G.1: Baseline
Post 2 of 11 in a series on the intersection of data and fitness.
Click here for the rest of the series.
Ready for what?
That’s the implied question some of you might have been asking from the last post. It’s the perennial problem with ‘readiness’: Ready to do what? The answer is we don’t know. For fitness, ready means living in that ambiguous space and being always prepared for the situations you find yourself in, especially the ones you didn’t anticipate.
For a simple example, earlier this morning, before I sat down to write this post, I took the Australian Army’s Basic Fitness Assessment. I’m here in Australia for a year as an Army War College Fellow, but there’s barely any US Army presence here and no one was going to organize an ACFT. For my biannual fitness test requirement, I opted to try out the Aussie version.
What was on it? What were the standards? I didn’t know until they briefed me this morning. I showed up and passed the test. I didn’t train all month on the movements. I didn’t rest up for the test either — I was in the gym yesterday and at yoga last night. Sometimes ready is easy, like today; the Aussie test is very similar to the APFT and was very easy to pass. Sometimes ready can be markedly harder.
To figure out what ready meant, the army, in a rare moment of taking a data approach, examined the last two decades of operations and identified six recurring themes in the typical mission profile.
Long Periods of Aerobic Activity
This one isn’t terribly well defined, but then ready rarely is. Aerobic technically covers anything where the energy demands can be met through the oxygen you gain through breathing. Ostensibly, your body is producing energy via aerobic processes just sitting and reading this on your phone. However, when people say ‘aerobic’ they tend to mean operating at less than 75-80% of your maximum heart rate.1
Intense Sudden Anaerobic Activity
Anaerobic is when your body cannot get enough oxygen to meet the muscle demands and so it switches to glycolysis. I’m going to spare you a ton of chemistry and human physiology by just saying this is generally when your heart rate goes above 80% of your max. Most humans cannot sustain this for more than a few minutes at best. This will also produce lactic acid, which is why you feel so shitty after finishing the sprint-drag-carry.
Carry Loads Upwards of 100lbs
Again, poorly defined. Upwards of 100 has no limit. How far am I carrying what? What sort of 100 pounds? In a pack? Does it have handles? Can I enlist a friend?
Ability to rapidly reduce heart rate to either engage or make decisions
This might be the most overlooked and yet most important requirement. In combat, you don’t run for fun or to win some footrace. You typically need to do something once you get wherever you were running. Shoot your weapon? Provide aid to a buddy? Pick something / someone up? Talk on a radio? Make a decision?
Our bodies are incredibly good at triaging oxygen to the organs they think need it the most. When muscles are screaming for oxygen, the brain gets less. In high stress situations, system one typically gets priority over system two, which means you’re firing more on muscle memory, instincts, and heuristics. This serves you well when the decisions you need to make are simple — i.e. Duck. Run. Punch. This is, however, the exact wrong type of thinking for more complicated decisions. Reducing your heart rate can sometimes be the only thing you can do to stop being stupid.
Requirement for continuous maximum effort followed by engagement and/or decision
Repeat #2 and #4, then do it again with some #3 thrown in for fun, then do it again. And again.
Reverse for exfiltration and extraction/ mission complete
If things go your way, you can look forward to doing #1 again all the way until you make it back to camp or a PZ.2
So, looking at #1 - #6, the army has decided ready means
Can you walk and jog further than you want to, pick up and carry things that are at times over half your body weight, and be prepared to mainline your heart rate only to rapidly get it back down, repeatedly, so you can make decisions throughout?
Looking at the old APFT, only the two-mile run even scratches the itch on any of these, and only one: aerobic fitness. The shift to the ACFT was the first step the army took toward trying to get soldiers ready for all six.
This series is focused on that goal. Over the last five years I’ve settled on programming that has enabled me to be consistently ready. Ready for ACFTs, but also a variety of hero WoDs (Workout of the day), team workouts, and individual challenges. In the next two months of posts, I’ll be sharing my perspective, my training regimen, and a few sources that have been particularly informative along the way.
Just a few notes before we get started:
What This Series Is Not
The ‘One Way’ to exercise. There isn’t one and you should be highly suspicious of anyone peddling one. As an example, in his great first book The Sport Gene, David Epstein details how the body morphology in individual Olympic events is very narrow. The top 100 meter butterfliers look strikingly similar and they are all competing in the same, very specialized race. But even their coaches can’t all agree on the best way to train. If you’re in the army, you are not doing anything remotely as specialized. Being ready is not a specialized sport, so therefore a wide variety of fitness is going to be essential to getting and keeping you ready.
A Navy SEAL fitness regimen. If you’re a grown adult and want to pay someone to yell at you, that’s your choice. But I’m not selling anything and that includes supplements or steroids. I’ve never bothered with pre-workout. I do prefer protein bars as a ‘healthier’ snack over the crap in the office vending machine, but I don’t take any supplements. I just buy the bar that gets me the most grams of protein, with the fewest grams of sugar, at the cheapest price. I am also firmly against using steroids. In twenty two years, the army never gave me any task that required or justified steroid use.
A Ranger / SFAS prep course. Those courses are heavily biased toward very long-range movements under weight. This is because both are trying to assess your ability to perform under the worst conditions on your worst day. Regardless, both have published training programs to prepare you for them. As a graduate of both, I can assure you the standard plan they give you works. If you want to pay someone on the internet to give you a different version, that is, again, your choice.
The advice of a certified fitness or physical therapy trainer. I’ll cite my sources where I can, but I am not a certified coach. Most of the workouts are either stolen or modified from gyms I’ve worked out in over the last 16 years. I have spent the overwhelming majority of my career not doing structured army fitness.3
Instead, I have mostly worked out on my own. For officers in particular, I think this is a key ability to have. Not that officers should be excused from unit training, but in my career, my fitness has more often than not been my responsibility and no one else’s. I can say, if you’re relying on an army approved Master Fitness Trainer to tell you how to be fit, I have some sad news for you.4
What This Series Is:
The lessons and workouts provided will focus on general fitness, with a bias toward movements that avoid undue risk and resemble things you actually do in real life — Yes, I’m targeting you ‘Standing Power Throw’ aka ‘10# Yeet’. If you had to do a series of physical tasks that included climbing, balancing, sprinting, carrying, ducking, crawling, and fighting, what sort of fitness would you want? What is going to help you get and stay ready?
I’ve generally adopted a ‘Moneyball’ approach to my gains, looking for movements that get me the maximum return on time spent, while also avoiding injury risk. Some of them will be new, but I suspect you’ll be more surprised by what I don’t do, than anything I am.
While nothing I recommend is aimed at training for the ACFT, I keep a personal goal of always being capable of achieving the 540 — 90 in each event — which enables a soldier to skip the tape test. As someone who’s been needlessly taped since I was a captain, the 2023 exception to the incredibly stupid tape test was possibly the best fitness change I’ve seen the army take in my career — even more impactful than the change to the ACFT.5
There is only marginally less data in this than there is in the army’s body fat test. Getting a 540 does not require some special raw talent, though it does demand more than the army’s baseline level of fitness. If a soldier has no injuries or disabilities, it is achievable.
Who Is This For:
I’m writing this series for anyone who’s interested in fitness or data and especially people who like both. But beyond a general interest there are three key audiences I’m writing for:
Junior Officers and NCOs: The senior officers and NCOs generally don’t have a background in this kind of fitness. They were brought up in the push-up / sit-up / run paradigm. Some have shown a willingness to learn new things, but this transition, much like the data and digital transformations, needs help from the junior ranks. It's on all of us to help the next generation get ready.
Mid-career Officers: Before you ruin your knees even more.
Soldiers who hate ‘army PT’: I think there's room to change your perspective. If you hate ‘army PT’ but want to improve your fitness, there's opportunity in here for you. Gains can be the best part of your day.
Before You Start A New Fitness Program…
Check in with your local H2F or THOR3 team.6 Schedule a diagnostic with your PT and talk with your strength coach about your fitness goals. The best form of exercise is the thing you’ll actually do, so find the forms of fitness you actually enjoy.
Take some time to do a self-assessment. What do you want to get better at? What can you do? Some workouts require certain kit, others the right technique. All of them require time. Clearing those three-foot-walls before you start a new program is key to maximizing your success.
What I Do
I generally workout five days a week, typically recovering on the weekends. While I don’t workout ‘for an hour’, my sessions usually run between 45 and 75 minutes. My average session looks like this:
3 minutes of intense exercise to get my heart rate up.
5-10 minutes of mobility and flexibility work — this also gives my heart rate a chance to come back down.
Three days a week I do some sort of Olympic lift set — cleans, presses, jerks, snatches, deadlifts, and squats.
A METCON (metabolic conditioning) set that combines several movements together, typically with weights. On the non-Olylifting days these are typically longer (20-30 mins), with shorter ones on days I lift — From 15 mins down to some sprint sets that only take a few minutes.
I enjoy swimming and when a pool is available, I try to swim at lunch two days a week.
That has been the general paradigm I’ve used for the last five years. I typically take my ACFTs in the mid-spring and then again just before Thanksgiving.7 I add the Upper Body Round Robin in February and Fight Gone Bad in August. This test schedule checks if I am ready every quarter, though I feel both FGB and the UBRR give me a better readiness litmus test than the ACFT does.
Over nine ACFTs since early 2021, this programming has consistently delivered 540+ scores.
What you don’t do can be almost as important as what you do:
I rarely run.
I almost never do one-rep max sets anymore.
I don’t do curls.
I’ve cut backsquats out almost entirely, opting instead for front squats because I can’t overload those like I can a back squat.
With all but a few exceptions — like in this post’s workout below — I don’t do movements that need a spotter. This is because I was able to find alternative movements that got me the same benefits without the risk of injury.
Over the years I’ve discovered the movements I’m most likely to hurt myself with and generally excised them from my regimen. Because, as it turns out, you don’t get weaker when you get older. You start getting weaker when you get hurt.
More on that next week.
Hoplite Challenge
Both this and next week’s workout recommendations come from Tacoma Strength where I worked out between 2009 to 2017. Morgan Blackmore and Leon Aldrich ran a phenomenal gym that was my second home. They established the standards which these are stolen from.
Hoplite is biased toward strength skills. Level 1 is a great baseline: If there are any movements you can’t complete at Level 1, those are holes in your swing. Get with your PT and strength coach and get a plan to tackle them. Doing all the Level 1 standards in a single session is a light workout on its own, and something I do every October.
Once you can achieve all of Level 1, start trying to tackle Level 2. These don’t have to be done all in one sitting but can be easily dropped in as single challenges into the start or end of a day’s session. If you can manage to achieve all of Level 2, you have a very solid level of strength readiness.
Level 3s are real challenges, and getting any of them is something to be proud of. As I mentioned above, I don’t really do single rep max (1RM) work anymore. Instead, I prioritize trying to find those seven seconds I need on my 2k row.
There are tons of great resources on ‘zone training’ and plenty of new fitness wearables to help you track it. I’m not opposed to this kind of training and encourage you all to check it out. I just don’t use it myself, so I have no specific recommendations.
Pickup Zone. The location where you’ll meet up with vehicles to take you back.
Unhelpfully the army abbreviates fitness, or ‘physical training’ as ‘PT’.
Except army PT sucks. It is generally reviled across most formations. This series of posts is an attempt to address some of the root causes of that, and we’ll start with the name. For the last five years I have referred to fitness training as ‘gains’, because gains are definitionally a good thing. And they are personal, because they are relative to you. You gain from where you started. Gains are non-transferable, though they can and should be shared.
For the purposes of this series, the initialism ‘PT’ will only be used to refer to ‘physical therapy’.
I got my first taste of PRT at CCAP last fall. It was not pretty.
While I fully support the need for mobility and flexibility — see next week’s post — I have serious doubts that PRT is getting that right.
Because of the way CCAP was run in 2023, I had to pass the tape test before taking the ACFT, and thus not exempt. That ‘single tape’ test calced my body fat at 20%, but upon return to Fort Liberty, I took an InBody scan which came up with 13.8%. Since a 45% difference in outcome seemed statistically significant, I tried to reach out through SMA Wiemer but was brushed off with ‘Our Army’s most diverse and comprehensive ABCP study ever conducted is not for review-it already was’.
Holistic Health and Fitness or Tactical Human Optimization Rapid Rehabilitation and Reconditioning. H2F is the Army trying to catch up to SOF’s THOR3. Both are programs focused on improving the mental and physical health of soldiers. Good programs include nutritionists, mental and physical strength coaches, and robust PT resources.
This enables a gluttonous and guilt-free holiday season that lasts until the new year.
A Soldier needs to achieve an average of 90 in each event with no single event being less than 80 points for a tape test exemption.