Different Fitness levels for Space Marines?

Normal humans have to work out to gain muscle. It doesn't just grow.

Naturally space marines are genetically engineered to be bigger and more muscular, but even among them, would a Space Marine that works out (a lot more) than a Space Marine that doesn't (a lot less) create an obvious difference? Or do they all get the same muscles regardless of how much or how little they work out.

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There are variations in athletic ability between marines, yeah. Given the nature of their implants, the "bottom floor" of how unfit they can get is probably still way above peak, unaugmented human. Barring drastic stuff like starvation or grievous injuries of course.

The laziest, most unmotivated Marine neet in existence would still be superhumanly strong and tough, just probably not very effective at war-making.

>The laziest, most unmotivated Marine neet in existence would still be superhumanly strong and tough, just probably not very effective at war-making.
Or at least, not very effective compared to his brothers but still probably Rambo compared to us.

I'm mostly curious how he looks like lined up and shirtless next to his GAINS brother astartes.

>my feet hurt
>this boltgun is too loud
>I'm hungry
>I wish I was at home playing Sororitas Academy

super organs aside. space marines are fundamentally human and human muscles grow in response to stimulus so probably. maybe sergeants are chosen for the amount of time they spend pumping iron and that's why they get an extra attack in melee.

They train daily, though there are differences in style of training and food intake.

I.E, Blood Angel Assault Marine might be AESTHETIC AS FUCK while oldfag Space Wolf might have a bit of musclegut going on beneath that armor of his because he's eating, drinking and sitting around with a fuck off big gun instead of wrestling Ork Nobs.

I just remembered that Scout Marines are fresh Astartes recruits who have undergone all the implants and are physically the same as their brothers. And they're typically displayed as skinnier than their comrades (well it may just be the lack of armor).

So maybe they are a good comparison? They are all built like The Rock anyway, but they do feel skinnier compared to a marine regular.

scout marines are still young so their muscles and skeletons are still growing.

>The laziest, most unmotivated Marine neet in existence

Tell me more.

>Naturally space marines are genetically engineered to be bigger and more muscular

HERESY! VIOLATION OF HUMAN PURITY!

SMs are biologically engineered, that is, they're cyborgs whose implants are organic. They don't suffer changes in their genomes. Although I don't know what makes marines become physically and mentally similar to their primarchs. Is it genetic, warp shenanigans, what? I like the idea of psychically enhanced psychosomatic identification.

It's both genetic and warp-touched.

Genetic because the gene-seed is brought forth from Primarchs originally, and Space Marines are indeed sculpted partly in the image of their Primarch. You get it with various references to taking on the appearance of their Primarch, or at least resemblances to them (to greater or lesser degrees).

It's warp-touched because the Primarchs are in part warp-spawned from the power that the Emperor stole from the Chaos Gods and then employed in the creation of said Primarchs (like the warpstorm of energy that occurs when Ferrus is decapitated by Fulgrim). In one of the HH stories, a Blank asks a Primarch if they would still be such if they were an Astartes, and the reply is no, the gene-seed "fills you up" and gives you a warp presence, overriding the Pariah gene. (The implication is that Blanks had been made into Astartes, which was how he knew.) From this, the reasonable speculation is that the changes wrought on both body and mind from the gene-seed instills character traits of the Primarch from whom said gene-seed is derived. Rowboat alludes to it in Dark Imperium.

That's a human thing, Apes for example don't lose muscle mass when they don't exercize, fixing it with the level of genetic engineriing going into a Space Marine should be trivial.

The best I can think of for an example of an objectively unhealthy marine is Haeger
wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Haegr

But I honestly don't think it'd be possible for a Marine to naturally lose their muscle. Maybe it can be hidden under a layer of fat like Haeger, but I can't imagine with all those implants their muscles fade.

Combine that with their indoctrination and how active they almost always are and I don't think there'd be too many loyalist Marines you could call "unhealthy".

Pic related, Haeger is bottom right.

>misspelling his name every time
>proper spelling is right there

Arjac Rockfist can be said to be the strongest natty marine if you take into account he's S5. Considering the difference between S4 and S3 is that of marine and guardsman, one can only wonder what kind of beast Arjac is.

>It doesn't just grow.
It does, technically. Testosterone triggers the proliferation of muscle cells - we just don't produce enough for muscles to grow while doing nothing.

However, here's a study showing that doing nothing while on a steroid cycle (IE, just increasing your serum-T levels while being a lazy neet) led to more strength and muscular gain than that of normal men actually working out in most categories.

It's basically impossible to starve a marine. They can eat almost anything as long as it's carbon-based.

Correction, the study shows neet + serum-T beats normal man working out in muscule mass gain but not in strength gain. That's kind of important because it's indicative of the importance of neuromuscular efficiency (training a muscle to perform better even at the same mass).

I mean look at that bench press. Baby little tiny gains in tri's (compared to cyling neet) still resorted in a greater strength gain. Sure, they should have included chest mass, but it still says a lot.

Can't they eat solid iron bars or at least slowly chew them?

With the acid they make? Fuck dude, maybe.

Tell me in your own words, do you believe solid iron bars are carbon-based?

If I remember correctly in a black library book there was a marine who was short, so he worked out until he was so swole he was ordered to stop because he was becoming too big for his armour

>Apes for example don't lose muscle mass when they don't exercize
This sounds like an absolute falsehood. Every animal I know of suffers muscle atrophy if they don't exercise. Do you have proof?

Nope, but it helps them avoid anaemia...

Due to nothing other than a hormonal deficit, pic related maintains this level of mass eating nothing but grass and perhaps some grains if he's been a good boy. I'd say that an astartes' build is probably mostly based off how they genetically adapt to their augmentations rather than any training or diet measures. Skill, on the other hand, is all about the training.

Consider that a normal, regular human can grow a tremendous amount of muscle by injecting steroids and growth hormones and doing absolutely no physical exercise. They would ofcourse grow more with exercise, but stimulus is not needed for some level of growth. Look it up if you doubt it, this has been tested.

Already posted in this thread, nukka.

I vaguely remember in ~old lore~ that in some rare cases where regular Marines (so no special cases like that 1000 year old Blood Angels guy) go past the 500 year mark (which is REALLY fucking rare, average marine won't live past 250), they become too weak to keep up with normal marines. They can still rip the head off an Ork, but not like they used to do. So they get Imperial functions that require inhuman soldiers outside a battlefield context.

It's referenced once or twice in the Dark Angels books by Gav Thorpe that the Marines who putter around the Rock doing administrative stuff are either too old or too fucked up to keep fighting.

So there is likely a retirement age or like it, but I imagine Marines that do live to be that old are probably FUBAR or whatever the Marine equivalent is, considering how long Long Claws keep fighting.

This seems like one of those lore questions that has about 50 answers and they are all apparently canon.

I'm remembering from the first 2-3 books from the HH series that old Luna Wolf who is considered kind of a joke by everyone because of how old the guy is. Doesn't he end up dying fighting that mute bodyguard who was being transitioned into Astartes, or does he beat him? I can't remember but either way, that guy was apparently old as fuck and fairly useless as a warrior.

They can eat iron bars due to their acid spit. He didn't say that it would sustain them.

Also
>iron bars
>in the 41 millennium

They'll be steel, so they'll have some carbon in them anyway.

Plasteel, more like, and who knows what that's like.

Apes most definitely lose muscle mass if they laze about. Animals just happen to have a different baseline of biological muscle mass than humans.

Humans are more similar to wolves and other lithe animals. We massively favor endurance over strength. Humans perform tasks at their leisure that would kill most other animals on the planet. You'll never see an ape become a triathlete, and even horses would regularly get run into the ground trying to keep up with marching armies of man.

>considering how long Long Claws keep fighting.
To be perfectly fair here, it could well differ depending on the Chapter and how their gene-seed has or hasn't mutated over the centuries.

Long Claws might naturally be more long-lived than other Chapters, like how Blood Angels seem to have more examples of supremely-aged warriors than, say, the Ultramarines.

Like I said, 50 answers all of which are canon.

I'm inclined to agree with you, the answer if we asked a BL writer would probably be "Whatever you want dude."

Apes spend 90% of their lives lazing around mang. Males especially. Much like male lions, they need to rest all day to conserve energy in case they have to rekt some challenger.

Animals that exercise are fitter than animals that don't.

I know what you're saying but just to clarify, it should also be noted that steroid users who exercise will still be far stronger than those who don't

Marines (or anything else wuth accelerated muscle growth) will benefit more from it if they exercise, that's pretty basic stuff. Even if they were simply grafted with purely vat grown muscle, they'd still benefit more from exercise.

> Even if they were simply grafted with purely vat grown muscle, they'd still benefit more from exercise.

Which by all accounts they get in massive amounts. Plus it's hinted at pretty heavily in some books that Chaplains enforce more standards than just the moral/spiritual. I suspect any chaplaincy worth it's salt would fuck a Marine up if they slacked.

So do powerlifters. Training purely for strength requires relatively little actual time, and apes (gorillas more so) who live in the wild spend at least a bit of their time bending thick as fuck branches to get to the leaves or just to get a closer look at random shit.

There's a couple of other s5 marines, the one that springs to mind is autek Mor, who patented the red talons that ended up as an IH successor, created clan Morragul and also made the tactical assault moon that was dropped on traitor shits

There are genetic mutations which can cause animals to just gain muscle like crazy. They don't survive in nature because building muscle beyond what you use is generally a waste of biological resources, but there's no physical reason you can't engineer an organism to just get muscular without exercise. Given the degree of engineering which went into the marines and some of the really crazy shit they can do, that would be relatively trivial and would make a lot of sense: every hour they don't spend lifting weights or whatever is an hour they can spend training marksmanship or something.

There are mutations that can result in humans gaining muscle like crazy too, although I think that's more a lack of a particular inhibitor in our bodies in those cases. The human body isn't built to take that kind of strain outside of high-stress situations.

>so no special cases like that 1000 year old Blood Angels guy) go past the 500 year mark (which is REALLY fucking rare, average marine won't live past 250)
Hey is this true for ALL space marines? I mean, the normal ones not like rubricae or daemonic ones

If you take a space marine from 30k and put him on a planet away from danger with medical care, its very unlikely he'd survive into the 40k with out intervention like more implants and such?

I can't imagine that sort of mutation would compare to muscles gained from actual exercise. It sounds more like a tumor type thing.

Maybe its the perspective, but this art doesn't do Haeger justice, especially if he's supposed to be the space marine equivalent of "The Mountain"

from a logistic standpoint bigger muscles require more calories and therefore are less preferable than smaller ones built for endurance. that's why you don't see soldiers in boot camp pumping iron rather than doing hundreds of pushups and running for miles each day.

It's a deficiency in what's called myostatin, which increases muscle generation at the cost of some skeletal force application. Also results in babies looking ripped as fuck within a week or two of birth.

Not a biologist, so I couldn't tell you much more.

Space Marines are effectively immortal. They just don't get much older that 250 years because they fight wars on a daily basis.

You do realise that the only reason you grow muscles from exercise is because your brain tells your body to grow more muscles with a chemical because the muscles are becoming ripped (as in literally ripped open) and damaged from exercise.

That's literally the only reason why you grow muscles.

There is literally no difference between some mutant who grows muscle from doing nothing, and some hardworking fitness freak.

One did so without medical care

wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Gravius


Of course he was barely alive by then

That was Iacton Qruze the "half heard".

I'm pretty sure he wasn't full astartes though was he? He was there during the unification wars

Isn't it fairly normal in the 40k universe for humans to live for several hundred years thanks to their technology? Archmagos cawl is well over 10,000 years old for example.

Doesn't that only apply to Blood Angels because of their mutations? Or do they just not age while everyone else becomes an old man and then lives forever as a badass grandpa?

yes , with rejeuvenation you can live up to somewhere between 400-500.
But even the mechanicum priests dont live forever.


Then again there is all sorts of fuckery in the 40k universe:

You could be a perpetual which is a literal immortal, and every time you die you just come back.

You could stay in stasis.

There could be warp shenanigans, the warp sort of distorts time.

*by the way that is not normal, you have to be very rich to afford those treatments to last to 400+, i assume some moderately rich people could afford another 40-120 years, the majority of people, the ones on the farms and in the factories and mines, probably cant afford any treatment at all

Iacton Qruze, and yes he was full astartes. He's worth knowing because he was one of the handful of astartes around during the Horus Heresy that were around for their Legion's beginnings pre-primarch. He was considered a joke because he mentioned the old ways they used to fight and work before the Emperor found Horus and put him in charge of the Luna Wolves. He's considered a relic because of his age, most astartes don't live that long with all the wars happening.

Also to the guy before you he did not die. He killed Maggard (the mute) and escaped with the Iterators to Eisenhorn frigate which was then stolen by Loyalist Death Guard captain Garro and flown to Tera. Kind of.

>but there's no physical reason you can't engineer an organism to just get muscular without exercise
Yeah, it's called a "Grotesque." The haemonculi just injects them with shit and lets their muscles grow as much as they desire - it's practically just aesthetic to them over function, since they all take the same role of "meatbag" anyways. And these are muscled-up eldar, keep in mind, who are historically lithe even when superstrong, though they've proven to be able to do this with marines, tau, orks, nids, anything they gets their claws on, really.

As you say Autek Mor is an Iron Hand and also T5 and I4 so he might not count as being true S5. Maybe he has used bionics to boost strength and toughness at the cost of speed since regular praetors are I5.

A space marine's day has almost no what we would call free-time. It's all just combat exercise and meditation/prayer and a communal meal.

Space marines don't have enough spare time to be lazy, there are no space marines staying home and watching shows while the rest go to the gym.

On top of this you have the fact that space marines aspirants either basically win the olympics to get recruited like on Ultramar, or they are some kind of feral-world teenage Conan or Rambo types.

There's no such thing as a lazy unmotivated Space Marine.

He killed Maggard on one of the crusade ships and fled to Terra on the Eisenstein after Isstvan III's purge began, then eventually got killed on board the Vengeful Spirit on a semi-suicide mission. He was also a full astartes, and was derided more for his strict adherence to "the old ways" and loyalty to Big E above all else more than any lack of combat ability. He was still an astartes and a veteran of the Great Crusade after all, could kick any random sergeant's arse.

It's also worth mentioning that for a regular before getting jacked up by the 63rd fleet's medicae into some sort of gland warrior/half astartes human, Maggard was a fucking badass, serving as a rememberancer's bodyguard and the chief enforcer of Maloghurst, one of Horus' most trusted lieutenants.

Everything is relative. Among the space marines, surely there are those who stick to baseline and those who go above and beyond.

Just as us.

What do you imagine "going above and beyond" looks like?

The Space Marine daily rituals looks as follows:

0400 Morning Prayer+announcements etc
0500 Morning Firing Rites (target practice)
0700 Battle Practice (usually close quarters)
1200 Midday Prayer+dealing with injuries from battle practice.
1300 Midday Meal
1315 Tactical Indoctrination
1500 Battle Practice (often combined arms)
2000 Evening Prayer and gene-seed testing
2100 Evening Meal
2130 Night Firing Exercise
2315 Maintenance Rituals (fixing gear)
2345 Free Time
0000 Rest Period.

That's 1 Hour 15 minutes of spare time where they are not already constantly practicing. They already do 10 hours of combat practice where they are exerting themselves NOT COUNTING target practice.

Space Marines rely a lot more on their implants and gene/hormonal therapy to maintain muscle mass than on lifting junk, going to the gym for one hour per day is unlikely to make a difference when you look at how much effort they already put in.

That said, of course there's going to be some space marines that are bigger and stronger than others, people are different and there are lore examples, but a space marine doesn't really have the time to spare to make a meaningful difference just based on being more motivated or putting in effort.

Its largely up to them /squad leader to practice, they spar and do target practice for fun anyway.

Salamanders drop in on their relatives and make fun stuff in the forge

Raven guard mope about

White scars have races

Iron Hands diddle machines

Black Templars Pray

Blood angels make stained glass, paintings and sculptures, some of their descendants also like to drink blood.

Dark Angels .... nobody knows, classified, knight stuff probably


Space wolves spend their post-training time drinking, eating and hitting each other with chairs, or hunting , unless they are having a feast with story time.

Ultramarines spend it drinking wine with their friends and wandering about their palace/fortress

Imperial Fists probably spend it playing strategy simulators on the cogigators

Also for 30k thousand sons you should add in their making wine (apparently Ahriman's was great) , playing chess, reading/ sorcery and going to cafes/ about Tizca. They had a decent life tbf.


Perturabuo had time to make a clockwork miniature titan

>Salamanders drop in on their relatives
Why are Salamanders so based? They actually care about average people. I really think they approximate a lot more closely to what the Emperor had in mind when he thought of Guardian Angels for humanity.

Blood Ravens practice their subterfuge and commandeering skills, and have a healthy respect for collecting

Ultramarines do too, depending on the Smurf.

So do Celestial Lions.

It's absolutely not "largely up to them" to follow the Codex Astartes. Yes, chapters have variations in their practices, but don't imagine that they have tons of free time because of that.

Pre-heresy might have been different, but post-heresy the codex greatly shifted the emphasis towards the more monastic, rigorously monitored and structured lifestyle. To quote several editions of space marine codex, even the 75 minutes of free time they have is viewed as dangerous and frivolous by some.

I didn't just make up this schedule for my own headcanon, it's been in GW print since before most of the people in this thread were born.

Big black bros , you just cannot dislike them.

The Thousand sons were pretty good at interacting with people too as they respected knowledge and Tizca was full of knowledgeable people. They worked in hospitals helping to heal people with their sorcery and had big gardens around their pyramids.
Also cafes where the people knew what you really wanted so you never had to order. Genuinely if i had to choose a world prospero sounded the comfiest.

It's kind of ironic really, that Rowboat gets back and looks at what the Codex has become, facepalms, and proceeds to entirely and completely ignore giant chunks of the thing.

Makes you wonder if the Codex regimens were actually beneficial at all. After all, what exactly was Robby G ignoring after he got back?

Nice get

You know what lore is like user, everything conflicts and the other stuff is skub.

I am just going off the books such as the ultramarines series with uriel where while sgts do make their squads practice, everyone seems to have time, between deployments, to visit the memorial halls and catch up with their friends over inexplicably obtained wine or go and speak to the chaplain etc.

>looks at what the Codex has become, facepalms, and proceeds to entirely and completely ignore giant chunks of the thing.
I haven't read the new books. Are there any explicit examples rather than it just being part of his "oh man the Imperium sucks ass now" mood?

Oh god, even in M41, gym manlet syndrome persists.

I'd say the big ones were that he said it was a bad choice to go with Chapters in general and split the Legions, along with how he founded the 11th companies and kept half the new Primaris in legion-esque formation. That in itself is a huge shift in thinking.

You know just as well as I do that there is a chapter of space NEETS that function as a scary bureaucratic beat-stick for the Administrautum to function as Superhuman Auditors. All their gear is absurdly old, because no one really dies in combat other than getting swamped trying to clean up the 40k DMV.

And then they spend all their time researching tau holovids for the Inquisition, the fucking weebs.

Thanks for the explanation dude.

I figure that if the gene itself is anulled, that's pure genetic change as you say. AFAIK, not even chimeric cells could make such an effect.

Aww, baby space marines

I want to know all about Lazy Marine

Ah yes. The Beta Legion.

>Normal humans have to work out to gain muscle

Sure, but when we were hunter gatherers we didn't because the things we'd consider heavy exercise today would be just daily activities back then, like running miles to chase down your dinner or throwing spears. These sorts of muscles would develop naturally.

I'd imagine it's similar for a marine. They will all be of fairly similar fitness due to their implants but also from their activity; a marine who is seeing combat every couple of months will probably maintain a good level of muscle. Marines spend a lot of their time training when outside of combat so they will all be fairly swole.

Isn't this the second thread we've had in a couple of days about body building and SM?
Are we being raided by Veeky Forums?

It's not that, the cover art is just awful.

Who does the artwork styled like these? I remember the 5th ed marine codex was full of them and I think its my favourite style of 40k art.

And aside from one Space Yiff with a genetic defect they also can't get fat.

>IF arguing about borders in grand strategy games or most effective fortifications in Total War