Fitness Challenge 2008

Sometime back I wrote about trying my luck with the Army's physical fitness test.

During a lunch conversation, one of my account managers and I were discussing fitness. He wasn't happy with his current weight level and missed his preretirement Army physique. So we hatched a plan.

Regardless of if you're in shape or out, you might want to join us. I'm doing it to benchmark and then measure my progress in 2008. No competition, just challenging ourselves. Here it is.

On January 2 we will test ourselves using the Army PFT guidelines.

Test #1 Push Ups - Number completed in 2 minutes, resting is allowed in the up position.
Test #2 Sit Ups - Number completed in 2 minutes, full sit ups, not crunches.
Test #3 2 mile run - timed two mile run
20 minutes allowed between each exercise.

We will then retest on March 1st to see if or how much we've improved. The nice thing is that this is a simple way to have a goal and to measure overall fitness. Another great thing is that it doesn't require special equipment.

I plan on testing myself throughout the year to see how I'm doing on overall fitness. Currently my cardio is pretty good, but my upper body strength is not as good as I'd like it to be, not to mention my core strength (gut).

Think about it....I'll try to get the scoring scale up in the next couple of days.