ABILITY AND GENERAL HEALTH
People will judge you by what you look like and not by what you can actually do!
You may look like you are in great shape but when it comes right down to it you have nothing but fake muscle or beach muscle, and no real strength. The information below will help your training.
In any sport or military function it is important that you can handle your body weight, and the weight of your gear!
BODY WEIGHT EXERCISES
Get a true body weight and then see where you are at (naked).
Your goal should be to…
Body weight bench press; strive to get around 20 reps.
Body weight dead lift, 20 reps
Body weight squat, 20 reps
Pull-ups, 20 reps. If you have never lifted weights before you should start out light and work your way up slowly to make sure you don’t hurt yourself.
Form is the most important part of an exercise. The order of importance when lifting is as follows: Form, speed of the rep, and the actual weight comes in last…
You don’t do your team mates or battle buddies any good if you can’t pull your own weight! That just means that some other guy on the team has to be that much stronger just to carry your weight, don’t be that guy!
Cardio
I hate running however, it must be done. Running long distances is super, but what you really need is to sprint. The ability to run as fast as you can with all your gear on to find cover, and then being able to shoot back under critical stress when you get to you position is key. Start of by running 50 meter sprints. As you get better increase to 100 meter sprints, you can also incorporate hill sprints which will help immensely.
Of course you need to be able to run a long distance at a fast pace, but sprints will save your life well before a 5-mile run. If you need to work on your running start out by finding your 1 mile time with max effort, then work from there. Start off by running 5 miles a week or a mile a day for five days at a good pace. Work yourself up and increase the speed and the distance. The goal is to be able to walk out of your door with no warm up and be able to run 6 minute miles.
Featured image By U.S. Air Force photo by Master Sgt. Dawn M. Price [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons