Sister Wives star Kody Brown tried to lighten his load while filming season 4 of Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test.
“The experience was interesting [and] there’s not a dull moment, even when you’re sleeping, you’re just worried you’re gonna get woken up in the middle of the night and dragged out into a pool of cold water in the dry desert,” Kody, 56, exclusively told Us Weekly. “My teeth chattered.”
Kody also recalled that Directing Staff (DS) instructors would “sort of” haze the recruits.
“I don’t even know what they call the punishment,” he told Us. “We’re standing and I’ve been in this water, and I started to shiver. I don’t want the DS [to see] that. I don’t want them seeing any signs of weakness because they’ll play on that.”
To conceal his teeth chattering, Kody played up a fake-wheeze to make it seem like he was pushed to his physical limits.
“When we had been just run ragged, [I was] wheezing, and it was a little bit fake,” he quipped. “I figured if they thought I was really working hard, they wouldn’t try to push me more, and I might need some energy for later. So, I’m sitting there doing press-ups, and I’m, like, wheezing.”
Kody added, “I knew that my limits physically were never reached. I had more to give physically.”
Not all of Kody’s physical responses during the Special Forces tasks were fake, though.
“There was one time when my muscles gave out,” he recalled. “We were supposed to be swinging across monkey bars, and I had sand on my hands, and I couldn’t cup the monkey bars. I just didn’t have the strength anymore to do it.”
While Kody admittedly struggled with the obstacle course, he looked over at fellow recruits Eric Decker, Andrew East and Mark Estes passing the test with flying colors.
“They all had the strength to do it, and I had lost my hand strength,” Kody said. “I was weaker than them. I just had enduring fortitude. It’s all just some endurance.”
Kody also told Us that the DS team “clobbered” him in an “emotional, mental place.”

Kody Brown, Johnny Manziel and Mark Estes. Pete Dadds/ FOX
“I was so ashamed because I just made huge mistakes in leadership,” Kody added of a separate challenge with Andrew’s wife, Olympian Shawn Johnson East. “It was all just training, [but] it was embarrassing and sad because, in reality, if that would have been a combat situation, both of us might have been dead.”
Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test season 4 premieres on Fox Thursday, September 25, at 9 p.m. ET.