Training The Norwegian Marine Jaegers with Paul Solberg

MOPs & MOEs

We're going back overseas with this episode, this time to Norway. The Norwegian military has a reputation for high fitness standards, and therefore their special operations forces take fitness to another level. This week we'll be digging into the training and testing of the Marinejegerkommandoen, more commonly known in English as MJK or NORNAVSOC (Norwegian Navy Special Operations Command). Directly translated they are the Marine Jaegers, and they live up to that legendary name.

Our guest Paul Solberg has a Masters in sport psychology and PhD in health psychology and physiology from the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences. He is an accomplished athlete in his own right, having represented Norway as a javelin thrower and also competing nationally in handball, powerlifting and weightlifting. After his athletic career he Coached for several of the best track and field throwers in Norway.

These days he is the Head of the Strength Department at the Norwegian Olympic Training Center and Committee, but we're going to spend most of this conversation focused on his previous role.

For many years he was the human performance program director for NORNAVSOC, where he built the training program they use today. He has also published close to 40 peer reviewed articles focusing particularly on muscle adaptations, recovery, power-training, motivation and well-being, and reliability of testing.

We mentioned Magnus Midtbo's videos where he took the Coastal Rangers and Long Range Reconnaissance fitness tests, so here there are:

Coastal Rangers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81Dz26FboU4

LRRP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-zAeifC2sQ