to warrant specific practice if you’re not good at it. We often recommend that our clients join something like Toastmasters if they need specific work on public speaking.
Green Berets aren’t just grunts with bigger packs. You must be an articulate speaker with clear reasoning skills.
Being good at articulating your reasoning and expressing yourself verbally is another distinct skill that stems from clarity of thought. Writing is an excellent way to practice this because it forces you to directly elucidate your thought process. As Leslie Lamport put it, “If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.” Incorporating a regular practice of journaling or writing in some form can be helpful in improving your communication, particularly if you have a feedback loop.
Be a person, not a robot
How you interact with others during down periods also matters. The instructors are always watching and not just evaluating you on physical, tactical, and technical variables. The course cadre also wants to know what kind of person you are. They want to see if you take care of your gear and help others do the same immediately after completing a grueling team event or land navigation course or if you check out and lie on the ground or only care about yourself.
If they bring you into their team, they will be living and working with you in very close proximity, in situations ranging from trusting you with their life to sitting next to you in a car for an entire day. So, your sociability and emotional regulation is an important consideration.
In short, you need to pass the beer test. You should be the sort of person your fellow candidates and the instructors would like to have a beer with. Be a person, not a robot.
Bringing it together: A big picture prep template for Special Forces Assessment and Selection
Special Forces Assessment and Selection takes place all year. You have quite a bit of flexibility regarding when you attend. You should use this to your advantage and not drop your packet, apply for an 18x contract, or attend an SFRE guard event to get a SFAS slot until you’re ready for selection. Unless you have an exceptional baseline of fitness, this is not the kind of thing where you decide to go to selection and do a 3-month work-up.
You should give yourself at least 12 months to prepare. No matter who you are, you’re likely to experience some disruptions during a long work-up, and the physical standards you need to achieve to give yourself a good shot at getting picked up will take time to build.
Your goal is to do selection once and excel, not “try out” and roll the dice. Be a pro, not a statistic.
Here’s a sample layout:
6-12 months out: Build the foundation
Your training should be individualized and specific to your limiting factors. We always use a concurrent training approach to achieve this without neglecting anything.
Concurrent means “done at the same time.” In this model, you target all physiological qualities simultaneously, and one or two specific qualities are emphasized for three to six weeks. As the famous track coach Charlie Francis described it, “Everything is done, only the volume varies.”
Your goal during this phase is to work up to the following capacities:
- Dial in your running technique and build up to 5-mile distance runs and one higher-intensity repeat or sprint session per week. By the end of the foundation phase (6 months out), you should be running at an 8:00 min/mile pace (at the very slowest) for 5 miles, ideally closer to a 7:30 min/mile pace.
- Build an aerobic foundation via zone 2 rucking, working up to 2-3 hour rucks. By the end of this phase, you should be close to or at a 15:00 min/mile pace for 8+ miles without shuffling/ruck-running and in heart rate zone 2.
- Ensure your relative strength and movement capacity are sufficient to stay healthy as you add volume and transition to a more specific methodology.
- Dial in calisthenics technique and start building a foundation of work capacity. Movement quality is as important as output at this point. The quality of your foundation will dictate the progress you make in your final 6 months of prep.
Training focus distribution
The number of strength vs. running, rucking, swimming, and work capacity sessions depends on your specific limiting factors. Assuming you have a solid training background (you’ve been training consistently for years without neglecting any capacity for long durations), your program will fall within the parameters below:
- Strength workouts: 1-3 per week
- Running: 2 per week
- Rucking: 2-4 per week
- Work Capacity: 1-2 per week
If you have a significant deficit in one area, say strength, you should move toward the higher end of the range and be on the lower end with rucking.
Those who need improvement in all areas might have a balanced mix of strength, running, & work capacity.
If conditioning is your limiting factor, you may only have one strength session, two runs, and three or four rucks.
No one-size-fits-all template will work for anyone because your training history, ability to recover from training (life stress, sleep quality/quantity, and nutrition), and specific limiting factors matter.
3-6 months out: ACFT prep
At this point, you should have no glaring limiting factors. The most common limitation we see is rucking speed/duration. You should comfortably be capable of rucking up to 12 miles with 50 pounds at a 15:00 min/mile pace while in zone 2 without shuffling/ruck-running. We’ve found that nearly everyone other than very short people (below 5’6”) can do this. It takes time and consistent practice, but it is possible. Rucking favors larger and taller individuals (up to a point), so particularly tall people may find the rucking standards relatively easy but will likely struggle more with runs.
The next most common limiting factor is running. If your 5-mile run is above an 8:00 min/mile pace, you won’t be ready for selection and in competitive shape, so you should delay for 3-6 months. While SFAS only has a handful of timed runs, you’ll have difficulty getting selected if you don’t have competitive times, and it takes time to improve your average running speed.
Show up ready to excel, not survive or “try out”
You’re better off showing up once and crushing selection than delaying your long-term development by peaking for selection, failing, and restarting the whole prep process. You may have to wait a year or more to return, depending on your current job.
The other common limiting factor in training for Special Forces Assessment and Selection is related to lifestyle. If you can’t handle 10-15 hours of weekly training volume, you might be capable of hitting all standards (passing the ACFT), but you won’t be in good enough overall shape to make it through the daily grind of selection for several weeks. You must get 7+ hours of high-quality sleep most days of the week, eat a healthy diet, and have no significant disruptions in training for your final six months. This can be hard to do with personal and professional obligations, but it’s necessary.
Adding specificity
If you have been doing the work and have a solid foundation, it’s time to add more specificity. We do this via:
- Open-ended workouts: These twice-monthly workouts should last 3-5 hours and be a mix of runs, rucks, and beatdowns with no ability to predict what’s next or when the session will end.
- Highly specific work capacity sessions: A mix of low-fatigue but high-volume methods and higher-rep/fatigue methods, such as circuits, that stress movement fidelity under increasing stress and fatigue levels. This includes A LOT of weighted carries to build up grip and carrying strength and capacity.
- Reduction in strength work: Unless strength is a limiting factor, strength training volume should drop to maintenance loads and volume (1-2 sessions per week).
- Higher intensity running: Running volume during this phase typically stays flat, while average speed should improve week over week.
- ACFT-specific practice: Mix in long-duration planks, ball throws, rope climbs, and some weighted drags.
2-3 months out: Selection prep
Once you can crush the ACFT and have a selection date, we shift the emphasis of training to handling long overland movements, weighted carries, and team events. This includes continuing open-ended workouts a few times monthly, mixing beatdowns, rucks, and runs for 4-6 hours.
You should have your highest volume training weeks during this phase. This is where you hammer any specific limiting factors. You want to bring limiting factors up to speed while focusing on maintaining everything else to standard. You must be well-rounded and capable of performing well over long days without breaking down.
We also emphasize movement work and taking care of your body. Your training volume is very high and has been for quite some time. People get injured regularly in selection. The more time you invest in taking care of yourself during this phase, the less likely you are to become a med drop or get performance dropped due to an injury.
1-month out: Deload & peaking
At this point, you’ve done the work. It’s time to recover and put the finishing touches on your prep process.
One of the biggest mistakes you could make is showing up to selection beat up and with residual fatigue. By tapering volume and strategically integrating high-intensity sessions over the final 4-6 weeks, you’ll show up ready for selection. We’ve sent hundreds of clients to the SOF selection courses and have mastered this process.
A general formula would look something like this:
- Week 1-3: Low-volume, moderate-intensity strength work 1-2x weekly to maintain your strength. Short but intense runs (1-2 milers and 3-5 milers), relatively short and easy rucks (6-8 miles), and max-rep testing for pushups, pull-ups, and dips. 4-5 sessions per week with volume tapering down each week.
- Week 4: Drop nearly all training stress aside from easy maintenance sessions. You’ve done the work and applied all the training stressors you need. It’s not especially critical to support your body’s recovery as much as possible. Your goal is to fully realize the adaptations from your training over the past year or two.
Conclusion
Training for Special Forces Assessment and Selection is a big undertaking. It demands dedication, discipline, and a strategic approach to training. By focusing on the key elements of the ACFT and SFAS, tailoring your training to your unique needs, and emphasizing long-term preparation, you can maximize your probability of success.
If you’d like a team of pros to take the guesswork out of your training, check out our app.
Enjoying the latest articles.
Would love to see one on how to train as a structural firefighter and how you would prepare someone to compete in the firefighter combat challenge, a short but very challenging event many choose to compete in.