It used to be where we had to go to CMPB to be certified fit to run around and once that is done, the merry go round begins.
Most people use their fitness test scores from thir JCs and Polies, where the standards for chin ups etc are freaking slack i am sure :P. Being the lucky bastard that i was, i did my high school overseas and as a returnee, had to do the NARFAR test. Failing which, i would not get a 6 week discount on my 2.5 years. Not surprisingly, i failed the chin ups (i was a portly 97kg at 1.68m tall).
I still remember the company Foxtrot, platoon 21. So fat we were that when we fell in at the company line, we would take about 1.5 times the space of a regular platoon. Anyway, they had a special phase for us "fatties", Fitness Training Phase, where all we would do is get run to our deaths by torture agents clad in all white, Physical Training Instructors (PTIs). Those prissy all white monkeys were roundly hated. There were also of course wild rumours about a "Monkey God" PTI who was sent to DB for running a recruit to death.
MOST people passed the test after 3 or 4 weeks of that punishment. Either the really round lost so much weight as to qualify for UN food aid, or the skinnies put on enough muscle mass to finally weigh more than their girlfriends.
The regulations stated that reps per set was restricted to a maximum of 20 push ups at a time ...but there would always be that mysterious person at the back of the lot who skipped one count and we would ALL start from ZERO!! Bloody hell! Lots and lots of tears were spilt, some from anger, some from the great sense of the injustice we felt but mostly from the futility of it all. However, almost all of us dragged, squirmed or in some cases, weaseled our way through. (Cue breasting the tape of a marathon music).
The irony of it is that the fatties would eventually be among the fitter ones. Having built muscles to carry five ton bodies around for years, losing a couple of tons meant we could run a lot faster and longer.
With that, we were qualified to start what is called Basic Military Training. :)
1 comment:
Haha,
Still remember the famous "monkey god" who scared the shit out of my BMT platoon in 7 BTS Delta Coy. In our first 2hr PT session, we actually spent 1.5 hrs in push-up position and doing sets of 20 pushups (i think we did a total of 400-500 pushups then) just for the stupid reason that our company after spreading out to do warmups, could not greet the PTIs in unison.
Come to think of it, it was quite hilarious then as you could hear 3 "echos" of "good morning PTIs" throughout the company.
After that, we spent the next 30 mins warming down and that was the end of that PT session and the whole company would not feel our hands for 2 days after that and we had to feed each other during meal times as our hands were so sore from the pushups that we could not bend them more than 60 degrees inwords.
Geez.... those were the days.....
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