How Canceling PT Made Me the Officer I am Today

This isn’t a story about skipping PT.

The head of our ROTC program caught me flat footed when I’d been one of a handful of cadets who had campaigned for years against our PT program. We had tried to argue that those who could earn a max score on the APFT should at least be allowed to skip Fridays, right? Two years of this argument had met with zero success. 

Then abruptly my senior year the PMS told our ROTC battalion they would henceforth only run “remedial PT”, a sort of “no child left behind” for fitness which saw eerily similar results. Our battalion PT program wasn’t good, for the same reason as many army fitness programs: a bunch of people with no actual knowledge about how to train fitness were put in charge of other people who didn’t know anything either. So, we ended up doing what the people before us did: push-ups, then sit-ups, then run. Every. Single. Day. To spice things up, sometimes we did Russian twists. Michigan State has a kinesiology department, but no one ever thought of asking them for tips. 

The reason those who could max the APFT wanted to skip PT was because we were already supplementing the ROTC program’s poor training on our own time. The ROTC PT wasn’t getting us any gains; it was just costing us sleep. 

Then the PMS suddenly declared, “If you can pass the APFT, you can skip PT.” I was elated, but also highly skeptical. Just passing? In the arrogance only a cadet can so blindly muster, I went up to him after and asked, “Sir, are you sure?” 

He should have smoked me for second guessing him. But instead, he replied with a hugely impactful lesson: “You’re going to have to be self-motivated as an officer in the army. People aren’t going to check up on you to make sure you’re doing the right thing. You just need to do it.” 

He was right. Not even a year later, when I took over a platoon in my first army assignment, no one was following up on 2LT Davis. I could join the platoon for their push-ups, sit-ups, run, or I could go do something else. When we deployed to Ar Ramadi that year, organized fitness became the easiest way to call indirect fire on yourself. It only took one mortar barrage to stop that madness. Staying fit wasn’t easy on a trip where we spent on average more than 72 hours a week out in sector, but we found ways. 

I dropped my packet to go to Special Forces selection not long after we redeployed. “Push-up, sit-up, run” wasn’t going to get me ready for it though. So, one of the first things I did was go to my commander and ask to be excused from company PT two days a week to train on my own. He was a Ranger Regiment alumnus, and the only supervisor who ever followed up on my fitness. When I asked him for those two days a week, I could tell what his worry was: could he trust my self-motivation? 

I managed to earn his trust, and a couple of years later, my Green Beret. 

Ditching PT for Gains 

One early consequence of my training was that I suddenly had to get taped. The army mistook the muscle mass I put on for the Q-course as “fat”.  Preparing for selection and then the Q-course didn’t just require different training. It also meant I had to learn a lot more about the theory of fitness and how best to rapidly recover. This meant a lot of self-directed reading in the evening after self-directed rucks. That disconnect between my gains and the army taping me for being fat left me wondering what else the army didn’t know about fitness. It turned out to be quite a lot. 

There were whole worlds of exercise outside of just different sorts of push-ups or sit-ups. There were deadlifts, cleans, thrusters, and snatches — hollow rocks turned out to be way spicier than lame old Russian twists. My next deployment introduced me to the benefits of a row machine. When I got back, I noticed all those long slow runs weren’t getting me a good return for time invested, so I just stopped doing them. Instead, I learned about the power of failure based fitness. I also read a lot, learning about VO2Max and the different ways to train aerobic and anaerobic fitness. One academic paper introduced Tabatas, which turned out to be so good for me that I’ve been doing one with every workout for over five years now. 

The real test came in early 2019 when I deployed as a singleton to Iraq for a year. I had been relying on outside coaches to provide my workouts for a decade. But as a singleton deployer, I’d have to do my own programming. Thankfully, after years of self-study and self-reliance, I was well equipped to do so. I’d inadvertently spent the previous 16 years honing a relentless pursuit of self-improvement. 

“The true test of a man’s character is what he does when no one is watching.” – John Wooden 

The army has shaped me in a lot of ways, but perhaps none more impactful than that first lesson in self-motivation over twenty years ago. It lit the spark in me to set high standards for myself, and to always be curious and hungry for more knowledge. That self-motivation has as much to do with my psychical fitness as it does my self-taught data-literacy. 

A lot of leaders hold up discipline as one of their core values. But true discipline isn’t something you can measure from across a parade field. True discipline is inside you. It takes a lot more than checking to see if soldiers’ shirts are tucked in. Testing true discipline takes more work from leaders. 

Back in 2019 the Army rolled out the ACFT, with new events based upon research covering the last twenty years of combat and what real readiness requires. Unfortunately, too many senior NCOs and officers, lacking this new fitness experience, showed even less self-motivation and curiosity about the ACFT. Across the army, too few leaders still held that critical internal drive our PMS had instilled in us back in ROTC. Even as late as last winter, fully six years after the ACFT was announced, RAND found too many soldiers were still often unfamiliar with the test, citing ‘Leadership challenges for implementing new standards’. 

This is a shame. Nobody joins the army out of laziness. At the start of all our careers there was at least a spark that got us to raise our right hands. But that small flame needs to be rekindled regularly. 

Officers lead change. But that change starts within us, with self-study and drive. I was lucky enough to learn early — all the way back in my cadet days — the importance of self-motivation and curiosity. These are critical to our warfighting capabilities because we’re never done changing. Cheap drones, artificial intelligence, and concerns about quantum computing are all disrupting war today. In this time of change, when senior leaders often lack the experience we need, junior leaders need to fill the gaps in the line.  

Fitness is just one example, but it matters. It isn’t just NCO business, because fitness is intimately tied to readiness, and readiness is a leader’s job. Leaders of all levels are charged with implementing and optimizing physical fitness plans and training. How are you, as a leader, managing all the forms of health for your soldiers? What are you doing for yourself?

Fitness is also the easiest way to keep that flame of self-improvement alive. It fans a relentless pursuit of self-improvement which, coupled with a healthy sense of curiosity, will keep you always looking for the next innovation, or the next disruption. And all it takes is a few minutes each day to stoke yesterday’s embers into today’s forge. Let fitness be your bellows. 

We can’t afford an officer corps that’s content to sit back and expect the army to bring them the answers. We need leaders, young and old, to lead their formations into the future. That leadership often starts with one of the first things we do in the morning. How are you going to get your gains today? 

COL Erik Davis has over sixteen years of experience in Army special operations. He is a Gen. Wayne A. Downing Scholar whose assignments have taken him from village stability operations in rural villages in Afghanistan to preparing for high-end conflict in the First Island Chain. He is currently commanding in Japan, and he writes about data and the army at https://downrangedata.substack.com/. 

Photos:

III Armored Corps Soldiers begin the week-long III AC Best Squad Competition with an Army Combat Fitness Test outside Whitside Fitness Center, Fort Riley, KS, on June 24, 2024. There are ten units from within III Corps participating in this event, all gunning for the opportunity to compete at the FORSCOM level Best Squad Competition later this year. (U.S. Army Photos by Spc. Tyler Selige)

U.S. Service members and civilians from across the world compete in the 34th annual Bataan Memorial Death March at White Sands Missile Range, N.M., Mar. 19, 2023. The Bataan Memorial Death March is a 26.2-mile marathon or ruck march to remember the roughly 75,000 U.S. and Filipino service members who became prisoners of war in the Philippines during World War II and were forced to march approximately 65 miles through the jungle to confinement camps by their Japanese captors. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. 1st Class Justin P. Morelli)