Many years ago as a young hard charging Corporal of Marines I attended the Non-Comissioned Officers Leadership school located in Quantico, VA. Now back in the cold winter of 1983 this wasn’t the polished, balanced and well thought out curriculum that young Marine leaders attend in their leadership schools today. We lived in an ice cold 100 year old wooden barracks that were about 10 feet off the Amtrak train tracks way back in the woods behind the Marine Officer Candidate School (OCS). All of our instructors were OCS drill instructors that were on a winter break from “pushing” candidates through OCS. Needless to say they had little interest in our “development”, but seemed to take sadistic pleasure in trying run us into the ground on the dozens of muddy running trails that are everywhere on that part of the base. Any actual leadership training was transmitted in the form of extra duty, pushups and endless hours of drill practice on the always windy parade deck. However there was one exception. Assigned to OCS in military exchange duty was a British Royal Marine Colour Sgt. A big, red headed easy going guy (who could run like a race horse) he was the official “PT” instructor for the NCO school, and a talented experienced leader in all respects. He gave us a class one day on the fundamentals of physical training. All old school stuff, eat 3 balanced meals away, PT everyday, don’t smoke, drink in moderation and try to get enough rest. Pretty tame compared to all the flashy high tech training advice you see 24/7 in the media today. While It was a good class, it was pretty forgettable except for one thing he said that I never forgot right up to this minute. That was he statement “don’t confuse efforts with results.” When your trying to get in shape and maybe lose some weight you have stick with what works. Don’t waste anytime beating your head on the wall trying to make something work that sounds good, but doesn’t really work. In my book “Corps Strength” I outline a simple and effective fitness plan that when applied correctly will get you, and keep you in outstanding physical condition and help keep your weight under control. High tech and high price aside, what the old Colour Sgt knew almost 30 years ago is just as true today. Is that in the end what counts is results and little else.

Good luck and be safe,
MGunz

Tags: Corps Strength

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 25th, 2012 at 11:53 and is filed under Corps Strength, Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.