Navy Physical Readiness Test

This post is in response to Scott Bird's (from the blog Straight to the Bar) question about what my Navy PRT test is.

Twice a year, the Navy tests physical fitness of its members. Their exercises of choice are the push-up, situp, and 1.5 mile run/ swim (for those who hate to run). Since I'm not that fast a swimmer, the run is my poison. You also have to pass weight standards for your height or, if you can't make weight, bodyfat testing using the difference between your neck and waist circumference placed on a chart with measurements based on height (kind of like BMI). ANd you have to pass a sit-reach test. If you do not pass BF or weight, you fail regardless of how you do on everything else. There are also standards for the exercises based on age. Failure can affect your evaluations adversely over time, and in the past 3 failures would get you kicked out.

Physically, I could pass the exercises but not that great. And bodyfat has been my bane since 2000. When I got out of the regular Navy in January 1999, I got careless. So whereas I was 206 at 20%BF 1in 1999, I was 26% at 234 in April 2004 and since I'm trying to get back in the regular Navy, this was a big hurdle.

In endurance for the exercises, I was having a hard time because of my weight. Now, I knew I needed to build up strength: endurance work with more strength means a greater ability to handle my weight repeatedly. I have a conversion phase designed for that taken from a book called Strength Training for Sports that always worked. But their Maximum Strength phase never made me that much stronger, and my endurance would hit a wall because of it. Another thing I knew was that I could never make weight: I carried enough lean mass (based on caliper testing) that even at 10% BF I would be 206 lbs (192 is the weight for someone 5'10"). So that meant cardio plus weights, because in the formula, a bigger neck means lower BF (Subtract a big neck from waist measurement).

Westside was my solution; it allowed me to get stronger fast and identify weak points. One was my lats/upper back. At a bench press of 185 at the time, I could only row 92 lbs. So I worked back with a vengeance. Unlike Westside, I train my back equally hard at lunch with maxes or heavy triples. This made pushups easier to launch from the bottom. In six months, this nearly doubled my T-bar strength and increased my chinup/pullup strength by 50 lbs. I also used Prilepin's Program from Tsampa.org's site but used it for everything: squats, RDL, bench, deadlift, and chinups/pullups using a Hoist assisted machine. All the triples and work volume brought my mass up which, combined with a system of circuits for running, dropped my run time by a minute to 13:00, increased my pushups and situps (my exercises for that were lying leg thrusts and ball crunches with weight plates.), and increased my neck one inch to 18" and dropped my waist size 2". When I was measured in September, my bodyfat had dropped to 20% without losing a pound or dieting hard. It was a great learning experience.

One last note: the muscle endurance cycle I went on was 12 weeks long. To avoid a strength drop, especially because CNS based strength fades first, I did a Westside workout two days of the week not being trained for endurance and worked up to a heavy single on ME days. I will cover conversion phases for strength in a future blog.