Royal Marine Commandos are some of the fittest soldiers on the planet.
They are put through hell in training to forge them into the elite amphibious fighters that are the envy of world’s military forces.
“Think of the hardest thing you could ever do – then double it,” said former Royal Marine and author of ‘Going Commando’ Mark Time.
The 32-week basic training every Marine Commando goes through to earn the famous green beret is one of the longest and most arduous around.
One of the men tasked with turning men into fighting machines was ex-Marine Physical Training Instructor Sean Lerwill.
He literally wrote the book on it (The Royal Marines Guide to Fitness).
Sean, who is now a top fitness cover model and body transformation specialist, talked to JOE about how Royal Marine training can turn anyone into a machine.
What is fitness actually like in the Royal Marines?
It was hard, but it was progressive – and that’s what people often forget. I’ve almost got a bee in my bonnet because I see a lot of people putting ‘Boot Camp’ or ‘Military Fitness’ and many of those people have never served in the military.
Actually even the people that have served in the military, they’ve never delivered it.
The main thing is it’s always progressive. The first nine weeks of training is all in doors, in trainers and a t-shirt and it’s based around bodyweight exercises like press ups, dips, pull ups and sprints and learning to control your body.
After nine weeks working inside with rope climbs, press-ups and pull-ups and bodyweight stuff, you then pass the test to earn the right to go onto the assault course.
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Then you transition into boots and combat jacket and you start doing the assault course, crawling, up and downs, sprints.
Then after a couple of weeks they add your webbing and your rifle, then you add some water bottles then some diving weights up to 22lbs and a 10lb rifle. That takes you from week 10 right the way through to week 22 when you then do a test.
It’s trying to get the message across that military fitness in the marines is hard and you’ll probably be sick and it will probably be the hardest session you’ve ever done – but it’s very progressive so they give it to you, push you and slowly raise the bar knowing that you’ll reach the bar.
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Why are bodyweight exercises and callisthenics so important and why do they work so well for people in the military?
They work so well for military organisations because often they’re working with people from 16 years old up to 32.
If you look at basic fitness levels a press-up is a really good measure. A pull-up is the main exercise of the Royal Marines – its one thing marines are measured by.
I think it’s a good test for everyone and it’s a leveller whether you’re 16 or 32. It’s something that everyone can do at the same time. Not only is it an exercise that everybody should be good at, whether you’re out in the field, on a ship or out in Afghanistan, you can always do press ups or pull ups.
It’s an easy and functional way or exercising large groups of people.
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What different elements will get you functionally fit in the military?
A good example in the Royal Marines is you have to teach everyone to rope climb. The Royal Marines are known as the best military rope climbers in the world.
The reason Royal Marines learn to climb ropes so well is because you do something in your career called ‘fast roping’. Basically a helicopter will be hovering above somewhere you need to get to and you’ll have a pair of gloves, so you don’t burn your hands, and all your kit and then you’ll jump out of a helicopter and the only thing attached to the rope is your hands.
You grip your hands and you go down the rope and as long as you keep hold of that rope properly and you’re twisting your hands right, it slows your descent down and you get to the floor and run away from the rope and the next man goes down.
The problem is, if anything goes wrong, you need to be able to possibly hold onto that rope or maybe even climb it. So that’s about the functional element of Royal Marines fitness.
So week 1, day 1 you will learn how to climb a rope. It’s a very specific technique.
You start doing it with a rifle and 22lbs of kit, outside on a rope, 30ft to the top and down a number of times to pass your Op Field Assessment, that means that if you’re ever coming out of a helicopter and something goes wrong, in theory you should be able to climb back up that rope. It’s functional.
The same with the endurance course which is one of the commando tests in the Royal Marines. It’s where you do a 2 to 3 mile tunnel course where you’re going through small tunnels, you’re completely submerged and you do ‘Peter’s Pool’ where you’re in water up to nipple level with your kit and your rifle. Then you run four and a half miles back to camp and then you’ve got 10 shots on a target to show that you can still hit the target.
If you get your rifle dirty because you’re too tired and you’re not thinking about your running, it won’t fire and you fail the test.
If you can’t run with all that kit and equipment back to the camp in the time, then you’re not functionally fit to get around tunnels, water and then roads with your kit. That’s the functional fitness bit for the job as a Royal Marine essentially.
What elements of that training that you did yourself and taught really translates into Civvy Street for anyone trying to get fitter, faster and stronger?
Most people in Civvy Street I meet, one thing I find is they’re not getting that much wrong.
Often what people want these days is a body transformation, so build a muscle and burn fat, usually their workouts aren’t intense enough.
Some people are training overly intense and they’re getting their nutrition wrong.
For a lot of people, what they think is hard is not actually hard. In the military you certainly learn how to push yourself but most people don’t know how to push themselves really hard.
The Royal Marines PTI course taught me a number of ways to help people push themselves harder.
For most people it’s just getting them to work to failure, and beyond. A lot of the time it’s mental strength.
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Once you give someone mental strength and teach them correctly how to do push-ups, sit-ups and pull-ups, how to change their running gait so they’re running with a better cadence so they’re a bit faster, and then controlling the central governor in the mind which is telling them they’re overheating and they’re going to be sick and teaching them they can control it and push beyond that, it’s then that people in Civvy Street can achieve what they want to achieve.
That might be a better 10k or marathon time, competing in a triathlon, or working harder in the gym to get their muscle up and body fat down and achieve the physique they want.
A lot of people get their nutrition wrong and that’s where I’ve teamed up with Maxi.
Some people can push themselves hard and are pushing themselves hard, but sometimes what I get is ‘I’m doing all this right and I’m still not achieving the goals that I want.’ People often don’t know how to eat and don’t know how to recover.
So they might go and do a really intense workout and then they go back to work and they’re not eating for three or four hours.
You’re not refuelling your body, you’re not getting in the protein that helps rebuild the muscle, which is something you need to then lower body fat. Get yourself something like a ProMax or a Cyclone and a banana – get the protein and carbs in – then when you can eat a full meal, eat it.
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What exercises translate best from your training background in the Royal Marines to Civvy Street? What are things that people aren’t doing or that people should be doing?
Depending on people’s goals, the basic compound exercises, which the Royal Marines concentrate on, are key – I don’t care whether you’re a would-be bodybuilder, a marathon runner, whether you want to be an MMA athlete or whether you’re just training for general health and fitness.
The Royal Marines you will very rarely find instructor training doing bicep curls or doing a leg extension or a calf raise. If we’re honest, they’re not necessary for functional fitness unless you’re rehabbing an injury.
The major exercises we do in the Royal Marines that translate well are pull-ups, dips, press ups, lunges, squats and back extensions, leg raises and maybe the odd crunch.
You did six abs exercises in the marines – not for the abs, but for the hip flexors. There are 13 muscles that make up the hip flexors. The reason they’re so important is if you’re running with lots of weight, it tends to be very hippy as you shuffle, so the hip flexors need to be strong.
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Also for rope climbing the legs and the hip flexors are far more important than the upper body strength.
The answer to the question is compound exercises. Whether it’s doing exercise in the gym so things like squats, deadlifts or glute bridges or you could do bench press, overhead press or pull-ups and dips.
But also for exercising outside, because there’s a lot more callisthenics people wanting to do that now, anywhere with a couple of bars – parallel bars for dips and then a bar for pull-ups and chin-ups – and then putting someone on your shoulders and then doing things like ‘fireman’s carry’. That’s another test we do, running with someone on your back, obviously for pulling someone out of a battlefield if they get shot.
You can do all sorts like squatting with someone on your back. These exercises are key for any type of fitness goal.
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What’s your training like now then? Do you still keep elements of what you did back in the Royal Marines? Have you evolved other elements to suit your body composition goals?
I have evolved. I used to do a lot of running in the marines, because it’s key to being able to do the job. Whether you’re doing a beach landing, like they did in the Falklands, and having to move 20, 30, 40 or 80 miles across country.
One of our tests is a 30-mile run with kit up and down the Brecon Beacons. We were running with kit every day. The last one was starting at midnight you had 20 hours to cover 40 miles up all the peaks on Brecon with all the kit on your back. You have to run.
I was about 79kg, but to do Men’s Health and Men’s Fitness covers I had to put some muscle on and had to get up to around 84kg so I had to pull back on the running so I could hold some muscle.
I did use some more of the bodybuilding elements of exercise, but keeping the big compound exercises I talked about before.
I think fitness is incredibly important to have the mental side of it as well. So just doing sets of pull-ups can get quite boring.
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But try doing ‘every minute on the minute’ (EMOM) which is a military style of fitness. You start a stopwatch and do 10 pull-ups with a controlled tempo – so it might take two seconds to pull up and then a three count to come down – then once you’ve done 10, drop off the bar and rest for the remainder of the minute.
Then on the next minute straight back on and perform another 10 reps. People will quickly go to failure on that. You can do the same on press ups and dips.
You can also do rest-pause sets, you doing 10 reps and then resting 10 seconds, back on the bar and do six reps then rest 10 seconds again and then do another set of four reps.
So you’re always forcing the mind to get over difficulty that pushes the body harder.
No matter what training I’m doing, it always keeps it a challenge. For me fitness is challenging. If you do the same thing, the same weights, the same reps, you’re going to be the same you. You need to do different things to challenge yourself and get your body to move forward.
Now I do gymnastic things like handstands and back levers to challenge myself. Look at what’s out there and see if you can do it progressively and it will keep fitness interesting.
I throw in swimming circuits, hypoxic circuits, I do Fartlek training or a whole day of press ups.
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Are there any Marine Fitness tests that you did at the time that people can have a go at?
Absolutely. The PRMC course (Potential Royal Marines Course) has a number of elements to it. Some of it you can’t replicate. But one thing you can do is the Royal Marines Fitness Effort which has the ‘bleep test’, like you used to do at school. There’s the running bleep test, but there’s also a press-up bleep test, a pull-up beep test and a sit-up bleep test.
I have written an eBook called ‘How to Pass the PMRC’ if people want to find out, and on my YouTube channel there is the sounds for those bleep tests, so people can stick it on and try to do them.
So the maximum score for press ups is 65. The max score for sit-ups is 80 and the max score for pull-ups is 16 or 18.
But the pull-ups one is quite different where you get a bleep to go up and then a bleep at the top to come down, which makes it quite hard. It’s also not on a rounded scaffold pole, it’s on a squared beam so you can’t get your whole hand around it, and so as your hands start to sweat and they start to slip off.
People can replicate that to see if they can reach the standard of the Royal Marines.
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Fat loss and muscle building are what everyone wants from a body transformation these days. What are the key elements to these in terms of diet and training?
I have won two national competitions with body transformations – one was a Maxi one called the Protein Project where we got PTs together and members of the public.
I did another one with Men’s Fitness and I got guy to lose 6kg of body fat and gain 1kg of muscle in 10 weeks and that was all dexa-scanned – and they said that was the nirvana of body transformations.
I think the key to that one was nailing his diet and finding exercises that worked for him.
I would say to people if you ignore the diet, you will not get the transformation that you want.
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Some people cut their calories too low, then their body just won’t change – they’ve not got enough energy to train or enough protein to build muscle.
Other people will think they’re eating a lot healthier, but actually they’re eating a lot more fruit and having sugary snacks and eating way too much carbohydrates for their needs so they’re still storing a lot of body fat.
I say there are three ways you can do nutrition.
You can either work out your calories and your macros, put it into MyFitnessPal so you know you’re pretty much on track.
You can also try to do the palm size of protein, two fist-sized portions of veg and a thumb size of fats at each meal and work that way – including the 20 foods I say people should try and eat including spinach and lean proteins.
Then there’s getting specific meal plans from people, which I try and steer away from.
If you don’t get your nutrition right then you probably won’t be doing yourself justice with your training.
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What about the training?
The training needs to be progressive – you always need to try and push yourself forward. But it also needs to be intense. If you miss the intensity of your training, if it’s easy and you walk away from the gym thinking ‘I could have done more’ then you probably could have, and you probably won’t get the best changes out of your body.
With growth in muscles, we need adaptation to happen and for adaptation we need the body to have to adapt to something.
So if you start with 10kg dumbbell press today and you made 12-15 reps to failure. Then next time you need to go for 12.5kg and go to failure. If you’re using 15kgs a few weeks later and you’re doing 10 reps, and you think you could probably do 12 then you’re cutting yourself short – it’s not intense enough, so either take the weight up or take the reps up.
Working to failure and making the exercise hard and intense using tempo, rest-pause or drop sets is key – but also make sure you’ve got the nutrition right to make sure the muscles have got what they need to recover and repair and adapt.
That means you will build more muscle. And with more muscle you have more metabolic tissue and that will help cut body fat and that will give you the transformation.
It actually is simple. But people make simple mistakes and there’s bad information out there.
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People who maybe take easy routes using some of the things that make muscle grow easier and then promoting themselves as people who know what they’re talking about, and they look good so people follow their advice. There are people out there who maybe don’t look as good, because they’re growing muscle more naturally but the things they’re saying are generally far better.
One thing I would say about the Royal Marines is we had a compulsory drug test. Once a year they would shut the camp down, you’d come into work one day, you wouldn’t know and they would lock the doors until everyone had done a piss test.
And that made sure none of us were taking anything – and that stayed with me. I would never do that. I like to the fact that I’ve achieved what I’ve achieved by being natural and saying to people that you can do it. There are a lot of short cuts being taken these days and that leads to a lot of bad advice.
But you can do it. It is possible. It’s not actually that difficult, it’s just doing the simple things and the basic things right. Don’t worry about all the complex things.
Just do the basics like compound lifts, eating natural and simple foods, avoid crap like carbonated drinks, refined sugars, alcohol, artificial sugars and processed food. Avoid crap and it makes a big difference. Then just getting your training nice and intense.
Sean Lerwill was speaking at the launch of MaxiNutrition’s 30-day Ibiza Challenge. To find out more about the body transformation competition and be in with a chance to win a trip of Ibiza, visit www.maxinutrition.com/ibizachallenge
