SSG Fries' Guide to the Army Physical Fitness Test, Page 2

  The pushup is an anaerobic exercise. You will not be able to replenish the oxygen in your muscles once you start the event so swing your arms like an old school thermometer to get that fresh oxygenated blood driven down into those arm muscles.

  Half Left Face! Front leaning rest position, Move! In cadence, Exercise!

  1. BEGIN THE PUSH-UP BY BENDING YOUR ELBOWS AND LOWERING YOUR ENTIRE BODY AS A SINGLE UNIT UNTIL YOUR UPPER ARMS ARE AT LEAST PARALLEL TO THE GROUND.

  That may sound familiar because it’s copied and pasted straight from the APFT instructions that we all get read to us every time we take the test. This portion of the pushup is the most important to get right during the APFT.

  Back to the statement I borrowed from my dad, “perfect practice makes perfect.” As you drop to the ground some people tend to go somewhat slowly actually lowering themselves deliberately to a point where their upper arms are parallel with the ground. If you are working out to be in shape, get big, or to get strong, great! Go slowly through this motion and you’ll get all of those. If you want to learn how to do a whole bunch of pushups in two minutes, STOP IT!

  As you drop slowly you’re using up the energy and oxygen your muscles have stored within them and cannot be replaced during the exercise.

  Drop like a lead weight to the ground. Let the Earth’s gravity do all the work in this portion of the exercise. Do nothing but drop. If anything, think of pulling the ground up to you.

  2.RETURN TO THE STARTING POSITION BY RAISING YOUR ENTIRE BODY UNTIL YOUR ARMS ARE FULLY EXTENDED.

  This is the part of the exercise that is where the work is done. How can you improve on this part, agreeably the worst part of the event?

  Too easy, look! Your body is not as smart as you give it credit for. Whether you do 100 pushups all in one shot or spend all day doing sets of two pushups at a time until you hit 100 pushups, your body has no idea that all that time went by in between those repetitions. To your body, 100 pushups is 100 pushups.

  Set yourself a goal every other day to be accomplished, something like 100 pushups. Hey make it 50 or 40 if you need to but my point is to set yourself an obtainable goal that you will hit. Then pick a room that you enter a number of times a day. I use my kitchen because I can’t stay out of there for long. Every time you go into that room knock out a few pushups until you’ve hit your goal for that day.

  If your goal is 100 pushups and you knock out 5 pushups every time you go in your kitchen throughout the day, before you know it you’ve been in and out of there 20 times and you’re done for two days. How easy is that?

  3.Down you go like I said dropping to the ground as fast as you can while using up as little energy as you possibly can to save it for…

  One! We’re doing a four count pushup, remember? Why is that important? Your mental conditioning is more important that you might think. Professional athletes spend tons of time psyching themselves out for an event. They visualize themselves being successful and winning. They picture the event and work every portion of it out and make a plan as to how they will dominate. Do you do that before you get down and knock out some pushups? No? Yeah, I didn’t think so. That’s why we’re doing four count pushups. If you do 5 four counts you will have done 10.

  Maybe you don’t have the mental training to successfully psych yourself out but you can easily trick your mind into thinking it’s done less than it has. From this point on count all your pushups in a four count. When you’re actually taking the test, have your counter count very quietly to themselves so you can concentrate on your four count. If your pushups are good ones, you guys will have a number that’s pretty close when you’re done.

  The US Army Situp and how to master it.

  The situp, like the pushup, is an anaerobic exercise. Unfortunately, there is no way to just swing fresh blood into your abs. You’re stuck with what you start with so let’s just get strong.

  1.BEGIN RAISING YOUR UPPER BODY FORWARD TO, OR BEYOND, THE VERTICAL POSITION.

  You will be starting in the down position so your first movement is pulling your upper body into the up position. Right off the bat you’re doing work. Well, just like the pushup, there’s nothing to it but to do it. If you’re doing a pushup workout every other day then do situps on the days in between. You’ll need that situp mat we talked about before, and again in your kitchen, if you can put your feet under your kitchen cabinets and knock out 5 at a time every time you go into that room ‘til you hit your goal for that day.

  2.LOWER YOUR BODY UNTIL THE BOTTOM OF YOUR SHOULDER BLADES TOUCH THE GROUND.

  Here again you have a negative action that will take up valuable energy if you let it. Throw yourself back. Do not waste the precious oxygen in your abdominal muscles by letting yourself down slowly. With this exercise, when you’re doing it at home on your small mat, you can do more of a crunch if you want. Cross your arms in front of you and go up and almost all the way down, stopping yourself just before your back touches the ground. When you’re doing the event for the test push yourself back so you feel no pressure on your abs as you drop.

  3.REPEAT STEP 1.

  One! Get used to counting your situps as a four count exercise. This will work on your brain the same way it did with the pushups.

  The US Army Two-Mile Run and how to master it.

  YOU ARE BEING TESTED ON YOUR ABILITY TO COMPLETE THE 2-MILE COURSE IN THE SHORTEST TIME POSSIBLE.

  For some, running just comes naturally and to those people I say, “Eat my shorts!”

  For the rest of us this can be the worst part of the test, between 15 and 19 minutes of non-stop exertion.

  Stop fretting… If you follow this plan I’ll have you passing by the numbers in no time with hardly any real work on your part.

  Let’s start by analyzing the human animal and how it’s designed to run. No one really talks about this aspect of running in the military and they just say, “Run!”

  WARNING: Changing the way you have been running to a new way can be, on one hand, effective in gaining speed and stamina but also can damage ligaments and muscles that are not used to these new ways of being stressed so start out slowly and if you feel ANY pain, stop right there and walk. Give yourself a few days to heal and strengthen up then hit it again.

  Humans may have come a long way from being the hunting and hunted, barefoot and bare assed animals we once were, but if you look at our physical condition as runners/hunter-gathers, we are a sorry bunch now. All you need to do to figure out how we, as animals, were designed to run is to take off those fancy sneakers and run down a wooded trail barefoot. You’ll find out pretty quickly that we were never designed to be heel strike runners. The first stick you land on or pebble your heel slams into and you’ll go yelping off hopping on one foot.

  It’s pretty simple. Humans were designed with feet that have balls up near the toes a little like a dogs foot. We were designed to land on our forefoot, roll our weight to our mid-foot and fall forward with our next foot out in front of us. So lean slightly forward and land on your forefoot to mid-foot but avoid landing on your heel.

  Again, be careful because your calves aren’t used to all the new stress and you can easily rip one out doing this. A little at a time and you’ll get stronger slowly. You’ll feel faster and stronger right away but you’re asking for an injury if you push through the pain here.

  New sneakers are an important aspect in being able to run fast. Even if you’re running shoes look fine, if they’re older than one year, just use them for walking around and casual wear. You should always have two pairs of dedicated running shoes. You should have one pair that you just use for the test itself and one pair you use to run preparing for said test.

  Okay, so now you have your new shoes on, you know not to run ‘til you hurt yourself and you know how to run. Let’s go running. Should we run 3 miles or even 4 miles to prepare for the 2 mile test? No, you’re running 2 miles in the test so prepare by running 2 miles… Perfect practice makes perfect every time.

>   Next question, how fast have ya gotta run? As fast as a leopard! Well no…

  You do have to start by passing the test, then we can work on the leopard thing. What do you need to pass? What are you getting now?

  Let me put these numbers down on paper here, and then I’ll explain below how you can tailor the numbers for yourself.

  Let’s just say for demonstration purposes you are running a 22-minute two mile run and you need 18 minutes to pass. Well, you’re out by 4 minutes aren’t you? Now let’s say that you’re an E-4 that’s flagged from promotion until you can hit that 18 minute mark. Is that 18 minutes going to be fast enough when you’re an E-5 and your troops can smoke your fat ass? I think not… So your goal should be more in the 16 minute range. 16 minutes is not so far out there that anyone that puts a little effort into it, and isn’t on profile can’t reach.

  Note: Females, please adjust these times to fit my meaning as 18 min. is not a bad time for you.

  Let’s just improve at two minute intervals. 22 min. shooting for 20 min. is a great start. Let’s break it down. If you are traveling 2 miles in 22 minutes, you are going 1 mile in 11 minutes. If a mile is 5,280 ft. that divided by 11 equals 480 ft. In other words you are traveling 480 ft. per minute right now. To be running at a 20-minute pace you need to go 528 ft. per minute.

  Does that make sense? We’re just finding out how many feet you have to travel per minute to pass the dang test. Too easy.

  This is where things can get a little tricky but you need to find a straight stretch you can run that’s 528 feet. A couple of ways to find 528 ft. is:

  1. Use a GPS, it’ll get you close enough.

  2. You can use the pace count I included in my chart. If you’ve ever done a pace count before to find your pace for 100m then this will be just like that. You start at a known mark like your driveway and step off with your left foot counting every time your left foot hits the ground. As you step off that’s one, your right foot strikes the ground and then your left again and that’s two. Get it? You walk out until your left foot has hit the ground 102 times and you’re there, or close enough to there. You’ll see that all the paces are listed for the different distances.

  Now that you have your 528 ft. marked out, get yourself a stop watch and run from your start point to the spot that marks 528 feet. Do this run in exactly one minute, no faster and no slower. It won’t be a sprint and it won’t be super slow, and it shouldn’t be hard to make it in one minute.

  At the end of the little run take a break. Stretch out, relax, and rest for a minute or so until you feel that you can make it all the way back to your start point in exactly one minute. Take off and run to your start point in one minute, and, you guessed it, take a break. Rest for long enough until you can make it back to your 528 foot mark in exactly one minute. If you do this 20 times you will have just completed the two mile run at a 20 minute pace.

  Take the numbers above and find which bracket you’re running in now. For instance, if you’re a 16:30 runner just call it 16:00 and make yourself a 14 minute goal. Follow the steps above to find how many feet you should be running per minute to meet your goal and lay it out. If you’re goal is a 14 minute pace and you’re running 754 feet in one minute and taking breaks at the end of each length, the up side to that is you only have to do that 14 times to cover the two miles. The guys and gals that are going slower may have to cover less distance in the same amount of time as you but they have to do more lengths to get to their two miles.

  As you run this more and more often, you’ll get stronger and you will build stamina. You will want to go faster but don’t. The key to this training is the feet covered in exactly one minute. As you feel stronger start cutting out your breaks. Run up and back without taking a break and only take a break when you get back to your start point. Keep covering the distance in the same amount of time just remove your breaks as you feel that you can.

  There will be days when you won’t have the time, or, face it, the will to do your required number of lengths up and back to make your two mile run. No worries! If you run up and back even that one time you’re still helping yourself out. This style of training teaches your body the muscle memory it needs to know at what pace you need to run to make your goal.

  One of the biggest problems with running two miles is that we pace ourselves beyond where we really need to. We say to ourselves at the beginning of the run, “Dang, two miles is a long way! I’d better take it easy and toward the end I’ll kick it in.” The end comes and we’re worn out and are never really able to really kick it in like we had planned to. If instead we learn the pace we need to run to make our goal and start off running at that pace. We travel as far as we can running at our goal pace and maybe piddle out a little at the end. Hey instead of running that 16:30 we had been doing, we hit a 14:45. That’s a pretty big win for us, no?

  Okay, so to sum this all up.

  Why: Why do you want to make a change. You better have a good reason that you’re sold on ‘cause if you don’t, you’re done before you even get started.

  Diet: Carbs kill. If you want a revelation pick up a half gallon of vanilla ice cream at the supermarket. A good quality one like Brier’s Natural Vanilla. Check out how many carbs per serving it has (about 18g), and then check out that energy drink you just downed. At 35g per serving and two servings per can you just swallowed in one fell swoop. Do the math, you just drank 5 servings of ice cream worth of sugar. Really! 5! It’s a no brainer that if you eat 5 servings of ice cream you’ll get fat. Why don’t people realize sugar is sugar?

  Pushups: Don’t work the negative, let gravity take you down. Do a few at a time throughout the day to get stronger so you can do more. Count them in a four count to fool your brain into thinking you have done less than you have.

  Situps: Again, don’t work the negative, let gravity take you down. Do a few at a time throughout the day to get stronger so you can do more. Use a small mat to sit on and the kitchen counter to hold your feet. Count them in a four count to fool your brain into thinking you have done less than you have.

  2 Mile Run: Buy new running shoes as well as dedicated APFT only running shoes. Learn how to run like a human animal. Learn the pace (feet per minute) you will need to run to make your goal time. Run that pace and only that pace until you’ve developed it into muscle memory. Take out your breaks until you meet your goal. Then, make a new goal.

  Good luck!