Читать книгу ACFT For Dummies - Angela Papple Johnston - Страница 11

IN THIS CHAPTER

Ushering the old APFT out and the ACFT in

Flexing your range of motion on the new test

Accepting the necessity of PRT and H2F

Discovering how the ACFT impacts your career

The United States Army needs high-speed, low-drag soldiers manning its ranks, and until 2020, it measured physical fitness by using the Army Physical Fitness Test, or APFT. But change is inevitable in the Army, and the Army Combat Fitness Test (ACFT) is now the standard by which all soldiers, male and female, are judged. Your ACFT score can determine whether you qualify for continued service in the military, and, like the APFT, it’s administered at the unit level.

So why the change?

The Army recognized the need to measure overall fitness rather than a soldier’s ability to do push-ups, sit-ups, and a two-mile run. Although those exercises are good for measuring chest strength, arm strength, and cardiovascular endurance, they’re not necessarily indicators of how well a soldier can perform on the battlefield. (And don’t get your hopes up. That two-mile run didn’t go anywhere. It’s the last event on the ACFT.)

The ACFT uses six events to measure a soldier’s functional fitness. Each event is linked to common warfighting tasks, such as carrying other soldiers out of harm’s way and climbing out of sticky situations. The ACFT standards are outlined in a “living document,” which means they can (and most likely will) change as the Army identifies new challenges and comes up with better solutions.