Army Fitness and Nutrition for Effeciency Advice

[Foxtrot November GolfParticipant 28]

Good (insert time of day), gentlemen. How are you? So one of my goals is to get to the point where I can consistently score a 300+ on the Army Physical Fitness Test, as well as being and fit strong in general. I’m 19, so a 300 on the APFT means doing 71 push ups in 2 min, 78 sit ups in 2 min, and getting a 13:00 min or less two mile run time. I scored around 250 on my last APFT with push ups being my Achilles’ heel. I’m open to anything that isn’t the majority of the exercise regimen we did at OSUT lol.

My current knowledge on fitness and physical training is limited to what little I learned from a summer semester class in college and the army:
-Stretch
-3 sets of 3-5 reps is strength training
-3 sets of 10 reps is for bodybuilding
-3 sets of 12-15 reps is endurance training.
-Running 60-120s (run 1 min, walk 2min, repeat), 3 mile runs, and swimming
-Push up and sit up drills (30 sec to 1 min push ups, 30 sec to 1 min sit ups, repeat X times)
-Cool down stretch

Since I recently got back home, I’ve been going off this knowledge. One day I’ll train upper body strength, then the day after I’ll do lower body strength plus cardio later in the day. Then I do the same concept with bodybuilding and endurance. After that is the recovery and don’t eat like a jackass day. Then repeat. Any advice or recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

I’d also appreciate input on nutrition since my school only broadly went over it and the DOD’s barracks posters sucked at teaching. My knowledge on nutrition is limited to what I learned in college and vague and possibly wrong info from the internet:
-get X amount of calories, carbs, fats, and proteins (dependent on weight and level of exercise)
-There’s formulas to find the X, but I can’t find my book from college right now and the book never answered whether or not to account for anything high calorie like cardio.
-Fruit sugar is good, sugar in other s~~~ is bad for X reason.
-Abs and big muscles rely a lot on nutrition, but idk s~~~ about that. I couldn’t find anything solid, but I think eating less than X grams of fat and non-fruit sugar a day helps
-Vegetables are good because nutrients and low calories
-If in doubt, multivitamin
-No fast food unless there is really no other option
-Water, drink lots of f~~~ing water

Again, any input is appreciated and probably a better idea than my current half-assing. I’m also interested in any recipes, meal recommendations, etc. you use for your fitness goals. I like cooking, mostly, and my dorm has a community kitchen that’ll probably see neglect otherwise.

Thank you for your time and have a nice day,

FNG

[RoyDalParticipant]

I like your exercise regimen. I am positive you can ace that test.

My go-to guys for nutrition are:

* Dr Eric Berg: https://www.youtube.com/user/drericberg123

* Dr Peter Glidden: http://criticalhealthnews.com/

The short version is too long for me to recreate here. I can say you need vitamins, minerals, essential fatty acids — and you cannot get them all from most foods in your supermarket.

Sugar, starch, and all junk foods are your arch enemies. Junk food = anything with chemicals on the label that you need a chem degree to pronounce.

Society asks MGTOWs: Why are you not making more tax-slaves?

[RedDawnParticipant 1391]

Homemade muscle (youtube and website) with free ebook + myfitnesspall calorie calc (free) = bigger and stronger

Courage is the key to life itself - Morgan Freeman

[RedDawnParticipant 1391]

I wrote a big response however, when I went to post it it said I needed to login and I lost it all. I recommend homemade muscle on Youtube and his website. Anthony is genuinely interested in helping people get big and strong through body-weight exercises and I have personally made some good gains over the past month from following his advice.

This link is to a video that will help you increase your chest strength and size significantly, which I can personally attest to it’s effectiveness:

He has a video on getting abs:

Leg raises: my main abdominal exercise:

5-15 reps with 3-5 sets is great for hypertrophy and strength gains and is what I’ve used successfully. When you can do 15 reps straight with perfect form, increase the resistance of the exercise ( endeavoring to practice perfect form is much more important than the number of reps in my experience). The number of reps need not be any more complicated than this.

Mind-muscle connection (mindfulness of exercise) – If you learn anything from this response it’s that you should perform each action with mindfulness. What I mean by that is you focus on a slow, controlled movement, and on the contraction and stretch of the muscle. Many people mindlessly fly through reps on an exercise and shortchange themselves on gains due to this. Leave your ego at the door and aim for perfect form and the contraction of the muscle (just enough to feel the tension on the muscle). From practicing this you will be able to do a lot more ‘regular form’ pushups, dips etc, because you will be used to much greater resistance training. Simply put, you will be bigger and stronger in less time (I have seen some great gains from just a month of solid training).

Cardio Walking 1-1.5 hours or alternatively going for a 30-40 min run 3x a week will help you lose fat. It’s not really necessary to do more than this if you’re trying to lose weight and get big and strong. The advantage to these forms of cardio is that you can spend most of your energy on getting big and look forward to a relaxing walk or a quick run to ease the mind. The calorie calculator will do the rest as a slight caloric deficit and patience will give you the results you want. Though as shown in the video above abs need to be trained a few times a week, no more than that is necessary (abs aren’t some magically different muscle).

Diet
-I personally use myfitnesspal.com for tracking calories, it makes your goals much more clear, though I don’t always use it, it just gives me a clear idea of what I need on any given day.

– I track protein and calorie requirements, I personally don’t worry about the level of fat too much. It has been proven in scientific research that the amount fat/cholesterol you consume does not affect the amount of cholesterol your body provides), furthermore fat is essential for optimum testosterone levels and feeling full. Therefore I eat plenty of fat eg. fatty red meat such as steak and lots of eggs (all the vitamins and minerals are in the fatty yolk).

Fruit is fine if you eat a couple of pieces a day. Eating copious amounts of sugar from fruit is no healthier than eating sugar from junk. It’s just junk food has other dodgy s~~~ in it.

Fruit and vegies also contain electrolytes for healthy heart and muscle function. This should be balanced with water intake as water in the body is not pure, it is mixed with electrolytes and diluting these too far with water can kill you in extreme circumstances. I think 2-3L a day is reasonable, as you get a 1/3 of your fluids from food.

I have my doubts on how well multivitamins are metabolised, but it’s a personal thing and I sometimes take one.

Overall, do your best to keep it simple, master the basics, train each targeted muscle 2-3 times a week and use a calorie calc to give you a good idea of how much you need to eat, (don’t need to always use it) and be mindful of every rep! Doing these things you can’t go wrong.

I would recommend doing your research on Homemade Muscle (Youtube and website) to help you achieve strength and hypertrophy, particularly if you like body-weight exercises. I have done the above myself with much success in only a month or so of training.

Courage is the key to life itself - Morgan Freeman

[Cap285Participant 6007]

Former Marine Corps here, E4.

I got a 300 In boot camp, the next three years I never scored lower than a 295 but I didn’t care and got lazy.

I wouldn’t overdo it with weight training as that is detrimental to doing pull-ups . I’d stick with the bodyweight exercises . Get those perfect push-up thing, those will help.

Stay on top of your cardio . Your runtime is what always kill you .

Of course limit your alcohol intake and junk food .

Thanks for your service soldier.

Fuck this planet.

[Duke of MangafParticipant 69]

Former AF E5 here, now I contract for the Army. Id agree with Cap285, cardio was always my main focus, and poor run times will hurt you. I was always too stocky for my height, and the bmi calculator the military uses is total bulls~~~ for everyone except extremely skinny guys with high metabolism. I had no choice but to run at least 5-6 days a week. Stick with resistance training and bodyweight exercises over heavy lifting for sure.

Theres a powder Ive used since back in those days that I still swear by, called Genisoy, stuff is the elixir of life. Other than that just stay away too much fried foods and processed sugar and meats. A good attitude is really the most important part, and it sounds like you already have that. Thanks for your service and good luck!

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