Marine Force Fitness Instructor.

[Christopher Anderson]

Not sure if you have came across this yet but it's a new MOS that the Marines are coming up with.

Marine Corps Now Recruiting First Force Fitness Instructors | Military.com

[Mark Rippetoe]

How is this important?

[Christopher Anderson]

How is this important?

Not really important, just found it funny that they are wasting the resources to create a MOS on fitness and nothing is going to change in how they incorporate it. No barbell training and all running, marching and push ups. Just like the majority of academia out there, teaching useless material and the cycle will continue unbroken.

[Eric K]

Not really important, just found it funny that they are wasting the resources to create a MOS on fitness and nothing is going to change in how they incorporate it. No barbell training and all running, marching and push ups. Just like the majority of academia out there, teaching useless material and the cycle will continue unbroken.

"We, the establishment, recognize that our centralized, global standardization has failed to produce desirable results. Thus, we shall expend resources to form a central body from within the establishment to certify 'trainers' in a way that will most likely stifle and/or discourage innovation among individuals to meet their own needs. We fully expect our superior station will compensate for our total incompetence in the given field, and that this new system will drive out the dissenting views of more qualified individuals."

How very government. For additional laughs, view the height and weight standards. Pay close attention to the lower end of the range of what's considered "acceptable." I honestly think I would actually be hospitalized before I reached the lower end of that range (125 lbs at 5' 7").

[Charlocity2]

I saw that headline in the Marine Corps Times and wondered if the military's conventional wisdom would dilute the effectiveness of this endeavor. Regarding training, my son the Marine took "improvise, adapt, and overcome" to heart. He trains the 5 barbell lifts on a novice LP and successfully recovered from an ACL reconstruction in November. He's astute enough to have scheduled coaching with not 1 but 2 SSCs in his travels.

[tfranc]

Well, Marines pretty much do whatever they want so...

[David A. Rowe]

This was always my issue while in. I had staff sergeants, guys with phenomenal levels of expertise in both recon and my MOS, tell me "Man, I've been blasting myself with P90X. Let's do that for our PT today." I don't mean to take away from them, or any Marine. What they lacked in knowledge on strength and conditioning training they made up for with sheer will and hard work. I'm absolutely biased, as well..

But FUCK the Marine Corps head shed for the shit they make Marines do. Forced pack marches, boots and utes runs with rubber rifles and body armor, obscenely long runs multiple times a week... the list goes on. Marines who do engage in strength training on their own are absolutely penalized because the only programming I could divine from my leaders was "make it hurt." Leadership at units typically perpetuate this cycle. This sort of shit doesn't harden your Marines... it breaks them down. If I had a nickle for every fucked up senior officer or staff NCO I ran across I could've retired by the end of my first enlistment. MARSOC and RECON were different, but it was because you were expected to play by big boy rules- here are OUR standards and what is required for a mission. Meet them. If I had known differently before hand about strength training it would have absolutely changed my life. It certainly has gone a long way towards unfucking my back and knees, but before I turned thirty I was already in a condition to NEED strength training to hurt less and be more physically capable. If I had known about conditioning and programming I would've been able to best prepare myself for deployment, and I could have passed said knowledge on to my Marines.

[tfranc]

It's interesting you mention that. Pretty much every Marine I know (7 guys) who's come back from the sandbox has back issues/slipped disks/etc. Same thing for Army guys. I think the bottom line is that when you make 19 year old twigs hump 70 lbs of gear for mile after mile after mile, you get injuries. Why brass hasn't figured this out yet is so unbelievably baffling that it makes me sick. The Army did a study recently showing the injury rate for sit ups during the PFT. It was something like 65 percent, just crazy stupid. I've heard a lot of NCO's say "if it aint broke, don't fix it", but its like, "dumbass, it is broken."

[Bryan Dobson]

This was always my issue while in. I had staff sergeants, guys with phenomenal levels of expertise in both recon and my MOS, tell me "Man, I've been blasting myself with P90X. Let's do that for our PT today." I don't mean to take away from them, or any Marine. What they lacked in knowledge on strength and conditioning training they made up for with sheer will and hard work. I'm absolutely biased, as well..

But FUCK the Marine Corps head shed for the shit they make Marines do. Forced pack marches, boots and utes runs with rubber rifles and body armor, obscenely long runs multiple times a week... the list goes on. Marines who do engage in strength training on their own are absolutely penalized because the only programming I could divine from my leaders was "make it hurt." Leadership at units typically perpetuate this cycle. This sort of shit doesn't harden your Marines... it breaks them down. If I had a nickle for every fucked up senior officer or staff NCO I ran across I could've retired by the end of my first enlistment. MARSOC and RECON were different, but it was because you were expected to play by big boy rules- here are OUR standards and what is required for a mission. Meet them. If I had known differently before hand about strength training it would have absolutely changed my life. It certainly has gone a long way towards unfucking my back and knees, but before I turned thirty I was already in a condition to NEED strength training to hurt less and be more physically capable. If I had known about conditioning and programming I would've been able to best prepare myself for deployment, and I could have passed said knowledge on to my Marines.

So much institutional " hard as nails" attitude makes it hard to introduce smart pt programs. The smartest training always happened in the smaller more specialized teams. The regiment and battalion level requirements are usually prescribed and stupid.

I was fortunate to spend a lot of time on small security teams where specialized response training and education took the majority of our training time while pt was fairly self directed. But you better not drop your scores that got you here.

[Mac Ward]

Have we considered letting the program execute the first class before we rip it to shreds? I think the MARADMIN essentially states that the fitness program could be better...and this is an attempt to improve.