The biggest mistake most airmen make in their physical training is focusing on quantity over quality, said professional bodybuilder Senior Airman Terrence Ruffin.
"They say, 'Practice how you play,'" Ruffin said in a Feb. 23 interview. "A lot of times, you see people doing PT and they're doing their pushups wrong just because they want to get a lot of them."
The result of such faulty training, Ruffin said, is some airmen aren't as in-shape as they think they are and can risk a surprising failure when their PT assessment rolls around.
"I hear it all the time," Ruffin said. "People say they do 50 or 60 [pushups] for normal PT, but when they take the actual PT test, they get maybe 30 or half of what they usually get, because they're not practicing properly."
Instead, airmen should concentrate on doing their exercises properly — maintaining a proper plank position and going down far enough to bend their elbows to the required 90 degree angle — even if it means not getting as many reps in.
"Leave your ego at the door," Ruffin said. "If you can only do 20 or 10 or so correct pushups, do as many as you can correct first and then, once you can't get any more in correctly, then you can switch just to get a few more in. The more strict you do them beforehand, the easier they'll be the day you actually take the test."
It's not just pushups. In Ruffin's experience, many airmen try to run too far in their training, mistakenly thinking running long distances is an effective way to get into shape. He said a better strategy would be to run intervals — relatively short runs with regular bursts of speed.
"Usually, when you're trying to increase your speed, interval training is a really good route to take," Ruffin said. "When I'm getting ready for my PT test, I do two miles at the most. I'm not the fastest person, but my time changes by about two minutes from the start of my PT prep to the day I take my test."
Ruffin also thinks many airmen need to exercise more times each week. His squadron, for example, PTs two or three times a week.
"That's not enough to actually progress," Ruffin said. "If you want to improve your scores on the PT test, doing aerobic exercise three to five times a week would be sufficient to help your run time."
The same goes for situps, pushups and strength training, he said. When he started lifting weights, he noticed he was soon able to do ten 10 more pushups.
Depending on their fitness levels and goals, Ruffin said, airmen should do between 30 minutes to an hour of weight training on their exercise days, plus 20 to 30 minutes of aerobic exercise.
And airmen should be willing to do training on their own, outside of the usual PT exercises, to make sure they keep pushing themselves, Ruffin said. When units PT, he said, they have to cater to all airmen, some of whom may not be in as good a shape. As a result, the exercises may not challenge fitter airmen, and they need to take the initiative to do more.
He said he helps some of his fellow airmen train, and that their PT scores have gone up noticeably.
Ruffin thinks the Air Force could improve how it measures airmen's fitness. He thinks the tape test, for example, disadvantages tall airmen with larger frames, who have less of a margin for error before being deemed too fat. But the 5-foot-5-inch Ruffin said it would be difficult for him to fail the waist measurement, even if he wasn't in great shape.
"Some people are naturally a 35 or 36, so if they gain a couple pounds, they have a smaller window," Ruffin said. "For bigger people or taller people, it's tougher than smaller-framed people."
Critics have also said the tape test is subjective and can lead to erroneous results.
Ruffin thinks the tape test could be used to identify potential medical problems in airmen, but because it is flawed, it shouldn't lead to airmen failing their PT evaluation.
"I hear story about people doing weird and crazy things to make their waist smaller before PT tests," Ruffin said. "I would eliminate that" tape test.
The Air Force in 2013 adopted new physical fitness test standards that offer airmen who fail the tape test, but score 75 out of 80 points on the rest of the test, the chance to pass by taking a Body Mass Index screen.
Airmen who have a BMI of more than 25 — failing that second test — then get a third chance. They have their body fat percentages calculated based on neck and waist measurements for men, or neck, waist and hip measurements for women.
Ruffin doesn't think BMI is an effective measurement for measuring fitness, he said, and should be taken out of the PT evaluation process along with the tape test.
But using calipers to measure body fat, combined with their running, pushup and situp scores, would be a much more accurate way to test airmen's fitness, he said.
Stephen Losey is the air warfare reporter for Defense News. He previously covered leadership and personnel issues at Air Force Times, and the Pentagon, special operations and air warfare at Military.com. He has traveled to the Middle East to cover U.S. Air Force operations.
