My Experience with Strength Training in the Military

I've been involved in strength training for fifteen years. For ten of those years, I've been serving in the U.S. Army. Since leaving college to join the Army, I have blundered through every program that I could find in a magazine or heard about from whatever knucklehead I talked to in the gym. I even attempted to resort to the programming I used in high school and college. All had the same result—marginal gains or a minor backslide. Throw in a few trips to exotic, faraway places where the locals aren't very welcoming and the overall result was failure. Sometimes I would question what kept me going back to train; I rarely set a new record. Was it some crazy masochistic tendency that brought me back time and again? Often I couldn't arrive at another explanation. But deep down, I knew it was something else. It was the memory of lifting a weight that I hadn't been able to previously and seeing hard work pay off. It was like a drug, bringing me back every day for more punishment.

Deployments have been another experience all together. They varied widely in the conditions, availability of equipment, and free time. Sometimes I was lucky enough to have an actual power rack, Olympic bars, plates, and a bench. Other times I only had kettlebells and whatever the soldiers before us had cobbled together. Nevertheless, on one of these all-expense-paid trips courtesy of Uncle Sam, I came to the realization that I didn't know one damn thing about getting strong. I knew what didn’t work; I had been practicing that for years. Someone out there had to know what they were talking about. What about those powerlifting guys? I knew they were pretty damn strong. But what was their secret? It must be steroids, right? I had worked my ass off with nothing to show for it—chest day, back day, arm day, leg day, repeat.

I started to read everything I could find on the internet. Naturally, CrossFit was one of the first things I stumbled across. A number of fellow soldiers were talking about it, so I looked through the main site and the FAQs. I remember seeing something comparing their method to others and making the claim that the best way to get strong was to do their seemingly random daily posted workouts. Nothing I had been doing had worked, so I tried it out. Wow. Doing a ton of burpees and squats in a short period of time is difficult, so this must be working, right? Nope. I definitely wasn't getting stronger, but I sure could wall ball the hell out of something. I have to add here that I'm not violently anti-CrossFit. I don't personally agree with most of it. However, they have exposed more people to strength training than ever before.

I continued to search the internet. I came across a book called Starting Strength, but this suspiciously resembled some programming used in many high schools. So the search went on—5 X 5, 3 X 3, 20-rep squats. Jim Wendler’s 5/3/1 was the next thing I found. I made slow gains for about a year, but at least I was moving in the right direction. This reignited the fire to train. I continued to read everything I could find. And that is when I discovered elitefts.com™.

Dave Tate and others had written hundreds of articles on strength training and powerlifting. It was a gold mine of everything I wish I had known for the last decade. I slowly and clumsily begin to incorporate the conjugate training method. I soon realized that the “fitness center” I trained in was sorely lacking and filled with idiots (exactly like I had been) clogging up the one power rack with their one hour curl-a-thon and lots of personal trainers grinding against their female clients while they did some sort of ball balancing, one-legged squat. I started to wear ear plugs and my hat pulled down low in a feeble attempt to block out the jackassery happening all around me.

After eighteen months of training, I'm stronger than I have ever been. My wife and I moved into an apartment with an attached garage, so I'm training inside a blazing hot garage in the Georgia summer with a fan for respite but still getting stronger. I have grown at five feet, eleven inches and weigh about 245 pounds. My lifts are nothing to impress anyone who is serious about powerlifting. I'm just breaking a 1300-lb training total. But I couldn’t be happier, and I'm getting stronger every week.

This is where the problem begins. The Army has some interesting fitness standards and methods of measuring body fat. A two-mile run with an extra forty pounds of body weight is considerably more difficult but not impossible. The body fat test is more of a challenge though. The Army determines a male’s body fat percentage by subtracting his neck measurement from his waist measurement at the navel. Anything over 22–24 percent, depending on your age, is failure and grounds for separation from service. This is turning out to be pretty difficult, but lots of neck work is helping to offset my larger torso.