Off Duty, Military Health and Fitness - Navy Times

Fitness fix-ups

Knowing your personal limits is a good thing. Self-awareness, after all, is a gift. But when it comes to fitness, confusing realistic limits with potential possibilities can lead to selling yourself short.

Nowhere is that more treacherous than your annual fitness test, where an incremental improvement on your score can mean the difference between a promotion or a better performance evaluation.

If you’ve settled into a routine where you’re only pumping out so many push-ups, crunches or pull-ups, or just can’t seem to improve your run time no matter how hard you try, stop sweating it. Most likely it’s not a lack of effort that’s to blame — it’s probably a misguided approach to training.

We asked fitness experts to help us help you pump up your scores. And that doesn’t mean simply doing more reps and sets of the events on your test. In this case, harder doesn’t equal smarter — it means doing collaborative exercises designed to improve your performance on those events.

The result: You can do more pull-ups and push-ups than you do now. You can run faster. You can knock out more crunches, sit-ups or curl-ups. The best part: You don’t have to become a PT freak to make it happen. Here’s how:

Sit-ups, curl-ups & crunches

The sit-up — and all its modern variations designed to minimize damage to one’s back and spine — is an age-old strength-training exercise designed to toughen your abdominal muscles. It’s the ultimate gut check on any military fitness test. But your abs are just part of the total equation.

“You use two muscle groups when you perform a crunch or a sit-up — your abs and your hip flexors,” says fitness policy expert Navy Cmdr. Jacqueline Pollock at the Navy Annex in Arlington, Va. “For a lot of people, it’s their hip flexors that fatigue out on a fitness test, not their abs.”

And that’s where the limitations set in.

Pollock says research shows your abs do about 30 percent of the lift in a sit-up, and your hip flexors do the rest. So while your abs help lift your shoulders off the ground, stronger hip flexors are what will help drive you to a better score.

The solution: The V-up

This gut-buster gives added attention to the hip flexors in addition to strengthening the abs:

1. Lying flat on your back, stretch your arms overhead and keep your legs straight.

2. While inhaling deeply, raise your legs and arms together as high and as straight as you can, forming a “V” shape at the top. Come up like you’re doing a crunch.

3. Try to touch your hands to your feet.

4. Hold the position for as long as you can, at least for three counts.

5. Lower to the starting position. Repeat, doing a set of 10 to 25 V-ups.

Other options:

• The exercise ball crunch: While seated on a stable exercise ball, do three or four sets of 15 to 20 crunches/sit-ups, lifting your torso off the ball.

Pull-ups

Another good test of upper-body strength is the pull-up. The Marine Corps is the only service that uses the pull-up in fitness tests.

Like the push-up, taxing the muscles that do the heavy lifting is a surefire way to improve performance, says Bob Thomas, the lead fitness trainer for Naval Air Station Pensacola, Fla., and a former naval aviator. He also writes the Military Muscle column for OFFDuty. His recommendation: Slow it down.

“Going super slow in training is a good way to see faster improvements,” Thomas says.

The solution: Super-slow pull-ups

Get in the pull-up position with your hands in a normal grip configuration and your body fully extended. Begin a slow, 10-second upward pull, keeping your body straight with little or no motion other than the vertical climb. Summit the bar with your chin and then begin a similar 10-second descent, returning to the starting position.

This slow-motion workout increases stress on your biceps, shoulders and triceps, Thomas says, boosting their endurance and capacity. It’s a slow burn with potentially big payoffs.

Female Marines do what’s called a flexed-arm hang, where they clutch the pull-up bar with both hands, placing their heads just above the bar. The longer they hold on, the higher their score. Thomas’ solution for improving that performance: “Drop the flex-armed hang in your training and do pull-ups — as many as you can.”

Other options:

• 7/21s: Do seven pull-ups from the full down position to halfway up. Then do seven pull-ups from halfway up to the full up position. Then do seven pull-ups from full down to full up.

• Change your grip: Go for wider grips to place extra stress on your muscles.

Timed run

If there’s one area that people need help, it’s here. But simply running longer distances when you train will not boost your speed. Instead, you need to train faster.

“We recommend doing sprints and going shorter distances,” says Stephen Van Camp, the assistant director and chief of doctrine at the U.S. Army Fitness School at Fort Jackson, S.C. “That will contribute more to overall speed than simply running longer distances.”

While longer distances will help improve overall endurance — and that’s important on these longer timed runs — it won’t shave time.

“You need to practice running faster to get faster,” Van Camp says.

The solution: 30-60 or 60-120 sprints

Sprint for 30 seconds, walk for 60 seconds — or, sprint for a minute and walk for two minutes. Repeat 10 times. Do this at least once a week.

Other options:

• Calculated training: Divide the length of your run into segments and have an elapsed time to hit each segment. Having such focus will allow you to target where you save time and boost speeds.

• Speed training: Run between 600 meters and a half-mile, but do it at a fast pace. You want to learn to develop “quick leg turnover,” Thomas says. Run that distance several times during your workout and equal or improve the time with each effort.

• Interval training: Run at a high intensity for two to three minutes, then cool down for one minute. Repeat. This can be done on a treadmill.