You. Hi, everyone. Stefan back with a follow up to that Air Force PT testing in 2021 and what you need to know about it. So interestingly enough, shortly after that Air Force PT testing ended up getting pushed from January 2021 to April 2021. Overall, I think that’s really good news for most, if not all of us.
Gives us a little bit more time to get back into a routine of things for getting in shape to pass that fitness assessment. As far as everything’s concerned, that April assessment, or depending on what time you test, they have a chart listed that you can go and reference your last official test and figure out exactly when you’ll be testing next. But everything’s going to end up being pretty much the exact same as it was before. Just the time frame that you may be testing will be different. So that means that you’re still going to get full points on that abdominal circumference, which I think is a good thing, because depending on how your body is structured, you can have a really wide ribcage and a really wide hip like measurement, and then your waist very likely will be wide, just because that’s how your body’s built.
So no matter how much dieting you do, or cardio or strength training or anything, your waist isn’t going to get down to a super small size. And what’s kind of frustrating is that right after it was announced that they would be looking to completely remove that from fitness testing, a new Afman came out. Afman 36 290 five on 11 December 2020, and that superseded AFI 36 290 five from 21 October 2013. However, that Afman still has the waist circumference in it, and that frustrates a lot of people. But the thing is that Afman was going through processing and approval well before the announcement was made that it was going to be looked at to be completely removed from fitness assessments.
So in order for updated guidance to come out, it’s better that they pushed it out and it cut down the amount in the instructions. With the new Afman, they cut out 70 pages. So that’s going to make it a lot easier to reference and find exactly what you need for fitness assessments and fitness testing. Now, just like last video, with a few months left, you have almost as much time as you could ever want to get back in shape, even if you have done nothing since your last fitness assessment. Looking at April from right now, it’s about two and a half months away.
And if you test in the mid to end of April, it’s about three months. Now, three months is usually about the time that you have given to you after you do not pass a fitness assessment in order to get in shape enough to pass it. And that means that 90 days is more than enough time to get into a good enough condition to pass a fitness assessment. Now, something else that will be coming up, potentially, depending unit to unit, base to base, will be mock fitness assessments. So I know I have one coming up in about two and a half weeks, and I haven’t done a whole lot of cardiovascular training over the last several months, which is probably the biggest thing you need to keep up throughout everything, as muscular strength usually comes back a little bit faster.
From my experience, again, that’s anecdotal. Don’t take my word for it. Your mileage may vary. So with two and a half weeks left, exactly what can I do to help improve that runtime? And realistically, I’m probably not going to run at all in the next two and a half weeks.
The main reason is that without having done it for a while, jumping right back into it, the amount of running that I’d need to do in order to condition myself for that in two weeks could potentially harm me more than it could help me. I could potentially injure myself in the next two weeks from running. And then I’m going to be on a waiver, and then it’s just a lot of stress and unneeded pressure for myself to know. Now I’m on a waiver, and that kind of sucks because it’s going to limit what I can actually do. So instead, I’m going to be focusing on other forms of cardio.
Primarily, I’ll probably be biking a lot because it’s low impact. And I did an overview of one and a half mile run training guidelines, and with that, cross training with other cardiovascular methods can actually maintain or improve your one and a half mile runtime. So that’ll allow me to do some low impact cardiovascular work to help me start to get back into a point where I’m more comfortable running that mile and a half. And I think that’s going to be the main thing for me. And then doing some push ups and sit ups, because doing the specific exercise that you’re going to be required to do is going to be a lot more beneficial than doing auxiliary exercises that don’t do the exact movement that you need.
So if you have a mock test coming up and it’s really close and you haven’t done a whole lot, I’d recommend focusing just on the muscular movements that you need to do. So your push ups and sit ups and do them probably every other day. Do a few sets at about between a third and a half of your maximum repetitions that you can do in 1 minute and have maybe a two minute rest in between. That’s just an idea. Again, whatever you’re feeling, whatever you’re comfortable with, you can do that, but you don’t want to do too much too fast and potentially harm yourself going into that test.
I’m also not going to be doing any probably strength training or cardio training at least two days before that assessment. So I’m looking at February 4. So around February 1 will be the last day I’ll actually do anything strenuous for working out and then I’ll take a couple of days off and then do the fitness assessment. Maximum effort and hopefully it’ll be good. Appreciate again you guys watching my videos and if you like this one, give it a like comment down below if you have any thoughts on the changes to the AFI with the new AF man that came out, any possible thoughts on what fitness testing should actually be like in the air Force?
So until next time, have a good one and your mileage may vary.