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Originally Posted by Brush Okie
I think you missed my point. As I said push ups and general PT is great for training. I am a big fan of weight training as well. My issue is that in today's Army your running ability is what everyone cares about yet many of these "PT studs" do not hold up in combat according to the Armys own report that is why they were going to change it. They didn't for political reasons. As for running miles upon miles in boots that is plain stupid as well. What I AM saying is do more ruck marches with gear along with the running pushups etc etc in PT gear. At the end of the day we are training to fight and our test should reflect that ie ruck march not PT run unless we are training to drop our weapons and run away from the battle.
Do you know why the Army picked 2 miles as the run? Because that is the blast zone of a nuclear weapon.
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Push-ups have been part of Army PT for a very long time, to include the post-WW II fitness test. The reason they were retained in the '46 test is because it was thought that the movement was very similar to that used to get up out of the prone firing position--a combat-relevant task.
As for adding combat-related physical tasks to PT such as ruck marching, there's nothing stopping a unit from doing just that. The APFT is the minimum PT requirement; if a unit wants to raise the standard, they certainly can.
As for the idea of fragile "gazelles", I recall seeing squads and fire teams of Rangers from 3/75 running like their hair was on fire and their asses were catching all over Benning during morning PT in the mid-90s, and most of those studs could ruck like machines just as readily. Being able to break 12:00 on the 2-mile didn't seem to hinder many of my peers in the Q course, Ranger School or later on in combat with SOF units, either.
Some of the folks that designed the 3-event PT test were guest lecturers when I was completing the Master Fitness Trainer course. The main reason for the switch from the 5-event test to the 3-event test, according to them, was to reduce the dependency on specialty equipment or courses (think horizontal ladder, run-dodge-jump lanes) so that the test could be administered nearly anywhere, and to improve throughput. I don't recall any of them correlating the 2-mile run distance to a nuke blast, though; like TR, I'd be interested to hear your source for that.