How to Prepare for FBI Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) Selection

Training for the FBI Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) selection process is a formidable challenge. This comprehensive guide will help you train for the PFT (fitness requirements) and selection. Intelligent preparation will ensure you are at your physical and mental peak to succeed in the highest-level law enforcement unit in the United States. 

Understanding the HRT Selection Process

The selection process for joining the HRT teams is one of the most difficult in the world. 

The HRT staff changes its exact selection process from year to year to keep trainees on their toes and unable to predict what’s next, even if they’ve previously attended selection. There are also components, such as specific pass-fail events, that aren’t public knowledge that we will not discuss here. Remember: Your job is to be a professional investigator, including the research you do during your preparation process. 

HRT selection also greatly emphasizes peer and instructor feedback and job-specific skills in selecting the right people for their unit. If you’re in the pipeline, you’ll know what’s necessary on this front with a bit of work on your side. If you follow the guidance in this article, you’ll be physically prepared to be at the top of the pack in all physical events. 

The pipeline involves three stages:

Stage	Description
PFT and Application	Submit application and pass PFT to qualify
Selection Course	14-day intensive physical and mental screening, in late May or early April
New Operator Training School (NOTS)	Approximately one-year advanced training/qualification course

This process is highly challenging. Only a few candidates pass each stage. We’ve been training people for HRT selection for the past five years, so we know what’s required to be successful. 

Overview of the PFT Components

The PFT, or Personal Fitness Test, includes several key components. Achieving competitive scores in the PFT requires surpassing the published minimum standards. Here is a breakdown of the competitive scores (not minimum scores) for each component:

• Pushups: Aim for 75+ reps
• Pullups: Target is 15+ reps
• Situps: 75+ is ideal
• Rope Climb: pass/fail
• Stair Climb: 55 seconds or faster (this a tough one)
• 2-Mile Run: Sub 13:00 = ideal 
• 200m Swim: Under 5:00 (this should be easy)

Hitting these scores requires an intelligent training plan and a lot of preparation. 

How long should you train for HRT selection?

The most crucial factor for success in training for FBI HRT selection is the time you dedicate to serious preparation.

HRT selection 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 HRT 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 14:59 benchmark for the 2-mile run. Instead, they’re concerned with setting new personal records or hitting excellent performances near the top of the class. 

If you’re going to selection, 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 screener, your training runway determines whether you will be worried about passing or excelling.

Physical Adaptations for HRT Selection

The reason for this comes down to physiology. 

The physical adaptations required to do things like:

• put out a fast 2-mile run,
• sprint up stairs while loaded up with gear,
• keep up with an instructor during unknown distance timed runs at a 7ish minute/mile pace,
• or do 12+ mile overland movement at a 12 min/mile clip with 40+ pounds on your back

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:

1. Session duration. Many (though not all) aerobic training sessions require multiple hours.
2. Training consistency. You must stack these sessions like bricks in a wall for weeks, months, and years. 

Behavioral Characteristics in HRT Selection

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 PFT and initial days of selection reveals critical behavioral characteristics. Selection instructors 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 PFT

 

The 2-mile run, weighted stair climb, and other longer pass/fail overland movements are the most common failure points in the PFT and selection. The water confidence events also get quite a few people—we’ll discuss that in more depth below. Training should focus not only on passing this test but also on developing the broader capacities needed for the entire selection process.

Much of our discussion about training for FBI HRT selection will revolve around how to do well on the 2-mile and unknown distance pass/fail runs, but you must stay focused on the big picture and the training you need to do well in selection as a whole, not just on the PFT. 

Your training for the 2-mile run and stair-climb is strongly supported by your preparation for the other most challenging events, the long-duration overland movements for time. This carries over more to the demands of selection, so it’s important to train this capacity extensively.

The PFT is not selection

This brings up an important caveat: Passing the PFT doesn’t matter if you break in selection. We often see this, including with people we’ve successfully prepped, who previously were performance dropped or injured midway through the course because they trained exclusively for the known PFT events. They passed those in their previous attempts but couldn’t handle the back-to-back-to-back events in selection. 

HRT selection is a challenging course. It’s biased toward long days that consist of a mix of beatdowns, long overland movements at fast clips, and cognitively 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 can be supported by effective training for selection in general, it doesn’t work the other way around. If the only thing you train for is to pass the 2-mile run and other PFT tests, there’s a good chance you won’t be prepared to handle the demands of selection.

Passing the PFT is just how you punch your ticket to start selection. Your performance stats in the PFT have very little bearing on how you’re evaluated throughout the course outside of how they correlate with the rest of your physical performance. 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. 

Weighted runs, unknown-distance runs, stair climbs, and moving at a 12-ish minute/mile clip with a load on your back require proficiency in both running and rucking. 

These skills should be developed separately before being combined in the final months of preparation for the PFT and Selection.

The stair climb and weighted overland movements 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 independently before mixing them

Running and rucking can be safely and effectively developed for a long time before we need to combine them, which happens in the final months of preparation before the PFT and mainly before selection. 

Once you do combine them, your performance is determined by how well you develop them separately first. If you don’t build a solid foundation of running and rucking before you sprint off into the bushes on a ruck run, 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:

1. Become a fast runner for relatively short distances so you can run 2 miles in under 13 minutes. 
2. 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 combine them into a fast stair climb, unknown distance runs, and weighted overland movements. You will 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 PFT and HRT selection training. Each candidate requires a personalized approach to address their unique strengths and weaknesses (for more on this concept, read Average Fails Everyone).

The screener 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 PFT and HRT selection. 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 HRT PFT

HRT selection is traditionally very run-heavy. As a general rule of thumb, you need to be capable of running 7+ miles at around a 7-minute/mile pace, or you’re at risk of failing events or simply being at the back of the pack and not getting picked up even if you make it through selection. 

Crucially, your aerobic fitness throughout these events also influences your recovery, baseline stress level, and cognitive function under fatigue. If you’re more aerobically fit, you’ll be much better at understanding and remembering complicated instructions, working through technical scenarios, answering instructor questions, etc. This is a big part of what you’re being evaluated on – HRT members aren’t just good exercisers. They’re also intelligent, adaptable, and good at quickly reading situations and learning new things. 

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. While we need tons of zone 2 aerobic volume to develop our aerobic capacity, 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, however, 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 HRT 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 selection/PFT prep. We outline the progression and frequency guidelines below. HRT selection tends to have both unweighted and weighted overland movements, the distribution of which changes from year to year, so you need to be proficient at moving under load at a good clip. 

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 high rep calisthenic beatdowns) and have you put in 2 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 and weight stair climbs 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 a 1987 Nissan instead of building a bigger engine. 

If you’re new to rucking, start with a pack weighing around 20-25 pounds and work up to about 40 pounds. While you may be asked to do some heavier rucks or carries during Selection, it’s not worth the wear and tear to train for them during prep. 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 HRT Selection

HRT selection is not a powerlifting contest. Keep in mind 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 SFET, and selection. 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 HRT 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.

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 PFT. While most of these events aren’t pass/fail moments, 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 run immediately after, setting you off on a downward slope of subpar performance. 

You should incorporate work capacity training into 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 HRT Selection

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

Treading and Swimming Skills

We won’t discuss the specific water comp events that generally occur in HRT selection beyond the 200m swim in the PFT, but you need to be comfortable in the water – above and below the surface. 

Technical proficiency is the first step. Swimming and treading are both heavily dependent on technical skills. You can’t out-wrestle the water. The better your technique, the less effort you’ll need, the more easily you’ll be able to compensate if you get a cramp, and the faster you’ll move through the water. 

Failures in the water typically result from an inability to tread water and stay calm. You should be able to easily tread water with your hands out of the water for ten minutes, even when stressed and fatigued. You should also have worked on your water confidence in a stressed state to know how to recover and stay calm when things start going sideways. 

A Treading Water Guide for SOF Selection

Swimming 101: A Guide for Special Operations Selection Training

Tactical, Technical, and Socio-Emotional Skills

HRT “team guys” aren’t just good exercisers. During selection, instructors will evaluate you on a wide range of skills and capacities, from CQB and job-specific technical scenarios to your speaking/briefing skills and how you interact with others. 

Obviously, we’re not going to teach you CQB or how to deliver an arrest warrant. But, these are important skills that you’ll be evaluated on in your course. The key concepts with these things are trainability and safety. 

CQB Fundamentals

The instructors aren’t looking for highly specific Youtube cool-guy shooting skills as you move through the house. If you get selected, you will learn their particular techniques and tactics, which are unique to every unit. What they are looking for is that you’re infallibly safe with a weapon, even when you’re tired, stressed, and working under highly chaotic conditions. They’re looking for your ability to comprehend and follow complicated instructions. In scenarios, they’re looking for your general ability to manage your stress response, stay calm, think clearly, and make good decisions. 

People don’t get negative marks in the shoot house because they didn’t perfectly do their no-look double knee slide rifle shot around a corner. They get negative marks because they’ve got their weapon off safe when it shouldn’t be, their finger on the trigger when it shouldn’t be, or it’s pointed in the wrong direction. 

Cadre may flag you on somewhat more nuanced errors that are also quite general to CQB, such as:

• ENOT (Eyes Not On Target)
• Not digging/clearing corners
• Reshooting targets
• Lack of verbiage
• Flyers
• Shooting Non-hostiles/no shoot targets
• Poor weapons manipulation/handling

This means that highly polished fundamentals should be your focus in tactical and technical training at your current field office or wherever you can go for extra training reps. 

As you might guess, your proficiency here will most likely come from time spent on a SWAT team. This is an important career step before selection, particularly for those without a military/SOF background, because it helps to give you valuable experience that will carry over into the course and your future training. 

Interviewing and briefing skills

Cadre will evaluate you on your interviewing and briefing skills. You must be comfortable describing a plan or explaining why you’re here to a room full of skeptical people who control your career path. You’ll need to be good with public speaking and good at articulating your reasoning, from your decision-making process in a scenario to why you want to join this unit. 

There are some generalized components of autonomic and emotional regulation that we cover 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. 

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.

Social skills and emotional intelligence

Lastly, like all SOF selection courses, the instructors aren’t just evaluating you on physical, tactical, and technical variables. The course cadre also wants to know what kind of person you are. 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, the instructors, and the support staff would like to have a beer with. Be a person, not a robot. 

Bringing it together: A big picture prep template for HRT selection

Selection takes place in March or April each year. You should give yourself at least 12 months to prepare. You’re likely to have some disruptions due to professional and family commitments, and the physical standards you need to achieve to give yourself a good shot at getting picked up take time to build.

Here’s a sample layout:

6-12 months out: Build the foundation 

This far out, your training should be individualized and specific to your limiting factors. We always use a concurrent training approach to pull this off 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 about 15 miles 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. 
• Dialing basic swimming and water treading techniques. You should be able to swim 500m continuously and tread water with your feet and hands for 10 minutes. 
• Ensure your relative strength and movement capacity are sufficient to stay healthy as you add volume and transition to a more specific methodology. 

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 (has 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: 2-4 per week
• Rucking: 1-2 per week
• Swimming/water confidence: 1 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 running.

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, 3-4 runs, and two 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: PFT prep 

At this point, you should have no glaring limiting factors. The most common one we see 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 a year. You’re better off showing up once and crushing selection than delaying your long-term development by peaking for selection, failing, and having to restart with less than a year to prep for the next cycle. 

The second most common limiting factor we see 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 PFT), 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 the next six months. This can be hard to do with personal and professional obligations, but it’s necessary. No one is going to HRT selection when they’re 19 years old. With years of wear and tear and substantial obligations outside training, maximizing your recovery is essential to adapt to training and not get injured. 

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. 
• 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. 
• Feet-only water treading: Now that you can swim and tread water, you should start working on treading with your feet only and eventually with weight in your hands once you can do 10 minutes with feet only. 

2-3 months out: Selection prep 

Once you can crush the PFT and punch your ticket, we shift the emphasis of training to handling long overland movements, weighted carries, team events, beatdowns, and water comp. 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 to bring them up to speed while focusing on maintaining anything up to standard. You must be well-rounded and capable of performing well over long days without breaking down. 

In the pool, you should introduce high-stress water confidence sessions, such as treading water with weights in your hand while stressed and fatigued.  

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. Here, you should spend more time on your interviewing, weapons, and other job-specific skills as you taper your training volume. 

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 to selection, peaking physically and feeling fresh. 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 the FBI HRT selection process is a monumental task. It demands dedication, discipline, and a strategic approach to training. By focusing on the key elements of the PFT and selection, tailoring your training to your unique needs, and emphasizing long-term preparation, you can increase your chances of success. If you’d like a team of pros to take the guesswork out of your training, check out our app.