The Army is developing a new, more grueling and complex fitness exam that adds dead lifts, power throws and other exercises designed to make soldiers more fit and ready for combat — and there will be no breaks in scoring based on age or gender.
In a video from the Association Press, soldiers at Fort Bragg, N.C., are put through their paces in the grueling new fitness workout.
"I am prepared to be utterly embarrassed," Sgt. Maj. Harold Sampson, a military intelligence specialist, told the AP, adding in his more than two decades in the Army he easily passed old fitness requirements: situps, pushups, and 2-mile run.
But commanders have complained the soldiers they get out of basic training are not fit enough.
According to the AP, nearly half of the commanders surveyed last year said new troops coming into their units could not meet the physical demands of combat. Officials also say about 12 percent of soldiers at any one time cannot deploy because of injuries.
The new test, "may be harder, but it is necessary," Gen. Stephen Townsend, head of U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, told the wire service.
Unlike the old fitness test, which graded soldiers differently based on age and gender, the new one will be harder and will not adjust the passing scores for older or female soldiers.
"We needed to change the culture of fitness in the United States Army," Army Maj. Gen. Malcolm Frost, commander of the Army’s Center for Initial Military Training and the officer in charge of developing the new fitness test, told AP. "We had a high number of non-deployable soldiers that had a lot of muscular/skeletal injuries and medical challenges because we hadn’t trained them from a fitness perspective in the right way.
"The goal is about a having a more combat-ready army."
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