Physical and Mental Training

In Singapore every male citizen unless they are willing to pay a $75,000(USD) exemption has to take part in a 2 year compulsory Military service. Every boy in the country can strip an m16 in 20 seconds.

Sitting on the Maze Green at uni this week with a Singaporean friend was definetly one of those conversations I will not forget. The way he talked about his time in national service and the things he told me about it were very interesting, and made me think about training in a different way.

Before you get posted to different units (eg if you will be a pilot, or be part of the creative and performing arts unit) every person goes through a 3 month basic training camp. Most of it is just fitness. It was just the whole wake up at 5am, go on some ridiculously long run, do a lot of push ups, chin ups and other body weight exercises eat and then move to the 'mental' training part of the day which he basically said was a brainwashing session about how good the government was.

However the physical training had a double use not just for making them into fit machines, but as well a large aspect of it was the mental training side of it. He told me a few stories about it. The first one he recounted is quite often you were given impossible tasks like they were sleeping at the top of a 4 storey building and had to get to the top and change from battle order suit (battle outfit incl webbing, ammunution, rations etc) and get into their dress clothes in a minute, if they don't they have a push up penalty. Obviously this is an impossible task but every time the crowd would be waiting at the bottom in the half pushup position and take a 20 pushup penalty once they were done. It wasn't uncommon to have days of 1000 pushups. He said there were given a lot of pointless and impossible tasks like this one that they were penalised for if they could not be done.

They went on ridiculously long marches in their I think it was called full battle order which is basically everything they would need to go to war for a week which ends up being about 35 kilos of gear. This would be up to 30 kilometre marches on some occasions.

Every week on Friday there was a fitness test which included pushups, situps, chinups and then a timed 2.4km run. If by the end of boot camp you didn't pass this test it meant coming back on saturdays and sundays until you were fit enough to leave bootcamp and then get posted elsewhere.

His last 'fitness' story was a week called 'Hell Week' which I think was reserved for the elite commando units. It was a week of hell. They were given 30 minutes of sleep a night and went on a 5 day journey combining all the 40 km marches with 35kilos of gear, fitness testing everyday, pushups in ridiculous numbers and the rest of all the fitness.

It was at this point I asked him "how?"
"When you get to the second or third day you know that if you just keep going that time will fly. Eventually you will just fall into andunconscious state that doesn't know how to stop."

"What if you can't do it?"

"The whole point of this that there is no 'can't.' You cannot say no. You are asked to stupid, repetitive pointless things but you cannot question what you are asked to do. The whole point of this is to prepare you to just accept and do, there is no choice in what you asked to do, you just have to do it."

He told me part of the elite commando training was torture training. One aspect was drowing. They would have to perform the fitness test and at the end of it while they were gagging for air officers would grab their heads and dunk them underwater for 2 minutes. At the one minute thiry mark they would let the person up coughing and gagging for air and then shove them back down for the last 30 seconds. Unsurprisingly people did die during this procedure and there was calls to the government to stop this brutal training. The government responded that this was not for the regular solider, but the elite of the best. The sorts of guys that were expected to bring down a battallion in a group of 3.

Luckily my friend was transferred out of this unit into creative and performing arts and is exempt from the yearly fitness tests (that everyone else has to do, even out of the army) becuase of a slipped disc in his back, he laughs though pinching the fat on his stomach and fondly remembering his 8-pack and once solid body.

So what was the point of all this physical training? Those impossible tasks that no person could complete, were just there to teach them how to obey as part of one unit, and learn to master their body.

He said a lot of it was to prove to you as an individual what your body was capable of. In the first week of bootcamp you couldn't imagine yourself doing what was asked. By the end your body was resiliant and capable of things beyond the imagination.