Warrior Fitness: Strength Training

My own fitness routine has been a little ragged, lately, due to colds & a "catch" in my upper back. I've been hanging myself a few times a week, though, and it's slowly straightening out the problem. But I wanted to share something I received in my email last week.

I have mentioned John E. Peterson's Pushing Yourself to Power before. I believe it contains all you need to get into fighting condition. This excerpt from a recent e-letter of Peterson's testifies to that. It's a letter he got from a soldier in Iraq:

For about four weeks I’ve been back at main camp here in Iraq and doing physical training with my soldiers six days a week. We do exercises from Pushing Yourself to Power, like the Furey push-up (they nicknamed it the ‘Boom Chicka Wanwan’), the Furey squat, the tiger bend pushup, and a variation of the handstand pushup (where we put our feet on a bench and walk out hands-backward till our legs are straight up and down but our torso has a slight angle to it). We also do incline push-ups on this bench, as well as several of the ab. exercises in PYPT.

Yesterday I did a practice APFT (Army physical fitness test) just to see how the Transformetrics training system works for different people. Well, the time for each event is two minutes, but for push-ups we brought it down to one minute just for this instance (you’ll understand why later). So everyone was excited with their numbers, everyone improved a good deal, everyone did at least half of their max on pushups(remember only one minute instead of two), and everyone improved on sit-ups. A few said they never thought they’d ever do that good on a PT test.

ALL THIS WAS AFTER ONE HOUR OF PT! So imagine the test results if everyone would have been rested and fresh. Not only do I believe in the Transformetrics training system, but now my soldiers do, too. ("Daily Transformations," March 20, 2008)

A warrior needs to stay in shape, even without the benefits of a gym or specialized equipment.