Physical Training Instructor

FLD 360 · Fieldcraft, Tactics, and Soldiering · Level 300 (intermediate; selected soldiers and non-commissioned officers)

A Royal Army College course on planning, leading, and safely conducting the physical training of others.

Course length: 10 hours, studied online and asynchronously at the student's own pace, together with any in-person practical instruction and assessment the course requires.

Foreword

The College builds a recruit's fitness through a self-paced plan, the Recruit Fitness Programme, proven against the Annual Fitness Test as the Physical Training Component. That works for the individual training alone. But a unit needs people who can take a group and train it: who can write a sound programme, lead a session safely, get results without breaking the people they lead, and hold the standard fairly. That is the work of the physical training instructor, and this course prepares selected soldiers and non-commissioned officers for it.

The instructor's first duty is not fitness but safety. Physical training improves health and readiness, but done carelessly or driven by ego it injures, sometimes seriously and sometimes for life. An instructor holds other people's bodies in trust. So this course teaches the principles of training and how to apply them, but it puts the duty of care first throughout, and it is explicit that the instructor works within their competence and refers what is beyond it to medical and specialist staff.

The course teaches the instructor's role and the duty of care; the principles on which all training rests; how to build and periodise a programme toward a goal; how to conduct a safe and effective session; how to train strength, endurance, and good movement; the particular demands of load carriage and military conditioning; recovery, nutrition, and the prevention and recognition of injury; and how to test, hold standards, and keep honest records.

How this course works

This is an intermediate instructor course. Its knowledge is studied online, lesson by lesson, but physical training is taught by doing, so the instructor qualification is completed and certified in person, under qualified physical-training and medical supervision, through a practical instruction assessment. The course assumes the soldier already meets the Army's own fitness standard. It is to be reviewed by qualified medical and physical-training authority before it takes effect.

Structure

Where this sits

This course is the instructor tier of the ground the Basic Training Manual sets out in Module 11 (physical training); the recruit standard itself is carried by the Recruit Fitness Programme and proven through the Physical Training Component, which this course teaches a soldier to deliver to others. It runs with Field Health, Hygiene, and Sanitation (MED 210) for the care of the body, Combat First Aid (MED 201) for the recognition and treatment of injury, and Foundations of Military Leadership (LDR 201) for leading and developing people.

A note on sources

This is the College's own course, written fresh in Kaharagian and Commonwealth terms on established physical-training and sports-science principles, adapting them rather than reproducing them, with the safety of the trained always before performance. It is written in formal British English and carries Crown Copyright. Its examples are illustrative and use generic settings, since the Principality holds no territory of its own. It is a draft for command and medical approval and is not a substitute for qualified medical advice.

Crown Copyright © 2026 | Published by Authority of H.R.H. The Prince of Kaharagia