It’s hard to find anyone who knows more about human mental and physical fortitude than a Marine, and Coach Cyrus Rustom believes that civilians could learn a thing or two from the commandos.
“I think people need a Marine in their life”, says Coach Cyrus, owner and trainer at Boxica Dubai. The ex- Royal Marines commando served in Afghanistan on Operation Herrick in 2006, and his story alone is likely enough to get you off the couch today- regardless of what the weather app says.
“Multiple skull fractures, a crushed eye socket, and a severed broken jaw in 3 places.”
The result of the occupational hazards around Coach Cyrus’ tour in Afghanistan would change him forever, and unprecedentedly for the better. Time would become a currency in commitment, as he dove head first into a demanding regime of psychological and physical therapy.
Two grueling weeks in an intensive care unit, followed by another six weeks of recovery in the heart of Oman— Cyrus’ story reads like a saga of sheer perseverance.
Something that becomes clear from the outside looking in (especially when learning he trained and competed in Muay Thai for two years after his tour), is that everything is about mindset to Coach Cyrus.
Even opening Boxica at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, a brand-new gym based in hard work, sweat, and movement was able to thrive in his objective to build a strong community around health in the heart of Studio City.
Through his own determination, Coach Cyrus has learnt what it truly means to be relentless, and that unique perspective is what he brings to the Coaching space.
Read our full conversation on growth, fitness, resilience and the power of cold exposure therapy below.
Coach Cyrus sits down with Esquire Middle East
You’ve been a Coach for 15 years and before that you were a royal marines commander for five years. Did your experience in the Marines influence the way you Coach civilians now?
CC: Most people want to improve something about their body. I would say 90 percent of people know what to do; its not rocket science- you eat right, you get in shape.
Where I come in with my military experience is the mindset aspect of it. When you take someone who is out of shape, goes to the gym, eats well, most people fall off the wagon after a few weeks or months, and they’re not consistent over the long term.
The difference I bring in with my experience in the Royal Marines is the mindset aspect of keeping them on track in building habits. It’s building discipline, so that they stay on the path long enough to get the results.
You’re essentially coaching and mentoring in both but are those two groups different in the approach you have to take?
CC: I think people need a Marine in their life. Everyone’s too soft.
I just like to be honest. In the Marines, when you make a mistake, you’re taught to immediately own up to it. You take the punishment, whatever it is, and then you move forward with a clean slate with complete honesty. You can’t lie or cheat your way through commando training, you need to be 100% honest with what you’re good at and what you’re not good at. Being brutally honest, I feel is something that people need- they need a coach, they need a Marine who is going to call them on that BS and say, “No, that’s not how it is. You are actually looking a little sloppy, we need to get you to here”. It makes them realize “Oh okay, wow. He’s right. Let’s do it”.
And it sounds like that marine mindset comes with not only honesty to others, but honesty with yourself when you’re slacking especially in fitness.
CC: It’s hard for people to be honest with themselves. Usually, people think things are okay until they see a photo, or video of themselves that they didn’t realize was being taken and it gets sent to them. And they see their body at a certain angle where they weren’t expecting to see it, they look at it, and they go, “Oh, my God, how did things get so bad?”.
They’re looking at themselves every day in the mirror, and it’s hard to see what’s in your bubble. It takes someone from the outside to kind of make you realize.
During your time in the service, you sustained a pretty serious head injury would you tell me a little bit about that and how it changed you?
We’re in Afghanistan and it was 2006. It was my head that essentially got crushed between two trucks. There’s body armor on the truck to protect it, and my head just happened to be the exact height of where the armor started. I completely broke my eye socket and the right side of my skull. I cracked my skull in various places, I broke my jaw in three places, and it was unhinged. I’ve lost certain sight aspects in one eye, hearing, and at the time it was quite serious. I was in intensive care for two weeks, and then they moved me to a facility in Oman, where I could recover for six weeks.
As you can imagine, I was feeling quite sorry for myself, right? They wouldn’t let me look at myself in the mirror for the longest time but when I did, my head was swollen and black, and you could barely see my eyes. It was quite a mess.
It was in this facility while I was healing that there was a guy on the opposite of me who had obviously become disabled. He couldn’t do anything for himself. The nurses had to do everything for him- Feed him, wash him, change him, couldn’t go to the washroom, couldn’t do anything. And he was trying to bite himself.
After a few days there, I asked the nurse what happened this guy. She told me that a few months back, he was driving with his mum and sister in the car, and it crashed. Mum and sister both died and he was permanently disabled for the rest of his life.
I didn’t know this at the time, but a man came in to see him every day and it was his dad. His son had obviously lost his wife and his daughter and he would come in every day and just smiled at me and say, “Hi, how are you?” and asked me how I’m doing. And I heard this story and I was just like, “why am I feeling sorry for myself?”. That just put things into perspective for me immediately
Is perspective sort of the thing that that still drives you? How do you find the determination to keep the pedal on the gas, what motivates you?
CR: People think that everyone who joins the military is disciplined, right? But you’ve got no choice but to be disciplined in the military. You want to get out of bed late, you’ll get physically punished for hours. Cold, wet, hard, physical pain. So it’s either you get out of bed, or you get immediate pain. So it’s easy to be to be disciplined. But when you leave the military, there’s no immediate consequences to you being slack. You wake up a little bit later, not do your work out, you can go and have a few drinks, you can gain a bit of weight, nobody’s there to put you in check- you’re just on your own. You can abuse and slowly kill yourself if you want.
And so I learned after leaving and joining civilian life and traveling to Thailand that I need to stay on top of my own discipline and my own routines. I left the military a long time ago in 2007. But I’ve learned over the time that I need to keep myself in check. I mentally feel low, sluggish, demotivated and negative when I’m not on top of my daily habits. I feel like crap. I don’t have that drive anymore, I feel low in energy, I’m getting negative thoughts, I don’t believe in myself, I don’t feel positive about the future.
But flip that around, when I do implement the habits that I learned in the military like waking up early, doing a workout, getting the blood flowing, getting those endorphins going, I’m physically elevating my mindset first thing in the morning to make sure I’m not in that negative space. I stack these positive habits on top of each other so that I’m elevating myself every day into this next level. That’s what drives me to stay disciplined and stay on my fitness. People think it’s just “fitness is fitness”, and the rest of your life is the rest of your life. It’s not how you do anything, it’s how you do everything.
If you wake up early, do you work out and you stay on your nutrition, you have these discipline habits that you follow that permeate into all aspects of your life and start believing in yourself. Fitness and nutrition is very simple. It’s not complicated, but it’s the hardest thing for people to do. So if you can get hold of that, and you can conquer that aspect of your life, you quickly start believing that you can do anything.
it’s definitely difficult for people because habits come with almost a daily set of decisions to be made like “should I go to the gym?”. But when you accomplish those things, you start the day with a win, and it sort of fuels you to keep going.
CC: You have to reframe it into it being a non-negotiable habit. And this is what I do with my clients is I stack these non negotiable habits into their lives and I hold them accountable. When there’s no decision involved, you just do these things that are good for you, that are positive, that will elevate your mindset to bring you into that level and be this different, elevated person. As much as possible, try not to make it a decision, and try to make it habit.
What do you do to maintain your mental health? Why do you do these monthly ice bath events at Boxica?
CC: We have them every month where we focus on the breathing and we do the ice baths. Most people when they get stressed, the first thing that changes is their breath. They mouth breathe and they start using their chest and their shoulders. They’re going into a fight or flight stress response.
In life, it doesn’t matter whether it’s physical or mental. Your body will go into that stress response from emails, WhatsApp, calls, daily life-work things. So why we do the ice bath? Well, it’s a very acute stressor.
It’s cold, really cold. So when you get in, your mind goes into that stress response and you repeatedly tell yourself to get out. How we combat that is through breath.
We breathe in slowly through the nose, we hold that breath, and we breathe out nice and slow in a very long exhale. And anyone reading this now can try it- just inhale deeply through the nose, hold it for two to three seconds, and try and exhale for 10 seconds. Do five to 10 of those breaths you’re going to feel physically and mentally completely different.
A combination of ice-bath, breathing, and sauna is great too. If you do ice-baths and sauna together, you will feel absolutely fantastic after- no negative thoughts coming in, you’re just completely relaxed, open and free.
You’ve just pushed yourself to spend minutes at a time in this freezing cold water which is hard on its own. You’ve conquered that, you’ve got in the heat, suffered and sweated. Once you’ve done that a few times, you feel like you can tackle and do anything.
It seems like what works about the ice baths is again perspective even on a subconscious or biological level. You’re putting yourself through that high point of stress so that the baseline is more normal.
CC: For sure. Imagine you woke up tomorrow morning at 5am and you did three rounds of three minutes in the ice. So a total of nine minutes in the freezing cold. You conquer your breath and your mind during those nine minutes.
Do you think anything normal can happen to you throughout the day that would throw you off track after just spending nine minutes in zero degree temperature controlling your breath? There’s nothing that’s gonna happen in your day that’s going to be worse than that. It’s nothing- bring it on.
You opened up Boxica in what anyone would say is the worst time to do so in 2020 in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic, how did you navigate owning a gym during that time? That seems like a high-stress situation.
CC: In March of 2020 pre-lockdowns, I was with my business partner who speaks to a lot of business leaders from around the world. And he told me, “I think we’re gonna go into this lockdown, where we have to stay in our houses” and I was laughing at him! Sure enough, two weeks later we were in a lockdown.
During that period, I was lucky in the sense that I had my background, to stay level headed with the military training and everything that I do mindset wise with my habits. I have a rock solid business partner, someone that is a seasoned businessman that can see through things like this, and can assure me that everything’s going to be alright, even though at the time nobody knew it was going to be okay. We didn’t know what was going to happen. Everyone was panicking. But we kept the ship sailing in the right direction.
We opened with one studio and it was tough to be honest. It was supposed to have thirty people in a class and it was down to seven because of the spacing. My life savings went into this thing and we had all these overheads. The first year was tough. Nobody wanted to go inside of a small studio and train with people. But through building the community, focusing on the people, we got through it, and then we started to get busy.
We decided to expand and there were some shops spaces free in the building. So we took another risk and we took the rent on three other shops in the same building at the same time. We didn’t really know what we were going to do. We just said, “The shops are there, we’re growing, Let’s just take them and figure it out on the way”.
We moved from the original studio which was focused on boxing and fitness, We started an indoor cycling studio first, then we took one of the shops and turned it int a cafe.
We also took the massive back-side of the building and built a full size strength and conditioning area out there. So we’ve got all this space now that’s expanded to be this whole thing which has 600 Members, we’re doing a million dollars a year in revenue, and by all sense of the word, were a successful business.
How do you prioritize recovery within the world of training?
CC: It depends on the individual. Most people that come to Boxica are not athletes, they are regular people with families, and stressful jobs and lives. Their priority is not getting abs, or being this top level athlete, they want to be fit and healthy for their family. They want to look good. They want an un-intimidating, friendly environment to come to train, and not have young kids with their tops off smacking their chests and messing around like other boutique studios in Dubai. Boxica is more of a friendly and chill atmosphere. So for the demographic that we have- business people, mid to high income, stressful lives, recovery is a priority, it’s something that they need to focus on.
At the same time, I don’t know many people that “train too much”. Most people don’t train enough. People think they’re overtraining when they’re training three, four or five times a week. They’re not.
I always encourage things like the ice baths, sauna, breathing. Yoga and stretching as well and to take at least one day off a week when you’re not training.
The funny thing is, when people get tired, they feel mentally drained. And they feel that the body’s too tired to work out. That’s really the opposite. They need to work out more to get their energy, to get their mind right, and to get that momentum going.
Is the hardest part about working out actually starting the process initially?
CC: Absolutely, they make it bigger than what it is. You know, the gym is an intimidating place especially if you’ve let yourself go a little bit. You walk into a gym and there’s some fit people in there and you may feel embarrassed or intimidated. It’s a real thing.
And it’s a shame because people need to go to a gym to feel comfortable and to better themselves, everyone’s there to better themselves. So we try and break down that barrier to make it easy for people to start. We do that by creating a great team. Making sure that the front of house team are friendly and welcoming. Making sure that everyone that comes for the first time comes 15 minutes earlier so they can spend time with the coach. The coach can assure them, speak to them about any injuries they have, show them how the studios work, and build a little bit of a relationship with that person so they know “Cyrus has got my back”.
The lights are a bit darker in the studio so its not like everything’s on show. You’re in your own space. Nobody’s watching you. So we try and break down those walls and barriers for entry so everyone can feel comfortable without being judged.
With the feedback you’ve gotten, it seems like you’ve applied the army mindset of being one team and applied that to the gym as well.
CC: We are a team. We’re a second home for people that can speak to us about anything. We know their names, the kids names, and the dog’s names. We have events outside of the gym to build that community. Boxica is four walls with some lights and some dumbbells. It’s just a place. It’s the people and the personalities, and the community that made it Boxica.
If you want to get a high intensity cardio workout, you can get it. If you want to do a full body strength training workout, you can get it. Strongman workout, cycling, boxing, fitness, yoga, nutritional coaching, all under one roof. We create results and that’s all fantastic. But the fact that you’re building a relationship with these people is even more important as serves two purposes. The person feels great coming, speaking to like minded people that feel comfortable in the environment. But it also keeps them consistent.
Because you’ll leave a gym, which walls and some dumbbells for a place that’s got nicer paint on the walls and nicer looking dumbbells.You won’t think twice about it. But you won’t leave a relationship that easily. friend It’s like looking a friend in the face and saying, “Yeah, we’re not gonna hang around with each other anymore”. It takes six months, twelve months, to build that relationship that keeps them in the game long enough to actually see the results as well. So it’s like a positive cycle.
Find out more about Coach Cyrus’ results based fitness at boxica.ae.