Posted by: trainer
on Sep 06, 2010
Recently the New York Times covered the new military fitness protocols for incoming recruits. The program innovations bring modern exercise science to the challenge of recruiting from a generation notoriously inactive and less fit than their predecessors. Gone is the “one size fits all” mentality, replaced by slower progressions and a focus on building soldiers’ functional capacity for the actual demands of their jobs.
Among this generation of recruits the military is observing low bone density (leading to bone fractures), overweight, and inability to meet basic fitness standards. The Times writes,
“The new fitness regime tries to deal with all these problems by incorporating more stretching, more exercises for the abdomen and lower back, instead of the traditional situps, and more agility and balance training. It increases in difficulty more gradually. And it sets up a multiweek course of linked exercises, rather than offering discrete drills.”
