G.0: Where Data Meets Gains
Perhaps no activity in the army is more ripe for a data disruption than our fitness. In theory, every unit in the army starts every day with fitness.1 Despite their near ubiquity, almost no units base their fitness programming on data. Few are even collecting data to improve their programs. There’s plenty there to play with, but for most of my career the army just hasn’t been interested in fitness data.
This is starting to change. The switch to the ACFT was a first step.2 The new Holistic Health and Fitness programs are another. Both are focused on improving the readiness of soldiers across the army.
The rocky rollout of these initiatives, much like the digital and data transformations, is in no small part due to senior leaders lacking the knowledge they need. For literal decades the foundation of army fitness was the ‘push-ups, sit-ups, run’ paradigm. Our senior NCOs and officers were brought up in this and for many it’s all they know how to train. A significant portion of the resistance to the implementation of the ACFT came from these senior grades.3 The ACFT was resisted by soldiers who self-defined as ‘a 300 person’ and thus couldn’t accept anything that undermined that self-perception. The APFT and it’s ‘300 perfect score’ encouraged the same plateauing of fitness that the USMC found in its marksmanship program.
The ACFT is not perfect and was not immune to senior leaders and politics putting fingers on the scales. But it is better than the APFT. This is because the ACFT was built off operational demands. It was an attempt to shift the army’s fitness paradigm to one that reflected the needs of combat. And it started it’s roll out in 2018, just as I was preparing to deploy to Iraq for a year.
I’d been relying on someone else to design my workout regimen for the vast majority of my military career — and my life for that matter. But starting in the spring of 2019, a year-long deployment as an individual augmentee meant I had to come up with my own workout plan, something I’d previously avoided.
Almost five years later, I haven’t gone back. I’m still doing my own programming, but perhaps unsurprisingly, I've kept a detailed log of what and how I've done going all the way back to May of 2019.
This next series of Downrange Data posts is going to take a bit of a tangent, but I hope it’s one you’re willing to take with me. I’m going to offer up what a data informed fitness regime can look like. I’ll be sharing sources I’ve come across that helped shape the programming I’ve done, but this series will also be based heavily off those four-and-a-half years of logs since I started my own programming.
The central philosophy of my fitness has been the same one that undergirds the ACFT redesign: being ready. One of my first company commanders had a pair of key insights on this.
He was the first commander I met to not give a shit about an APFT 300. ‘You want a gold star?’ He was candid that he felt the APFT was a poor assessment of combat fitness. But it was the army’s test and so his only expectation was that we could all pass it. Always.
For an infantryman this sounded absurdly easy. Or at least it did until late one afternoon on the back end of a long week in the field. We’d just jumped out the back of the trucks behind the company headquarters and the horses could smell the barn. But suddenly our commander wanted every squad to send him representatives. In a brown t-shirt, BDUs, and running shoes, I got the worst APFT score of my career. All of us did. But we passed.
That’s what ready meant. It meant there was no ‘diagnostic’ APFT. There was no ‘month to get ready’. It meant being able to pass a second APFT right after passing the first one. There was no getting ready, just being ready.
He gave us other challenges, tasks that would test our mental and physical readiness for combat. These were typically done in conjunction with once a quarter squad competition. Which was the second insight he gave me into fitness. While our battalion commander was insisting on platoon and company fitness training, our commander pushed the programming down to the squad leaders.
Why? ‘We hold squad leaders accountable for their squad’s fitness on NCOERs. Why wouldn’t we give them the autonomy to make it?’ Much to the consternation of our battalion commander and his CSM, our company did exactly that; with impressive results. That company had the highest level of fitness I've ever seen outside of SOF.
In SOF, teams do their own programming — though we do love a team competition from time to time. There’s no company or battalion run fitness programs. The results are impressive and hard to argue with. There's no question this self-programming played a part in why only three of the 515 soldier battalion hadn’t passed the ACFT when I left command. Teams design the fitness programming that suits them and their mission.
Because the real test is not the ACFT or the APFT.
The real test comes when you haven’t rested up for a week or spent the whole day prior hydrating. It comes abruptly, when you aren’t ready and often when you didn’t want it to. It will come when you are tired and sore, and then it will turn around and test you again right after. And again.
The real test is simple. There’s just one question, and it is pass fail: ‘Are you ready?’
To help illustrate the concepts I’m discussing, I’ll also be including workouts with each of these posts.
ACFT Sprints
We rolled this first one out when it became clear there were a lot of soldiers who were apprehensive about the ACFT. Many were worried because the ACFT was asking them to do movements which were completely new to them. To help slay the demon in their imagination, we ran all the officers through the:
No rest between events. Score is total time it takes you to complete all five events to minimum standard. The soldiers who did the ACFT Sprint were all surprised at how easy it actually was. To this day some of them reach out to tell me about sharing this workout with peers who are nervous about the ACFT.4
If you’re looking for a further challenge, try out:
Score is total time. This one does get a little bit harder, but even I was surprised at how fast it went. One decision you need to make is when to start the SDC and the plank, since if you don’t get the minimum time standard, well the clock is still going…
And if you’re feeling extra 🌶, then check out …
Score is total time. If you can get the whole thing done in less than 30 minutes go celebrate with some guilt free tortilla chips.
This is, as I learned in my last assignment, factually untrue. I was dumbfounded at the lengths the majority of the soldiers in my directorate would take to avoid taking a single ACFT.
Army Combat Fitness Test. The six-event test the army adopted to replace the APFT (Army Physical Fitness Test), which consisted of a two-minute push-up event, a two-miniute sit-up event, and a two-mile run.
If you look at the standards which were set for the ACFT in 2021, which were based on the results of tens of thousands of soldiers taking diagnostic ACFTs, there is a clear drop off in the minimum and maximum scores at the mid-career ages. In fact, despite some of the rhetoric, women under 28 actually saw their maximum standards get harder from those in the APFT. The younger soldiers weren’t holding back.
The hyperlinked video was recorded under the old leg tuck ACFT and was a test to see how fast we could meet the ‘gold’ standard. These days you have to transition right into the plank after the SDC. While this is harder than a single leg tuck, is still very doable.