Image by jpw_para

The Royal Marines are the Royal Navy’s amphibious infantry on permanent readiness to deploy across the globe, and is a core component of the UK’s Joint Rapid Reaction Force. In short, they’re badass and the best of the best at what they do.

Much like the U.S Marine Corps, the Royal Marines are a flexible infantry force. To achieve their goals Marines need a very high level of all around fitness, as well as a positive and determined state of mind.

When I think of a Royal Marine, I see a man who approaches the impossible with steely grit and intense inner belief. These attributes are, in my opinion, applicable to anybody looking to better their life. Be it through self-improvement in your job, your physical fitness or your finances and lifestyle.

Whatever your goals, a positive mental attitude will get you a long way to achieving them. In particular, your determination to succeed. Royal Marines have determination in bucketloads. For a Royal Marines Commando, their state of mind is the driving force. It reminds them that the mind powers the muscles and that they are not special because they are Marines. They are special because of what they do and how they do it. As Aristotle said:

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

This is the ethos of the Royal Marines. Their state of mind can be broken down into 4 elements - known as The Commando Spirit.

The Commando Spirit

1. Courage
2. Determination
3. Unselfishness
4. Cheerfulness in the face of adversity

On paper, these attributes seem simple and anybody looking to put together a quick list of ways to improve themselves could recite them. However in practice, it is much more difficult to apply this Commando Spirit to your everyday life. Many people simply don’t have the determination to achieve their goals. I’ve been as guilty as anyone for merely coasting along and doing the minimum amount of effort to get by. But for a Royal Marine, these are drilled into their minds so deeply that it’s no longer a conscious decision. It is part of who they are and I can only imagine the level of clarity and focus that having these attributes drilled into your subconscious will bring.

So how do we achieve this Marine-like mental focus to improve ourselves?

It’s actually quite simple. You need to know what you want. It can be difficult to figure this out - but once you know what you want, the only thing left to do is focus yourself absolutely and completely to achieving it. Force out all the negative thoughts. The last thing you should be thinking is “I can’t do this!”. Of course you can. If you focused all of your mental efforts on how you’re going to achieve your goals rather than worrying that you can’t achieve them, you’ll have a lot more success. Other attributes for you to focus on include:

• Unity - Whether it’s uniting you mind, body and soul or something less cliché like unity with your work colleagues
• Adaptability - You need to be able to adapt through new workouts or new life approaches based on what has worked and hasn’t worked for you in the past
• Humility - You can’t push yourself forward with a pat on the back. When you succeed, be humble and focus on further improvement. Don’t gloat!
• Fortitude - You need the physical and mental strength to endure adversity with courage

If you’re still unsure of how to achieve the focused, Royal Marine state-of-mind, here is a list of tips to improve your clarity and give you the steely determination you need to succeed:

1. From the moment you wake up each day, focus on what you want to achieve and get motivated to succeed.
2. Cut out (or at least down on) bad habits such as smoking, drinking and eating bad foods. Nothing ruins clarity like impurities in your body.
3. Focus on your short term goals. Your long term goals will materialise as an effect of the short term goals.
4. Be as self sufficient and reliant as possible. There won’t always be people around to push you so you’ll need to learn to push yourself further.
5. Never be satisfied. Always strive to achieve more.
6. Don’t focus on limitations. Focus instead on what you want to achieve and the steps you need to take to get there.
7. Believe in yourself. If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.
8. If you struggle or falter, ask for help or advice. I’m happy to help out wherever I can.

The mental stamina of a Royal Marine, coupled with a high level of physical fitness, is what separates them from the mere mortals. They are both core components to the puzzle. Without fitness, all the mental stamina in the world won’t help if every muscle in your body is fully exhausted. Without mental stamina, all the fitness in the world won’t be enough when everything in your being is telling you to stop. Things like gun fire, bombs, endless walking across the Falkland Islands, the altitude of Afghanistan or the blistering heat of Iraq.

So, besides mental strength, what physical attributes do the Royal Marines have - and how did they get them?

The Royal Marines Training Schedule

Royal Marines are typically more lean that U.S. Marines. Regular cardio exercise and interval/fartlek training are a staple in the training arsenal.

Marines often workout twice a day. In the morning this will usually be 30-45 minutes of cardiovascular exercise such as swimming, running or biking. In the afternoon that’s when the fun begins.

Royal Marines Circuit Training

For a Royal Marine, there is a high focus on muscular endurance. They need to be able to give a high level of exertion for prolonged periods of time. The best way to achieve this is through circuit training. As you’d expect, the majority of exercises a Royal Marine performs are based on bodyweight. This allows them to workout wherever they are in the world and can give a fantastic workout in a short amount of time. Here is an example of a Royal Marine workout:

1st SET | 2nd SET | 3rd SET

15 Press-ups | 20 Press-ups | 15 Press-ups
20 Vertical Jumps | 25 Vertical Jumps | 20 Vertical Jumps
20 Squats | 30 Squats | 20 Squats
4 Pull-ups | 6 Pull-ups | 4 Pull-ups
10 Hanging Leg Raises | 15 Hanging Leg Raises | 10 Hanging Leg Raises
15 Box Jumps | 20 Box Jumps | 15 Box Jumps
4 Dips | 6 Dips | 4 Dips
20 Sit-ups | 30 Sit-ups | 20 Sit-ups
10 Lunges | 20 Lunges | 10 Lunges

This circuit should be completed as quickly as possible with no rest in between exercises or sets. You can rest only as long as it takes to get your breathe back to continue.

When performing this routine, Royal Marines ensure that their posture and form is perfect on each exercise. They don’t rush to get through them by arching their backs on press-ups or swinging their legs to complete a pull-up.

In addition to circuit training, Royal Marines also perform regular progressive shuttleruns - also known as The Bleep Test.

The Bleep Test

The objective of the bleep test is to run for as long as possible between two points which are placed 20 metres apart; keeping to the speed indicated by the bleeps on the bleep test.

The test is maximal and progressive. It starts out slowly and the speed increases each minute. A single bleep indicates the end of a shuttle run, which means you should be at the 20 metre line when you hear it. As the test continues, the amount of time between beeps shortens. This means that you need to increase your speed to reach the end of each shuttle in time. When you hear three beeps, this indicates the end of a minute, at which point the speed will increase.

Make sure that you start each shuttle with at least one foot behind the 20 metre line and ensure you turn properly by pushing away with one foot or the other to avoid injury.

Here’s the link to download the audio file for the bleep test

It’s in .wav format so you may need to convert it for use on your iPod or MP3 player.

Ready to become a Royal Marines Commando?

Once you feel like you’ve achieved a good level of physical fitness and your mental strength and clarity is steely, gritty, determined etc and so on, you can - if you’d like to - apply to join the Royal Marines. For many people, performing the exercises and gaining the mental strength of a Royal Marine is enough. But if you’re one of the select few that strive to achieve more than this, then you’re exactly what they’re looking for!

If you’re a Royal Marine, or training to become a Royal Marine, drop us a comment and let us know how the training is going and any tips and advice to become better men.

Image by Joe Shlabotnik

There are so many different types of workout available for men these days that it’s often hard to determine which is best for you. This is made more difficult by so-called experts that claim their way is best and anything else simply won’t work. The fact is that there isn’t a one-type-fits-all workout per se. Different goals, body types, and motivation are all factors to be taken into consideration.

If you’re anything like me, you want your workouts to be as simple as possible so that all of your energy and focus goes into the exercise. This is why I hate most modern gyms. There are distractions everywhere! The TV is playing, there are social conversations between groups of friends and not to mention that there are often a lot of attractive women, which means my concentration is not 100% on the task at hand.

Working Out From Home

Working out from home may not be for everyone, however the exercises I will explain later in the article can be done at home or in the gym.

Working out from home allows me to remove all distractions from my surroundings and my daily life so that I can focus completely on my workout.

The main reasons why I love working out at home are:

1. There is never any queue to use a machine
2. I can put the time it takes to travel to/from the gym to much better use
3. No distractions
4. I can pull my most hideous workout faces without the hot girl on the treadmill seeing me
5. I can do exercises I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing in front of other people

Okay, so we’ve established reasons to work out at home (if you’re comfortable doing this workout in the gym then it can be done there too) so now it’s time to talk a little bit about the reasoning of the weight free workout.

Reasons For Weight Free and Conditioning Exercise

Having lifted weights for many years, I was very skeptical to try out conditioning and bodyweight exercises, but the more I thought about it, the more I realised that resistance is resistance. It doesn’t matter if that resistance is your bodyweight, a barbell or a medicine ball. As long as I’m providing my muscles with the necessary resistance needed to improve strength, speed and flexibility, then I don’t really care about what type of resistance I’m using.

Let me tell you now that after doing these exercises (and various others) for six months, I was stronger, fitter, and healthier than I ever was when I was pumping iron. I’ve included a couple of very basic sample routines towards the bottom of this article for people who don’t need to go through the exercise moves and want to skip ahead.

I would describe the sample routines and exercises as low-tech and high intensity. It’s similar to circuit training I did back in school, but that was nothing compared to this. Let’s cover some exercises.

High Intensity Exercises

People often think that the further they run and the longer they run for, the better shape they’re going to be in. This is true in principle, but it’s not always the type of shape they’re looking for. Lengthy cardio sessions will increase your aerobic capacity which means you can run longer and further, but your body will adjust to this type of exercise by reducing the muscle mass.

What we want is short, high intensity anaerobic workouts (unless you’re running a marathon) to really get the heart pumping. This type of exercise burns fat while preserving your muscle mass.

Exercise 1 – Hill sprints

Remember when Rocky ran up those steps in Philly? Same principle. The process goes like so:

1. Start at the bottom of the hill
2. Sprint all the way to the top
3. Jog/walk down the hill
4. Rinse and repeat

If it sounds simple, that’s because it is. Be warned though, this exercise can be soul destroying. I used to jog over to this giant 200-odd metre hill, which was maybe a 30 degree incline, and sprint up it for 30 minutes. By the time I was ready to jog home, my legs were like jelly and I was ready to puke. Simply, effective and minimum time needed for the workout. Hill sprinting also helps to develop lower body power in addition to anaerobic endurance.

Exercise 2 – Burpees

Remember those weird star jump into a push-up type things you used to do at school? They’re called burpees and I guarantee that once you start doing them, Burpees will be the exercise you love to hate.

This exercise is, in my opinion, the best conditioning exercise available. You will rarely hear people bragging about the number of burpees they can do the way guys in the gym brag about their bench press figures. This is a very difficult exercise which a lot of people avoid by choosing alternative conditioning methods. Here’s how to perform it.

1. Start in the squat position with hands on the ground.
2. Kick your feet back into the downward position of a push-up.
3. Push up with your arms, simultaneously thrusting your feet back into the squat position.
4. Explode into a jump.
5. As soon as you land, repeat and continue at a furious pace.

For those that didn’t get that, here’s a YouTube video:

Try performing 100 burpees as fast as you possibly can. It makes for a brief, but very effective conditioning workout.

Exercise 3 – Pull ups

How do you workout your back? Don’t tell me you’re knocking out a couple of sets on the lat pulldown and calling it a day?

This exercise works out your back, your arms, your shoulders and strengthens your core. It’s an amazing bodyweight exercise which can be made more challenging through the addition of a weighted vest if you start to find yourself knocking out a lot of reps.

Pull ups are done from a bar with your palms facing away from you. If your palms are facing you, that’s a chin up and is easier because you can pull with your biceps. Pull ups are a much more functional exercise because if you ever needed to climb up and over something, your grip would resemble a pull up. Ideally, you should combine the two for best possible results.

Also, you can wrap a towel over the pull up bar and do a modified chin up by holding the towel. This really blasts the forearms and grip.

Exercise 4 – Squats

You all know the exercise. Legs shoulder width apart, squat down sticking your bum out until your knees are about 90 degrees, back up and repeat. It’s a great exercise for strengthening the leg muscles and is a staple in the routine of any serious gym go-er. If bodyweight squats are too easy and not challenging enough for you, then I’d recommend giving the Pistol a go. It’s basically a one-legged squat. It will further strengthen your legs, while improving your stability and balance as well.

I remember a friend of mine who had big powerful legs, but he simply couldn’t do a Pistol because his balance and supporting muscles wouldn’t allow it.

Here’s a video showing the Pistol technique:

Exercise 5 – Push ups

Another no brainer really. Push ups will strengthen your shoulders, chest, triceps and core. Aim to improve your maximum number of push ups each week. Once you reach 50 push ups in one set, you’re ready to try the one armed push up. This is a much more difficult exercise which puts extra stress on the triceps and, to a lesser extent, the chest. Video below:

Exercise 6 – Skipping

Most boxers are in fantastic shape, and it’s no wonder with the amount of anaerobic routines they go through. Skipping is a great exercise to get the heart pumping and the blood rushing.

Try doing double unders. Because you’re jumping higher to spin the rope twice before you land, you get an even better workout!

Exercise 6 – Medicine ball slams

One of my absolute favourite exercises is the medicine ball slam. If you or your gym doesn’t own a medicine ball, you can knock one together pretty cheap by following this tutorial. The slams go like so:

• Take the medicine ball and hold it above your head
• Slam it down into the ground as hard as you possibly can
• Bend down and pick it up
• Stand up and raise the ball over your head

Repeat

This excellent conditioning exercise works the arms, shoulders and legs as well as improving your anaerobic conditioning.

Okay now we’ve got a few highly effective exercises, let’s put them into a couple of sample routines.

Sample Workout Routines

I’m going to give you 2 sample workouts to try and see what you think.

This first workout is commonly referred to as No Excuses. It only takes ten minutes to complete so it can’t be too bad. Can it?

1. Burpees
2. Pull ups
3. Squats
4. Push ups

The workout begins with a 60 second interval of each exercise (Burpees then pull ups, then squats, then pushups). You then immediately perform the circuit again with 45 second intervals, then 30 seconds, and finally 15 seconds.

You must move from one exercise to the other without stopping. There are no rest periods between any of the circuits or exercises. If you get stuck on an exercise, rest brief and do your best to continue. If you can’t perform anymore pull ups, hang from the bar for the remainder of the time rather than sitting out to rest.

The second workout is even more of a killer and you may want to make sure you can fully complete the first one before trying this one out.

1. Hill sprint
2. 10 Burpees at the top of the hill
3. Jog down the hill
4. 20 Medicine ball slams at the bottom of the hill

Repeat 8 times.

This exercise is very straightforward. Perform the circuit 8 times as fast as you possibly can. There should be no exercise between exercises or circuits. You can rest if you need to after the completion of the current circuit, but aim to complete the 8 circuits with minimal rest.

These exercises and very simple routines are not meant to replace your current workouts, but supplement them and shock the muscles by doing something a little different. I’ve had a great deal of success using these methods as part of my training and I’m sure you can too.

I’d love to hear your opinions and feedback on these exercises. Do you know of better routines that I can try? If you try these workouts let me know how you felt about them.

You should also check out munfitnessblog and The Fitness Black Book for regular fitness articles. Also, I wouldn’t know about half of these exercises and routines if it weren’t for the truly amazing and inspirational Ross Enamait.

Finally, subscribe to my RSS feed to get all the latest posts and then check out the following video, just because Ross is a complete badass fitness guru!