Latest news with #H2F
Yahoo
23-04-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Army makes combat arms fitness test sex-neutral, drops ball throw
The Army has reconfigured its fitness test, dropping the ball throw, making the test sex-neutral for combat arms and raising the minimum required score for 21 combat-focused jobs. The exact scoring won't be published until early May, officials said. Meanwhile, soldiers will now perform the deadlift, pushups, sprint-drag-carry, plank and two-mile run for the renamed Army Fitness Test, which, starting in June, will drop the former designation as the Army Combat Fitness Test when it becomes the service's fitness test of record. For the rest of the 200-plus Army jobs not on the combat list, soldiers must score a minimum of 300 points and at least 60 points in each category to pass. Army to replace athletic trainers with strength coaches on H2F teams Combat arms soldiers must score 350, also with a minimum of 60 points in each event, though these soldiers will need more points in some events to reach the 350 threshold. Soldiers in the 21 combat arms jobs who do not pass on first or subsequent authorized attempts will be reviewed for job reclassification, officials said. Sgt. Maj. Christopher Mullinax, the enlisted leader for the Army's G-3/5/7 office, and Command Sgt. Maj. Joann Naumann, senior enlisted for Army Special Operations Command, told reporters on Tuesday that the service dropped the 'combat' designator for the test's title because it was redundant. The purpose of all Army training is to prepare for combat, Mullinax said. Following a detailed review of each of the events, researchers with the RAND Corporation noted the steep technique learning curve of the 10-pound medicine ball throw as not benefiting the intent of the test, which is to build explosive power, Mullinax said. With the removal of the ball throw, the maximum score possible drops from 600 points to 500 points under the new configuration. Male and female soldiers serving in one of the 21 combat arms jobs listed by the Army must pass each event under the 350-point standard for a successful test, regardless of gender. The tests are likely to remain 'age-normed,' which means that scoring is adjusted for the age of the soldier, officials said. Final scoring details won't be released until May. Army officials listed the following jobs that must meet the 350-point minimum standard: 11A Infantry Officer 11B Infantryman 11C Indirect Fire Infantryman (Mortarman) 11Z Infantry Senior Sergeant 12A Engineer 12B Combat Engineer 13A Field Artillery Officer 13F Fire Support Specialist 18A-Z Special Forces officer, Weapons Sergeant, Engineer Sergeant, Medical Sergeant, Communications Sergeant, Intelligence Sergeant and Senior Sergeant 180A Special Forces Warrant Officer 19A Armor Officer 19C Bradley Crew Member 19D Cavalry Scout 19K M1 Armor Crewman 19Z Armor Senior Sergeant Discussing the change, Naumann shared her experience in passing assessment and selection for special operations in the early 2000s and said that achieving that standard helped her maintain credibility with the force. 'I see this as a positive for women in combat roles because it's the same standard,' Naumann said. Implementation guidance is scheduled to publish in May. The test will become the official test of record in June. New scoring standards for the combat arms jobs will take effect in January 2026. The scoring standard for combat jobs will become the standard for the Guard and Reserve in June 2026, according to Army officials.
Yahoo
22-04-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Army cuts athletic trainers from fitness teams, with medics to take up slack
The Army is cutting certified athletic trainers from the fitness training teams across the service, Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Jim Mingus said Tuesday, replacing them with strength coaches. But regular medics might get extra training to deal with fitness-related injuries when the trainers are gone. The overall goal, he said, was a fitter, stronger Army. 'We will not have arrived until we have a no-neck Army,' Mingus joked. 'Everybody in the Army, their traps are going to go from the base of their head right down to their neck.' Athletic trainers are civilian specialists trained to help prevent or treat injuries that often occur during normal fitness training like weight lifting and running. To replace them, the Army says it will hire more strength coaches, fitness specialists who focus on creating and monitoring workouts but who often lack training on injury prevention. As for the injuries that athletic trainers might have helped with, soldiers will now have to go find a medic in their unit, officials said. A typical Army platoon, Mingus said, already has its own medics who are present for unit training and exercises. 'We just need to train them on how to identify and be able to do some of that treatment there,' he said. The move will effect the teams set-up in large units under the Army's holistic health and fitness program, or H2F, the Army's massive overhaul of its fitness and wellness training for soldeirs. Those teams, which are made up of about 20 people for Brigade-sized units, had been designed with seven strength and conditioning coaches and four athletic trainers. But going forward, the Army is cutting its athletic trainers and moving to 11 strength and conditioning coaches. Mingus said the units with H2F access are seeing fewer injuries, faster recovery times and better marksmanship scores. According to H2F data provided by the Army, for units with the program, they have seen a 14% decrease in musculoskeletal injuries, 23% greater Army fitness test pass rate, and 27% more soldiers qualifying as experts for rifle marksmanship. H2F was announced in 2017 as cultural shift towards improving soldiers' total wellness that goes beyond physical fitness, to include taking care of their mental health, getting enough rest, and eating well. As part of the program, the Army embedded teams within their formations to give soldiers more direct access to fitness professionals without needing to make appointments at clinics or hospitals. Those changes, first reported by came down to credentialing and budgeting issues, Mingus said. Athletic trainers are considered health providers and are overseen by the Defense Health Agency, which oversees the entire military's medical staff. But the H2F program does not include DHA positions. 'If you're in the health providing business, you have to be credentialed, licensed and overseen by DHA, which is outside the Army's control,' Mingus said at an event hosted by the Association of the U.S. Army in Washington D.C. 'We wanted to keep this as an Army program. We wanted to be able to control our teams and how they interact.' While a strength and conditioning coach focuses on improving fitness through proper technique and deliberate planning in training, an athletic trainer, or AT, is trained in the medical science of injury prevention and recovery. The strength and conditioning coaches are 'probably not going to be able to do it in treatment, which is why your medic, your battalion surgeon, your brigade surgeon — there are [occupational therapists] within a division, they need to come in and perform those functions with the strength and conditioning coach,' Mingus told Task & Purpose. 'It's just a slightly different pairing.' Mingus, a major proponent of H2F, said the Army is no longer testing the feasibility of it as a pilot, but rather sees it as an established program 'for the entire Army.' The service initially equipped 20 of its maneuver formations with H2F teams and the goal is to outfit 111 active duty brigades with their own H2F teams by the end of fiscal year 2027. The Army is using pilot teams within National Guard and Army Reserve units to determine the best configuration because their needs and training schedules are obviously different. Those H2F units might be established in 'centralized locations where soldiers can be advised by human performance subject matter experts either virtually or in person,' according to an Army release. 'It is absolutely here to stay,' Mingus said. 'The optimized human component of how you fight is actually, I think, more important than anything else that we will do. Fitter people are hard to kill. That's just fact.' Beyond the physical successes, he said the program is leading to 'many other intangibles' like soldiers experiencing less mental health crises and committing fewer 'acts of indiscipline.' Those 'intangibles' have equated to 22% lower behavioral health reports and a 502% reduction in substance abuse profiles. He said that the investment in the program — which costs roughly $3 million to stand and $2.5 million to sustain — will equate to $3 million in annual savings per formation. Mingus also said the goal is to have the program pay off for soldiers who want to have lifetime Army careers or for those who retire with enduring injuries — many of which cost the government through Department of Veterans Affairs healthcare. 'Think about the number of NCOs and senior officers that retire and their quality of life is just crap,' he said. 'We owe that to our troopers that are out there that if you want to commit to 20, 30, whatever number of years, you ought to know that you're going to go into your next life with a pretty decent quality of life.' Top enlisted leader of Air Force Special Operations Command fired amid investigation The Marine in one of the most famous recruiting commercials is now in Congress 75th Ranger Regiment wins 2025 Best Ranger Competition Medal of Honor recipient Dakota Meyer reenlists in Marine Reserve Air Force pilots get a new way to pee at 30,000 feet
Yahoo
22-04-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Army to replace athletic trainers with strength coaches on H2F teams
The Army is swapping athletic trainer positions from its Holistic Health and Fitness teams for more strength and conditioning coaches. Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James Mingus told Army Times that the move will keep control of instructors in the Army's chain of command, and allow for the service-wide rollout of the plan to continue on schedule. The move, reported April 16 by from a leaked internal staff memo, will take effect in the coming months. Army looks to expand its holistic health program for Guard, Reserve The H2F teams currently include a mix of four athletic trainers and seven strength coaches at the brigade level. Under the new plan, those teams will contain 11 strength coaches and no athletic trainers. Mingus said that athletic trainers are licensed medical professionals and overseen by Defense Health Agency requirements. Those requirements are proving difficult to fill as the service spreads the program from its original 111 combat arms or combat arms support brigades to the entire Army over the coming years. The athletic trainers focus primarily on returning soldiers to duty following injury and focusing training on injury prevention, Mingus said. Strength coaches are more focused on optimizing human performance, he said. Mingus told Army Times he was confident that a combination of injury prevention and mitigation by proper instruction and monitoring by strength coaches, battalion and brigade surgeons and medics could keep injuries down. The fitness program covers five health domains — physical, sleep, nutrition, spiritual and mental — for an all-around approach to soldier health and performance. Each domain is overseen by experts in the field from strength and conditioning coaches to behavioral health professionals, registered dietitians and chaplains. At every level, the Army has touted its H2F program, highlighting improved metrics for H2F-resourced brigades compared with brigades that lack support teams. Data has shown a 30% decrease in musculoskeletal injuries, a 140% decrease in injury referral; a 22% reduction in behavioral health problems and a 26% increase in rifle expert qualifications. 'Fit people are harder to kill,' Mingus said. In March, Lt. Gen. David Francis, deputy commander at Army Training and Doctrine Command, announced multiple pilot programs to expand different versions of H2F to Army National Guard and Army Reserve units. Currently the Army is on track to have 71 active duty H2F-resourced brigades by October. The original goal was to reach 111 active duty brigades by 2030. A series of six pilot studies in both the Guard and Reserve will examine how best to implement the program at smaller or dispersed units. 'We are committed to making sure that our Guard and Reserve folks are taken care of because when they go [deploy], they got to be just as strong and fast as everybody else,' Mingus said at the time. The pilots will examine using both Area Support Teams and H2Fast concepts to determine how best to build teams to support such units. An active duty pilot will convert a former embedded H2F team at Joint Base Lewis–McChord, Wash., to support the installation commander and smaller brigades at the base that did not have teams to look at dispersed coverage. On the Reserve side, five-member H2Fast teams at the readiness division level will manage various health and fitness resources across their assigned units.
Yahoo
16-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Army master fitness trainer speaks on 'culture of fitness' to prepare soldiers for 'lethality in combat'
A U.S. Army advertisement titled "Stronger People are HARDER to KILL!" released earlier in February saw branch project manager and master fitness trainer SFC Scott Dalrymple deadlifting and lifting weights. Dalrymple joined "The Ingraham Angle" on Friday to discuss the advertisement and messaging shift for the U.S. military. Host Laura Ingraham asked why the message of strength was prevalent in the video. Trump Signs Executive Orders Banning 'Radical Gender Ideology,' Dei Initiatives In The Military "We created this video to promote the Army's holistic health and fitness program H2F," Dalrymple said of the ad released Feb. 9. "Basically, what that program is doing is preparing our soldiers for lethality in combat in the different pillars such as physical fitness, mental, emotional and spiritual." Sleep is a major focus for the program, Dalrymple added. This comes as a sleep expert recently warned about the problem of chronic sleep deprivation across the country. "So sleep, obviously, that's one of the big pillars that affects basically how you live your life day to day," Dalrymple continued. Read On The Fox News App "With the help of the personnel that are part of this program, we're going to be able to help soldiers and make them better war-fighters." Hegseth Bans Future Trans Soldiers, Makes Sweeping Changes For Current Ones Ingraham also asked whether military personnel are feeling positive about the prospects of fitness programs being effective under Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Both men were outspoken in their criticism of DEI policies and the "woke" culture they claim has caused problems. Trump Says He Ordered Firing Of Military Academies' Board Of Visitors "There is definitely a culture of fitness that is coming to the military," Dalrymple noted. "It's something that has been in the works for a while that is needed to basically, you know, get back on track, and that's something we're working towards." The minimalist advertisement featuring Dalrymple marks a tonal shift from some of the messaging the military used under former President Joe Biden's administration. In 2021, social media was set ablaze over an animated video on the GoArmy YouTube page entitled "EMMA | THE CALLING | GOARMY" — unlisted as of press time — that was criticized as a "joke of an ad."Original article source: Army master fitness trainer speaks on 'culture of fitness' to prepare soldiers for 'lethality in combat'
Fox News
15-02-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
Army master fitness trainer speaks on 'culture of fitness' to prepare soldiers for 'lethality in combat'
A U.S. Army advertisement titled "Stronger People are HARDER to KILL!" released earlier in February saw branch project manager and master fitness trainer SFC Scott Dalrymple deadlifting and lifting weights. Dalrymple joined "The Ingraham Angle" on Friday to discuss the advertisement and messaging shift for the U.S. military. Host Laura Ingraham asked why the message of strength was prevalent in the video. "We created this video to promote the Army's holistic health and fitness program H2F," Dalrymple said of the ad released Feb. 9. "Basically, what that program is doing is preparing our soldiers for lethality in combat in the different pillars such as physical fitness, mental, emotional and spiritual." Sleep is a major focus for the program, Dalrymple added. This comes as a sleep expert recently warned about the problem of chronic sleep deprivation across the country. "So sleep, obviously, that's one of the big pillars that affects basically how you live your life day to day," Dalrymple continued. "With the help of the personnel that are part of this program, we're going to be able to help soldiers and make them better war-fighters." Ingraham also asked whether military personnel are feeling positive about the prospects of fitness programs being effective under Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Both men were outspoken in their criticism of DEI policies and the "woke" culture they claim has caused problems. "There is definitely a culture of fitness that is coming to the military," Dalrymple noted. "It's something that has been in the works for a while that is needed to basically, you know, get back on track, and that's something we're working towards." The minimalist advertisement featuring Dalrymple marks a tonal shift from some of the messaging the military used under former President Joe Biden's administration. In 2021, social media was set ablaze over an animated video on the GoArmy YouTube page entitled "EMMA | THE CALLING | GOARMY" — unlisted as of press time — that was criticized as a "joke of an ad."
