Z.11: A Eulogy for the Yeet

I have a lot of respect for retired colonel Michael McGurk. Last month the army announced we were ditching the standing-power-throw, aka the ‘yeet’, as part of the new Army Fitness Test (AFT).¹ Mike quickly hammered out an editorial in the Army Times defending the event and decrying the hole in our fitness assessments it leaves behind.

He is literally the only person I know who has mourned the loss of the yeet. I know more people who defended the cheese and veggie omelet MRE, which is objectively the worst MRE ever made.² I have to give props to Mike, who culminated 45 years of service with 13 years working on the ACFT and H2F programs. He had a big hand in changing the army’s definitions of fitness. He didn’t have to defend the yeet, but he stuck to his guns. I like a man of principle.

And his overall arguments aren’t wrong.

The event evaluates explosive power, a crucial physical attribute for tasks ranging from close-quarters combat and scaling obstacles to transitioning quickly from prone positions… As a simple, reliable and low-maintenance test, it not only measures explosive power but also integrates balance, coordination, flexibility, speed and agility — elements indispensable to soldier performance.

The AFT now has suffers from this gap in its overall assessment. Soldiers get one rep of that quick transition from prone in the sprint-drag-carry (SDC); but just once, right at the start. The deadlift assesses maximum strength, but if you’re using explosive power you’re doing them wrong and likely hurting your back. Please stop. And though the SDC does work coordination, speed, and agility as you transition from event to event, it doesn’t challenge flexibility much, which many soldiers struggle with. I did for most of my career, until I started doing yoga.

But here’s where I think Mike goes wrong:

The standing-power-throw draws upon principles of kinesiology to approximate the functional movements soldiers rely on daily — movements that demand synergy between force, speed and agility. [emphasis added]

Contrary to Mike’s assertion above, the standing-power-throw’s movement doesn’t replicate anything soldiers actually do. It doesn’t really replicate anything non-soldiers do either. Even when civilians throw heavy things for distance, they don’t yeet them backwards over their head.

Because nobody power yeets a weight over their goddamn head! Go watch a video of a caber toss or a hammer throw.

G.1a: RAND Gave Me A Christmas Present

To be good at the yeet, soldiers had to dedicate time and energy to a task they didn’t need anywhere else in their jobs. Since most soldiers only take their fitness test twice a year, the standing-power-throw skillset was always going to struggle to get the repetitions and sets that would actually drive improvement.³ Instead, the movement atrophies with lack of use. Soldiers quickly plateau - not at their actual explosive power limit, but at a much lower, artificial one.

Units don’t typically enjoy spending their limited training time on a skillset that doesn’t help them do their job. Deadlifts, in contrast, help every soldier learn to pick things up better. Regardless of your job, everyone picks things up. The sprint-drag-carry simulates a lot of movements we all get called up to do randomly, regardless of our MOSs. The leg luck helps soldiers master the agility to climb obstacles. The plank… yeah I don’t really have anything to defend the plank. It helps soldiers practice for all the ‘hurry-up and wait’ they’re going to do throughout their day?

Units don’t have a ton of time. Every unit I’ve ever served in had more 350-1 requirements than they actual had hours in their calendar.⁴ Units in the army have to decide what will and won’t get done with the 168 hours they get each week. They need to prepare for their wartime mission and to also be prepared for the other missions they know they might get. Things that easily translate into benefits for multiple tasks get done, which is why fitness should be a priority. But practicing the skills you need to excel on throwing a 10 pound ball backwards over your head only four times a year?

The Pillars of Power: The Clean and The Snatch

I was actually doing snatches this morning while I was drafting this post. You won’t find a better expression of ‘explosive power… balance, coordination, flexibility, speed and agility’ than the snatch. But, the army should not use the snatch to asses soldiers' fitness for the same reasons we shouldn’t use the yeet.

Snatches are one of the two families of Olympic lifts. The other is cleans. Both are built around the very normal task of taking a weight from the ground to overhead. Cleans do it in stages: first lifting the weight from the ground to the shoulders, then through variants of the jerk or the press to get the bar to full extension. Snatches go from ground to full extension without any pause in the middle. They are the ultimate technical lift, requiring you to execute six different movement phases in a single rapid, but specifically timed, sequence. The reason you can clean more raw weight than you can snatch is because of just how meticulous the latter lift is.

I love the snatch. When you hit it right it feels like poetry and power all at once.⁵ But it takes a ton of work to learn and an equal amount of work to maintain. That coaching and that training time are the two things the army lacks. That same shortcoming was what killed the standing-power-throw.

The ACFT was designed as a field test, not a laboratory test, and to have the ability for minimally trained graders to measure test results.

The army has struggled to teach senior NCOs and officers to properly deadlift, though it has been making slow and steady progress. But there will never be enough time on any unit’s calendar to train snatches, never mind enough certified trainers to coach the movement. The standing-power-throw suffered from the same problem.

If you do a snatch poorly, you’re highly likely to hurt yourself. Aside from just the potential damage to your muscles and spine that a bad pull can get you, you are throwing a heavy weight directly over your head. If your balance is off, that bar is going to come down somewhere.

The standing-power-throw is a similar lift, where timing and technique have to be spot on to maximize the result. I’ve seen plenty of soldiers release the ball way too late, resulting in a shorting line drive ball straight down the field. I’ve also seen plenty of soldiers release the ball too early, launching it basically straight up in the air. Both demonstrated great explosive power, but in neither case will it show up in their score.

The standing-power-throw ended up not getting us great data on our soldier’s actual explosive power. Not for lack of trying though. The researchers at RAND cited the increased risks of injury with the standing-power-throw, which is what led to the army dropping it in the AFT. Apparently a lot of soldiers out there were really going full send.

We Still Need Explosive Power

While I disagree with Mike about the utility of the standing-power-throw, I do completely agree we now have an ‘explosive power’ shaped hole in our fitness assessment. This is concerning because as the old army adage goes, ‘you get what you inspect’. The APFT army didn’t build the kind of fitness we needed when we only tested push-ups, sit-ups, and run. I see a lot of risk in leaving that explosive power and agility gap there in our annual assessment.

In SOF we often use force plates to assess both our maximum strength and explosive power, as well as diagnose problematic asymmetries. They’re actually great training tools, but as Mike concedes in his editorial, most units don’t have access to them at scale. Deployed units definitely don’t.

A 2017 Study in the Journal of Applied Biomedical Research confirms medicine ball throws are reliable for upper- and lower-body power assessment, requiring less setup than force plate-based tests.

After the last five years of turmoil, congressional intervention, and revision, I don’t think the army is going to make any further adjustments to the AFT any time soon.⁶ That said, if I were the Secretary of the Army for a day, I’d tweak the sprint-drag-carry and roll out the sprint-clean-carry.

What is the Sprint-clean-carry? In lieu of the 50 meter 90 pound drag, you swap in heavy sandbag cleans. It’s a simple swap that can fill the explosive power gap, while also better replicating real soldiers’ lived experience. I’ve never needed to drag anything 50 meters in my job outside of the ACFT, so I don’t know how critical the drag was to the overall ACFT assessment Mike and his team built. Then again, I also never had to run 50 meters in an awkward sideways shuffle either.

But have I ever had to pick up some oddly shaped heavy-ass thing, throw it onto my shoulder and run with it? Lots of times.

That awkward weight and balance is actually one thing that’s a great benefit of heavy medball and sandbag cleans. Most the things we lift in life aren’t as perfectly balanced as a Oly lifting bar. It’s actually much more normal to pick up irregular shaped things from the ground, which engages a lot more of your balance, coordination, flexibility, and agility.

The sprint-clean-carry would also solve a logistical problem. No more drags means no need for sleds nor a need for expensive turf fields — though most units I’ve served in have been doing the SDC on grass just fine. Instead, units just need to get ahold of some gym sandbags, which actually cost less than the current drag sleds. Deployed units can pretty easily pack these away, or improvise with duffel bags and real sandbags.

Your unit needs the explosive power fitness and you should be finding ways to incorporate these kinds of cleans into your workouts. In a sprint-clean-carry, I’d probably have the soldiers clean the bag / ball at each end before running 25 meters under the load. You can scale the weight for the clean too, so combat MOSs have to pick up heavier ones than gen-pop.

The yeet going away is, in my opinion, a good thing. But Mike’s right: we need to prioritize explosive power, balance, and flexibility. In a perfect world we’d have a fitness assessment that leverages familiar movements to test our soldiers on these skills. In the gap, it’s up to the leaders across the army to make training and assessing these a priority. Mike’s call to ‘evaluate soldiers holistically, bridging the gap between physical fitness and combat readiness’ is spot on. For now, leaders need to be the ones making sure they add a supplemental assessment to their training. One that ‘reflects the demands of modern warfare’.

1. My editor has hated the word ‘yeet’ since the first time I used it and this is the last post I’m allowed to use it. So we’re eulogizing both. RIP, yeet.

The army announced the ACFT in July of 2018.

2. Meals Ready to Eat, or the pre-packaged meals you get in the army when no one can cook. For any of you very young Gen-Zs who don’t know what the cheese and veggie omelet was, just be glad you missed it. And for you Gen-X / Boomers who think the five-fingers of death were worse, go yell at a cloud.

3. Well all soldiers are supposed to take their fitness tests twice a year. I don’t have the actual metrics on how many actually do. If my last unit is any indication less than 30% took just a single one each year.

4. Army Regulation 350-1, which is Army Training and Leader Development reg. However, most units have their own 350-1 addendums which add even more training to an overburdened schedule.

5. This video is of Olympic lifter Mattie Rogers. She weighs about 10 pounds less than me and she’s snatching 163% — 42.5 kilos more — than I did today.

6. The army has changed my uniforms at least seven times in my career, and the fitness test only twice. I wish we cared more about our fitness than our fashion.