Angela Papple Johnston - ACFT For Dummies

If you’re battling the tape measure each time you take a physical fitness test, have a peek at Part 4of this book. I give you the rundown on hitting the drive-through, eating your veggies, and pounding energy drinks (and how they all impact your physical performance).

Not sure where to start? Grab your last bag of chips (at least until after the test), kick back, and start at the beginning.

Part 1

IN THIS PART …

Take a look at the Army’s physical fitness requirements and how they’ve evolved over the past 250 years.

Test out the science behind the Army Combat Fitness Test and discover when and how the military evaluates physical performance.

Explore each ACFT event in detail and uncover how the Army scores soldiers.

Chapter 1

IN THIS CHAPTER

Ushering the old APFT out and the ACFT in

Flexing your range of motion on the new test

Accepting the necessity of PRT and H2F

Discovering how the ACFT impacts your career

The United States Army needs high-speed, low-drag soldiers manning its ranks, and until 2020, it measured physical fitness by using the Army Physical Fitness Test, or APFT. But change is inevitable in the Army, and the Army Combat Fitness Test (ACFT) is now the standard by which all soldiers, male and female, are judged. Your ACFT score can determine whether you qualify for continued service in the military, and, like the APFT, it’s administered at the unit level.

So why the change?

The Army recognized the need to measure overall fitness rather than a soldier’s ability to do push-ups, sit-ups, and a two-mile run. Although those exercises are good for measuring chest strength, arm strength, and cardiovascular endurance, they’re not necessarily indicators of how well a soldier can perform on the battlefield. (And don’t get your hopes up. That two-mile run didn’t go anywhere. It’s the last event on the ACFT.)

The ACFT uses six events to measure a soldier’s functional fitness. Each event is linked to common warfighting tasks, such as carrying other soldiers out of harm’s way and climbing out of sticky situations. The ACFT standards are outlined in a “living document,” which means they can (and most likely will) change as the Army identifies new challenges and comes up with better solutions.

Fitness training has been on the Army’s radar for years — but not from the very beginning. Seven decades after General Friedrich Von Steuben’s Blue Book laid out the drill and ceremony the Army uses today, West Point implemented the first physical fitness program for its cadets. The program included gymnastics, calisthenics, swimming, and fencing. Six years later, cadets were assessed for their performance on a 15-foot wall climb, a 5-foot horse vault, a 10-foot ditch leap, an 8-minute mile run (or an 18-minute two-mile run), a 4.5-mile walk that a cadet had to complete in an hour, and a 3-mile ruck with 20 pounds of gear, arms, and equipment in under an hour.

The Army scrapped the whole physical training (PT) program in 1861 when the Civil War started, but in 1885, the Army hired a new Master of the Sword, Lt. Col. Herman John Koehler. Koehler’s Manual of Calisthenic Exercises became the first Army-wide physical training manual. In 1920, the Army re-implemented its testing requirement. Soldiers had to successfully perform a 14-second 100-yard sprint, an 8-foot wall climb, a 12-foot running jump, and a 30-yard grenade throw as well as complete an obstacle course.

The test continued to evolve with the publication of Field Manual 21-20 in 1941. It’s the same FM in use today, but the events (and the test’s name) changed every few years until 1980, when the APFT you know and love became the standard.

Now that the creators of the last evolution have retired, the APFT has gone into retirement, too. (No word yet on whether it’s buying a red sports car, though.) Its replacement: the ACFT. Like many past evolutions of Army physical fitness testing, the ACFT includes multiple events designed to represent how well you can perform on the battlefield.

The Army knows that military operations have become more complex. You’re not riding a horse into battle with your sword drawn. You’re up, they see you, you’re down. You’re wearing and carrying 80-plus pounds of gear through rugged mountain terrain, setting up OE-254s, performing HAZMAT operations in Level A, or emptying truck after truck full of supplies on a remote operating base.

Push-ups, sit-ups, and a two-mile run just couldn’t tell the military that you could perform under those rigorous conditions. In fact, all the APFT told the Army was that you could do push-ups, sit-ups, and a two-mile run. The APFT was designed to have 40 percent predictive power for performance in combat. But today, it’s all about functional fitness — and assessments indicate the ACFT has 80 percent predictive power for battlefield performance.

Training servicemembers for the ACFT (and requiring the test itself) is the Army’s way of improving soldiers’ physical fitness, reducing preventable injuries, enhancing stamina, and contributing to enhanced unit readiness.

The ACFT is required for every soldier. Age and gender don’t matter. Like my drill sergeant at “Relaxin’” Jackson told me, “You’re an infantryman first.” That means the Army wants assurance, whether you’re an 18-year-old male private or a 55-year-old female four-star, that you have muscular strength and endurance, power, speed, agility, cardiovascular endurance, balance, flexibility, coordination, and high-speed reaction time.

Is the ACFT harder to pass for some soldiers than it is for others? Yes. Does that mean you may need to work harder than your battle buddy? Absolutely. But that’s what this book is for. I can’t go to the gym with you, but I can show you what you need to do to meet the Army’s vision: “To deploy, fight, and win our nation’s wars by providing ready, prompt, and sustained land dominance by Army forces.”

The bottom line is that the Army is a standards-based institution, and those standards are in place to meet the requirements of combat operations.

The Army developed the ACFT over 20 years — it wasn’t a fly-by-night decision. After creating physical readiness requirements for all soldiers and conducting a specific study on physical demands, the Army zeroed in on ten components of physical fitness necessary for warfighting. The military brass consulted with military fitness leaders from the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, France, and the Netherlands, as well as fitness experts from universities and reps from government agencies to put together its latest evolution of physical fitness testing.

The ACFT challenges you to complete six events, each designed to test one or more fitness components. You need to prepare for these events to max out your ACFT score; I go into details on the fitness components in the following sections: