BOOK REVIEW: “CAN’T HURT ME” BY DAVID GOGGINS

It’s not often I read something from this century, but I recently picked up David Goggins “Can’t Hurt Me” and read the entire thing over 2 sittings, and after putting out some feelers there was some demand from my readership to give it a review, so here we go.

BACKGROUND

This is a good summary

If you’re completely unfamiliar with who David Goggin is, he’s a retired Navy SEAL and an extreme endurance athlete that has competed in dozens of ultramarathons along with triathalons and other races (I’m not too smart on what’s out there in the race world).  He’s been featured on several podcasts, and as much as I can’t stand the medium, I actually watched him on both Joe Rogan Experiences he’s been featured on and found them very entertaining.

This wasn’t my first exposure to Goggins: I had actually first learned about him from the book “Living with a SEAL” by Jesse Itzier, which I picked up expecting to be a comical romp and ended up being something I read entirely in the span of one sitting and found pretty captivating.  Particularly, the SEAL and ultramarathoner featured in the book seemed to share my sentiment regarding training: it sucks and we hate it.  That said, I also found myself having many moments of doubt regarding the stories told by the author.

Since I’m not reviewing THAT book (though I recommend it), I’ll give you a very quick overview on the premise: Jesse Itzier hired David Goggins as something of a live-in personal trainer for a month because he wanted to experience how David lived and trained, and Goggins put him completely through the ringer.  Because the story was told from the perspective of the trainee talking about the trainer, I assumed there were bits of hero worship and embellishment blended in, and in some cases assumed we were dealing with outright lies.  The book was still an entertaining read, and demonstrates how interesting of a character Goggins is.  

THE BOOK ITSELF

“Can’t Hurt Me” clocks in at a pretty hefty 360+ pages, but the font isn’t small and there are occasional pictures. Having spent the majority of my leisure time reading 19th century German Existentialism, this was a VERY easy read, where David says what he means and writes in a very easy to digest manner.

The first 100 or so pages are David’s childhood, and it was ROUGH.  As a parent, it’s tough for me to read about someone treating their kids as poorly as David’s dad treated his family.  My heart broke for him, and I honestly think I read so much in my first sitting because I didn’t want to put the book down during such depression.  Just be aware that, if you are sensitive to such plights, it might be tough to get through.

If you are a fan of military heroism ala Richard Marcinko’s “Rogue Warrior” (the autobiography, which I highly recommend as well, but I can’t vouch for the fiction works), that’s not to be found here.  David talks primarily about military training rather than actual operations, so there’s quite a bit about his time going through SEAL Hell Week (BUD/S), Army Ranger School, Delta Force selection, etc, but about the only mention he makes of his work as an active duty military member is discussing recruiting efforts.  This is most likely by intention, and two-fold: it seems that many special forces members are reluctant to discuss actual operations in public, and David’s focus tends to be on experiencing misery and overcoming, with selection processes giving ample opportunity to discuss that.

For the love of god, you want the FIRST one

David is incredibly human, despite appearances of super-human abilities.  In turn, the book does not follow the traditional “3 acts” one sees in plays and movies, primarily because life doesn’t unfold that way.  David has highs and lows occur throughout the book which means that the reader can’t just settle back after the first 200 pages, assume the rough stuff is over and then settle in to absorb all the good vibes and victories.  You need to be paying attention to when mistakes are being made to be able to learn FROM these mistakes without having to make them yourself.  It’s not just the victories that are worth learning from, but the failures as well.

About the only thing that’s really jarring about the book is that David tries to sell it as a self-improvement book rather than an autobiography, and it gets a bit on the nose.  He starts out by telling you there will be 10 challenges in the book for you, as the reader, to face, and each chapter ends with a summary of the chapter, what lessons were learned, what the challenge is for the reader, and then instructions to upload photos or stories of yourself completing the challenges along with the appropriate hashtags to post to be able to share them.  The book came out a year ago and this has already aged poorly, and will fundamentally be silly when read 10, 20, 30+ years from now.  It honestly has to be the work of a ghost writer, because it’s just so completely out of character with the rest of the book.  That said, David s trying to start an online business based around his personality, so don’t hate the player.

      THE TAKEAWAYS

This is a good one

Once again, I had an understanding of David Goggins before picking up the book, and fundamentally wanted to read it to hear his perspective first-hand, rather than relayed by a trainee.  It did not disappoint in that regard.  I can’t say I particularly “learned” from Goggins, but more spent 300+ pages agreeing adamantly through the process, similarly my experience reading Jon Andersen’s “Deep Water” book. It’s nice to find that there are other people that share my mindset, especially when those other people are significantly more accomplished than I am.

The biggest point Goggins makes is how unfun and uncomfortable the experience of becoming better is.  Goggins is an ultramarathoner that hates running, he was a Navy SEAL that was negative buoyant (meaning he sinks instead of floats in water, a quality I also share with him), he had to lose 106lb in 3 months to join the military because he likes food and dislikes training so much, etc etc.  It’s so refreshing to finally read someone that ISN’T talking about how you have to LOVE the process and that this is a passion and training is their life and how it’s all they want to do etc etc.  I’ve always said the same thing whenever I’ve heard that “you’re not training hard enough”, and David is proof of concept that, when you are working hard enough to make REAL changes, the fun absolutely stops.

Not pictured: fun

But that also ties in perfectly with what else is great about this book: David’s emphasis on how many of our limitations are products of our mind. David espouses a “40%” principle, which basically boils down to, at any given point, when people think they’re “giving their all”, they’re only giving 40% of their all.  I LOVE that point.  For lifting, we see that ALL the time.  Kids who SWEAR up and down on a stack of Bibles that they’re going as hard as they possibly can in training, and then you finally get to watch a training session and see just how much they’re not putting out.  David talks about how the mind can put a governor on the body that limits its output, and how, through constant agony, pressing and overcoming, one can improve their ability to tap further and further into their potential. 

Reading about some of the absolutely insane things David has accomplished should hopefully shine some light on the reader about what the human body is capable of.  As painful as it is to read about David’s childhood and upbringing (painful due to the horror of his experiences, rather than as a matter of writing style), it illuminates to the reader that David is a human: flawed and limited like the rest of us. In turn, you’re not reading a story of a super human doing super human things, but about a REGULAR human doing super human things.  When you read about doing a 100 mile race with ZERO prep, armed with only a box of Ritz crackers and some protein shakes, it starts to dawn on you that maybe you can get up at 0500 and go lift some weights without a pre-workout, 2 hours of stretching, devil worship, intra-workout protein and carbs, and 27 warm-up sets.  Or that maybe you can add a few miles of running to your training plan without it catabolizing all of your muscle. 

SHOULD YOU GET THE BOOK?

Yes, absolutely, without a doubt.  It’s an easy read and has a lot of great lessons in it.  Based off some stupid stuff on amazon, I should apparently warn you that it contains a fair amount of profanity in it.  Honestly, if you’re shocked to find out that a Navy SEAL ultramarathoner employs a great deal of profanity, you most likely aren’t understanding just how much suck he’s undergone.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

HOLD THE BODY HOSTAGE

We’ll return to the discussion on brutality momentarily and, if there’s any interest in it (leave a comment), I also blitzed through David Goggin’s book “Cant’ Hurt Me” and may write a review on it, but today I want to discuss the notion of the “self” and how many folks tend to misunderstand it.  Fundamentally, the issue I observe with many individuals is that their concept of the self is that which they can observe: their physical manifestation-their body.  Already we must contend with the flaw of such a philosophy, as the reality is that one can never actually OBSERVE their own body in whole, but only reflections and reproductions of it.  Hence, if one determines that their “self” is simply the physical manifestation, one will never have any TRUE understanding of the self, as they’ll be the ONLY person who actually cannot have a for real observation of said self.  But, further than that, I argue that not only is the body not a true representation of the self, but it’s in fact entirely isolated from the self.  The self is the “anima”, the spirit, the mind, or whatever other metaphysical word/understanding you have relating to those terms.  The self is cognition and awareness: the body is meat, bone and blood.  If one has this understanding relating to the two terms, one gains access to one of the more effective manners of achieving physical greatness: that of holding one’s own body hostage.

This picture should do a great job of alienating half of my audience that's too young to get the reference and the other half that finds it SUPER offensive

So again, when one has an understanding of their physical manifestation as their “self”, they are inclined to take the actions that result in the preservation of the body.  These are the folks that are very ginger in their approach to physical training, with an emphasis of avoiding injury, maintaining moderation, slowly easing into things, not pushing past their limits, etc.  To these people, they are “taking care of themselves”, or, more precisely, taking care of their “selves”.  But when one has an understanding that the physical is entirely separated from the true “self”, the body takes on a completely different form: it is abhorrent. 

The body is a physical manifestation, sure, but not a manifestation of the self: it’s a manifestation of limits.  The self is capable of true limitlessness: the mind’s power of imagination is limitless, with an unlimited ability to conceive of anything.  What limits the self from expressing this limitless manifestation IS the physical: the body.  The body is the weakest link, dependent on so many interconnected and related biological processes that are, honestly, fragilely and haphazardly connected.  If you were designing a race of superior beings and someone brought you a blueprint for the human body, you’d fire them for showing up to work drunk.  One of the greatest tragedies ever inflicted upon the self is that it’s only manner of expressing itself in the physical world is via the medium of the body.

I bet this was going to be WAY cooler in this guy's mind...

But with this perspective of the body, one is able to significantly change the relationship one has with their body.  Specifically, when one thinks of “my body”, or, even better, simply “the body”, rather than “myself”, one interacts with the body from an outside perspective.  It’s now no longer our dream car sitting in the garage that we keep polished and maintained by some crappy rental car that we’re gonna run until the engine falls out.  Why do we care?  It’s not “us”.

And from here, one obtains the ability to “hold the body hostage”.  Previously, one took care of the body, babied it, protected it from harm, and it reacted by staying soft and uncalloused.  But the body can do other things too: specifically, it can become more.  It CAN become bigger, stronger, more resilient, tougher, calloused, hard, sharp and keen: it simply needs a catalyst to drive it to that action.  And, thankfully, your “self”: the real, honest to goodness TRUE “self”, that psychotic tyrant that IS your mind, has full power and control over what happens to the body.  This means you can put the body’s adaptation on your schedule, with a promise of consequences if it fails to perform.

Yeah, sorta like this actually...

Because despite what the body might be trying to tell your self, it’s frequently ready and able to perform even when it indicates otherwise.  It’s ready to grow, even if it claims it’s not.  And you simply have to let it know that it’s choices are to either perform or get broken.  Because remember: this isn’t you breaking your “self”: this is you breaking the body.  Your self will remain unbroken from this process.  Hell, your self may even GROW from breaking the body, as you’ll have an even better understanding (and with it, resentment) of the failings of the body and how it limits your self, and, in turn, grow to develop even more deviant and terrible ways to force the body to at least come within some REMOTE proximity of how your true self envisions it should be.

When the body refuses, continue to push it.  Make it clear to the body that your self is in control, and you are more than willing to absolutely and totally destroy the body to a completely irreparable state UNLESS it does as it is told.  Squat a PR on Monday and tell the body you’re coming back on Wednesday to put 5 more pounds on the bar and that failure isn’t an option: and that, if the body decides to quit, it’s not going to walk away from the experience without at least some snapped connective tissue, a ruptured internal organ, and blown out blood vessels over every square inch of the torso.  Load up the barbell on the floor and let it be made clear to the body that it will either pick up the weight or learn how to live with a herniated disc.  Lace up the running shoes and run further than your best distance and then let the body know that it’s either going to find a way back home or it’s going to starve and die.  The body will HATE you, it will make its protests known, it will ache and breathe fire and camp and even have some small cuts, scrapes, and breaks along the way, but, ultimately, it will be so terrified of your self that it WILL comply until it absolutely, positively, REALLY cannot.  And at that point, you’ll have made the body at least marginally less abhorrent.  Hell, who knows, maybe someday, you’ll both be friends and you can laugh all about this.

Or maybe that’s just Stockholm Syndrome.        

THE BARBARIAN VS THE MONK: BRUTALITY OVER TECHNIQUE-PART II: JACK DEMPSEY AND GAME CHANGING BRUTALITY

Continuing on in the saga of brutality, allow me to discuss an instance of one of the most brutal moments in combat sports: the heavyweight championship bout between Jack Dempsey and Jess Willard.  For any that have not had the absolute joy of witnessing the first (and what should have been final) round of this fight, please enjoy

And now let’s back up a little bit.  I’ve mentioned Dempsey before, but for those that are unaware, Jack Dempsey was one of the major inspirations of Mike Tyson, to the point that Mike took to cutting his hair in the same style as Jack (back when Mike had hair).  Mike idolized Jack and did his best to emulate his style, both due to it’ brutal effectiveness in the ring along with its entertainment value for the spectators.  It was simply fun to watch Jack Dempsey fight.  And why is that?

Because Jack effectively reinvented the sport of boxing WITH his brutality.  Ever notice how very old time boxers had what appears to be a unique stance compared to modern fighters?

The body is leaned far back while the hands are stretched out forward.  For what purpose?  Because people don’t like getting hit in the head!  So boxers would lean their heads away and put their hands forward to put up a defense.  Boxers would look for openings and come in with 1 or 2 long looping punches before retreating to a safe distance again.  It was a very defensive style, built around preserving the skull (and, thus, the fighter) for long durations, which, given how many fights would go into the dozens of rounds, wasn’t’ an awful idea.

And then came Jack Dempsey.  Jack, who brought “bad intentions” into his fight, who hit people with the intent to do harm and break them, brought in an aggressive style of forward pressure where he was willing to sacrifice the safety of hanging back and having the gloves far out if it meant getting inside his opponents guard and demolishing him with tight hooks.  Jack, who learned that if he “fell” with his punches, he could put all of his bodyweight into the blow, because he was going FORWARD into the opponent, not backward, retreating away from them.  Jack, who stalked his opponents like a lion going after prey, standing barely an arm’s reach away while they got back on their feet, only to savagely batter them back down to the floor again.  Jack made his own style, because he wasn’t going to use the techniques that people said you HAD to use to be a boxer, and it became so brutally effective that they had to CHANGE THE RULES OF BOXING to make it fair for other fighters.

You know you've done good when they have to change the rules to make things fair for your opponent that is 58lbs heavier and 5 inches taller than you

Marinade on that for a second there: boxing, which, at that point in history, was the most brutal manner of prizefighting available, had to be changed because Jack Dempsey arrived.  He arrived, and brought with him so much brutality that boxing was no longer “safe”.  Prior to his arrival, it was the natural self-preservation instincts that were permitting prizefighters to have 100 round slugfest and still walk away and have a beer.  Know what the outcome was for that Jess Willard fight?  Jess was carried away with a broken cheekbone, a broken jaw, several broken ribs and an estimated 6 missing teeth, with a physician ruling that it would be 6 weeks before Jess could move comfortably again.  The beating was so savage that, for DECADES, arguments existed that Jack either coated his boxing wraps in plaster of paris OR had loaded his gloves with metal, as the mere idea of one man so savagely beating another in the ring was just unfathomable.  And it doesn’t really matter what the truth is to those accusations, for if Jack DID manipulate his gloves to do more damage, that just further demonstrates his brutality, and if he DIDN’T, that just goes to show how terrifyingly brutal he was.

BECAUSE of Jack, more rigorous pre-fight inspections of equipment occurred, to look for evidence of tampering.  Because he arrived, fighters had to change their stances and approach, learning how to work angles, active defense, counter aggression, etc.  Because of Jack, fighters HAD to retire to a neutral corner when their opponent was down, so that they could STAND UP before getting smashed in the face again.  In fact, Jack lost one of the greatest matches in his career because that rule change had recently been implemented and he defaulted back to his baseline brutality when he saw a man down on the canvas.  That opponent ended up getting a “long count”, as the ref didn’t start the 10 count until 8 seconds after he had been knocked down, as Jack did NOT want to go back to his corner. 

Jack, seen here, being told that what he wanted to do to his downed opponent was NOW known as "assault and battery" rather than sound strategy

Because when you have enough brutality, you force the game to change.  While other fighters were fighting for sport, Jack grew up fighting just to have enough money to eat and find a place to sleep, and this meant he had no time to play by anyone else’s rules or style: he was going to bring his brutality and play the game the way he wanted to play it.  He wasn’t going to change who he was: he was going to force everyone else to change to deal with him.  Because brutality can overcome just about everything, so long as you throw enough of it at something, with violent “bad intentions”.

And when the game changes because of your brutality, it no longer matters if you “lose” by the new rules.  If the only way people can beat you is by removing or limiting your brutality, you’ve already won.  There could be no possible victory any sweeter than the one of being the person who forced the game to change because it could not deal with the force of nature that you are.  Endeavor to be the one who is so absolutely brutal that the only chance people have to win is by no longer playing the same game as you.

THE BARBARIAN VS THE MONK: BRUTALITY OVER TECHNIQUE-PART I: SLAMMING YOUR WAY OUT OF THE TRIANGLE CHOKE

This title is a massively over ambitious word salad, but this is fundamentally a combination of all of my nerdy obsessions and philosophy, so let’s give it a shot.  In fact, it got so overly ambitious I ended up having to break it into a few parts. 

This request comes by way of reader “The American”, who requested I discuss my experience in combat sports as it related to my focus on strength, and I quickly replied that I was a pretty awful combat sports athlete due to my inherent lack of athleticism and coordination along with my propensity toward oafishness.  Techniques basically took me twice as long to learn, which also meant my toolbox was half as big as everyone else, so I only knew a handful of submissions and the odds of me really landing one was pretty limited.  However, the one area I DID tend to shine was strength and conditioning (ok, so that’s two areas), with the former seemingly significantly neglected by a majority of those training for the sport.  Sometimes this was a hindrance, as it meant that I was prone to trying to force submissions to work rather than rely on technique, but other times it opened up avenues that were not regularly afforded to other trainees, to include one of my favorite submission defenses of all time: slamming out of the triangle choke.

Before going on any further, for those of you unfamiliar with the triangle choke as it relates to combat sports, allow me to provide some examples of what I’m talking about

For you BJJ elitist out there, I'm sure everyone in these pictures is doing it wrong and only you have the one true lineage

As you can see, the move is fairly technical and relies on the mastery of the person on the bottom (in the guard position) to be able to effectively position and maneuver themselves such that they use their aggressor’s OWN arm along with the defender’s legs to choke out their opponent.  Like the majority of submissions, there’s an understanding that the only defense against a submission is BEFORE it’s locked in, as, once it’s locked in, it’s not simply a matter of time before the person being submitted either passes out or has a limb broken, at which point they need to “tap out” and admit defeat.

However, for those of you that aren’t versed in combat sports and simply read my blog as lifters, let me ask you something: doesn’t this look like the bottom of a good morning?

Rest assured: someone is about to have a bad morning

Oh boy did I love slamming people once they had the triangle choke on me, because it is one of those things you can only get away with if you’re decently strong, which, in turn, makes it a pretty unpredictable “submission defense”.  And I put submission defense in quotes because anyone who actually plays the submission game will scoff at this, since it’s absolutely NOT grappling and is simply pure brutality as a means of escaping.  But slamming people out of the triangle choke wasn’t just as active submission defense: it was passive as well.  Primarily because, once you slam a dude out of a triangle choke the first time, they REALLY don’t want that to happen to them again.  Most folks tend to think they’re going to be in a “comfortable” position when they have the triangle choke locked in, and when you start aggressively slamming the everloving hell out of the back of their skull, that comfort is gone, and now you’ve removed that entire tool from their toolbox.  This is true to the point that I’d very often BAIT the triangle choke, get into someone’s guard, give my arm away as a gift, wait for the triangle to start getting applied, and then smash them until they gave it up, knowing that I’d now removed that threat from the fight and they had to now fight MY stupid game of fighting, with little technique and lots of brutality.  Because, as we often observe, one can overcome a discrepancy in technique with a massive surplus of brutality.

One of the best displays of this ever in the sport of MMA was Bob Sapp vs Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira which, if you’ve not had the delight of viewing before, I will link below.  Specifically with the Joe Rogan commentary, because Joe (rightfully) spends the majority of the fight marveling over how gigantic Bob Sapp is and how he was holding his own against one of the greatest Jiu Jitsu fighters of all time

Here is the most important part, if you don't want to watch the whole video

Coming into this fight, Bob had an amount of fight training time and experience that could be measured by episodes of King of the Hill, but he brought something that is very hard to prepare for in training: an absurd amount of brutality…paired with a 150lb bodyweight advantage that was ALL muscle.  When Nog went for a takedown, Bob sprawled on Nog, wrapped his arms around his body, PICKED HIM UP AND PILEDROVE HIM.  They may say that a triangle, once successfully applied, has no defense, but I’m pretty sure they meant the piledriver when they wrote that, because what the hell are you supposed to do there?  Watch the whole fight, see Bob muscle out of subs, throw Nog out of the mount, and spend his time “trapped” in Nog’s guard smashing his face into a bloody pulp with hammerfists, completely oblivious to the “danger” of being in the guard of a talented jiu jitsu fighter.  Yes, Nog DOES win (spoilers), but boy did it take a LOT of technique to finally survive and overcome that brutality.

And we saw this same sort of brutality when it came to Tank Abbott and Brock Lesnar, and in doing so, people will say the same thing: “that wasn’t brutality winning: it was strength.  The weight difference was so significant that it was insurmountable”.  Ok: let’s take an example of two guys in the same weight class: Matt Hughes vs Carlos Newton

Once again, a quick summary

There it is.  Carlos Newton was a phenomenal jiu jitsu fighter, and though Matt Hughes was a very accomplished wrestler, he wasn’t known for his submission game or technical skill.  And when Carlos had that triangle locked on, I’m sure he thought that the fight was over.  It was sunk deep and as tight as it could get, and when Matt picked him up, you can briefly see where Carlos gives it a smirk, as though it was the desperate act of a dying man…until it dawns on him just how committed Matt is toward getting this slam.  To the point that Matt employed his own body’s failing consciousness as the mechanism to slam Carlo’s skull full force into the mat, rendering him totally unconscious.  And all Matt needed was for the blood to get to his brain faster than Carlos regained consciousness from a massive concussion: the kind of insane plan that can ONLY be hatched from brutality.

This discussion can go on forever, and for the sake of brevity I’m going to wrap it up here and save more for future parts, but think of the lessons one can take from the example of slamming your way out of the triangle choke.  In competition, you’ll inevitably go up against someone that, on paper, is better than you in every single way, yet the variable you can control that can lead to victory is just how much brutality you are willing to bring.  Someone who is technically better than you may simply not be prepared for just how ridiculous and mean you are willing to be in order to escape defeat and secure victory.  The same is true when it comes to dealing with the adversity of existence or your training: even when you are “beaten”, there is always the option of success by brutality.  And much like how it’s a passive defense of the triangle, display enough brutality often and frequently enough and, pretty soon, nothing seeks to ever put you in that triangle choke again.