Physical fitness is vital to almost everything that the Army does. The physical training that builds that fitness in each unit is a foundational contributor to its effectiveness. And the culture surrounding fitness is—for very good reason—an elementary building block of the broader Army culture and the identity that comes with Army service.
So the Army’s decision to hire civilian personal trainers to effectively take over fitness programming is in many ways a head-scratching one. The decision to outsource physical training seems to be based on the faulty logic that tactical-level leaders are incapable of learning how to create fitness programs themselves. But the more that we pay people to think about fitness for us, the worse our fitness problems will get.
The History: Ten Years of PRT
As the Army entered the high operational tempo of the United States’ post-9/11 wars, it began developing a new style of fitness. It took years to do so, but in 2010 Training Circular 3-22.20 was finally released, introducing the Army to PRT—physical readiness training. PRT was designed in “schedules,” which were sets of premade drills to be completed in unison and in a military formation. The overall theory was that the schedules could be completed in a certain order, which would repeat over time and constitute the “program.”
At the time, PRT was pitched as a solution to the rising musculoskeletal injuries in the Army because it would simplify fitness and organize it under a single style. Unfortunately, PRT schedules were boring, repetitive, and universally hated, and then Sergeant Major of the Army Dan Dailey had to defend the fitness regime’s utility after its critics informed him that even his own fitness routine was in fact not PRT. PRT imposed a centralized solution on the Army as a whole and didn’t include basic fitness education that we might expect from the Army.
The centralized control of PRT effectively ended the practice of noncommissioned officers designing their own programs. Some NCOs were required to memorize PRT drills for their professional development schools, some were forced to do PRT schedules purely out of an abundance of safety, and others were instructed that PRT was the only authorized fitness program. If you were in the Army during these years, then you surely remember this sudden change.
PRT’s proponents insisted that “physical training is NCO business” but somehow also claimed that it was officers who should provide “the program and everything else that goes with it.” It is my honest belief that this line is a throwaway, meant to ease initial repulsion to a formalized fitness schedule that stripped unit leaders of the responsibility for designing fitness routines for their formations. An Army PRT pocket guide demanded that NCOs perform PRT schedules “as written” anyway, which eliminated the need for officers to provide additional programming. Under this system from 2010 to 2020, NCOs and officers memorized PRT schedules, and this sufficed as the fitness education for their professional development.
The Problem: H2F and its Outsourcing of Army Fitness Programming
In 2020 the Army conducted an overhaul and introduced the Holistic Health and Fitness system (H2F). H2F operates under the logic that each unit requires a specific fitness routine based on its mission. This is surprising because it is the precisely opposite logic that brought about PRT’s generic schedules. Despite this contradiction, amazingly, PRT schedules were retained as a part of H2F. Among the sprawling 676 pages of text from the three H2F manuals there are eighty-six pages dedicated to a fitness program schedule—the entirety of which are cut-and-paste PRT schedules from 2010. This is an absurd oversight that has yet to be corrected.
H2F operates under the assumption that PRT failed because “many leaders and their soldiers simply did not understand the changes from an exercise science standpoint” and that H2F has solved this misunderstanding by hiring civilian personal trainers to directly train soldiers each morning. This is faulty logic and reeks of condescension. The foundation of the Army system relies, in virtually every activity the service undertakes, on NCOs training junior soldiers. NCOs teach junior soldiers how to conduct battlefield medicine, fire artillery, conduct tank gunnery, and do rifle marksmanship. It is difficult to understand the argument that fitness programming is somehow more complex than these disciplines.
Meanwhile, H2F is employing thousands of civilian contractors in the largest personnel contract in the history of the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command history. The 2020 H2F operating concept envisioned “expert performance personnel” who would “provide a tailored training program to accelerate individual growth.” This is a massive $100 million+ contract that represents the abdication of any intent to teach soldiers how to do this themselves, a trend that began in the 2010 with the development of PRT.
The Center for Army Lessons Learned published an H2F handbook in 2023 with the intent of providing commanders with a resource on how to integrate the new civilian trainers. The handbook readily acknowledged that there weren’t enough trainers and recommended that an H2F “extender course” be taught at each unit to supplant this shortage. The handbook proposes that extender courses should be taught to NCOs that have an interest in fitness. This sounds great—but a closer look uncovers the truth: these newly taught NCOs are actually being prepared to attend yet another civilian-taught fitness course.
This “new” fitness course is provided by the National Strength and Conditioning Association and is called the Tactical Strength and Conditioning Course–Facilitator (TSAC-F). The Army must pay $1,200 to send each soldier to this course so that they can learn how to be fitness trainers. As a company commander I sent five soldiers to TSAC-F in 2019. They returned two weeks later without a certification or a functional understanding of how to build a five-day workout plan. I asked fellow company commanders in my battalion and confirmed that this was common.
Civilian organizations are set to gain the most from this new arrangement and there are many of them who have convinced the Army that fitness programming is too difficult for soldiers to handle. Most of these organizations have developed prebuilt fitness programming, which is by its very definition not individualized and not something that the Army should be purchasing.
The Solution: Army Programming
The answer is to directly teach soldiers and officers fitness programming. Fortunately, we already have a world-class military education system structured to educate soldiers on complex issues at scale. Soldiers and officers regularly attend mandatory schools that offer the perfect opportunity to teach this kind of thing, schools that currently have blocks of time earmarked for fitness that are ripe to be reassigned to fitness programming.
What has been missing from PRT and H2F is a career-long, tiered approach to education. Just as leaders receive tactical-, operational-, and strategic-level leadership over a career, so too should they receive a physical training education over the same time with corresponding levels of responsibility. The Army needs to write the foundational document, create periods of instruction based on that document, and integrate them into the curriculums. They could be progressive and Army-specific. So why hasn’t this happened yet?
It hasn’t happened because the Army’s Center for Initial Military Training can’t decide what fitness program it likes. It hasn’t happened because there is disagreement about what soldiers ought to be able to do. Lawmakers have even weighed in, demanding changes to fundamental portions of the new fitness system and further slowing development. Due to this indecision, the Army has opted to hire civilian trainers to just take over. The entire process of outsourcing the actual writing of fitness programming to civilians is reminiscent of a scene in the movie Elf, in which a children’s book publisher is under pressure to come up with a new bestseller and the two lead writers pitch their idea—to hire yet another writer. This is essentially where we are at with the Army fitness program.
The Army has failed at writing good fitness doctrine, but it has the talent to do so today. H2F is full of staff who are qualified to build new programming, and the Army even has a Warrior Fitness Team with active duty soldiers and officers who know how to build programming. H2F has collected a few resources about programming that it shares on its website, but they have yet to be made into an actual programming system. As of now they remain buried on a website and separately labeled, each designed by a different agency.
Civilian trainers might even retain an important position within H2F. Civilian fitness professionals could help squad leaders by reviewing their weekly workout plans. This is a simple way to provide quality assurance while directly interacting with squad leaders each week. This would allow NCOs to create and run physical training for their units, while having a professional coach them and provide oversight. This is much simpler and more reasonable than having 4–5 civilian coaches train 700–900 soldiers each day in the current setup.
Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Weimer wants to change our culture of fitness. I agree—but the Army Combat Fitness Test alone will not make that happen. Now is the time to create an actual fitness programming methodology for the Army. According to the definitive book on Army physical fitness, the service has historically revised and published changes to physical training and testing about every five years. The latest edition of Field Manual 7-22 was released in 2020, which means an updated manual is likely coming this year. When it arrives, we will see if our Army is truly willing to change its fitness culture, or if it is planning on outsourcing it to civilians.
Major Joshua Webster enlisted in the Army in 1999 and joined 2nd Ranger Battalion until he departed in 2003. He was an Air Force pararescueman from 2003 to 2013. He commissioned back into the Army in 2013 and served as an infantry officer until 2020 with the 173rd Airborne, 1st Ranger Battalion, and 2nd Infantry Division. He is now an Army foreign area officer and works in Washington, DC.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Staff Sgt. Catessa Palone, US Army