This morning I took the Art of Manliness' World War 2 Fitness Test. The US military started using this test in 1942 to weed out soldiers who weren't fit enough for the rigors of combat.
The test is designed around functional strength rather than looking pretty and puts a big emphasis on good form. There are five exercises:
- Pullups - front grip, full extension, chin above the bar
- Squat jumps - leaping into the air from a squat, hands clasped on your head
- Pushups - palms forward, elbows backward, full extension down to chests touching a palm (1.5cm above ground)
- Situps - extended knees, hands clasped behind head, right elbow to left knee and vice-versa
- Cardio - three different kinds depending on test conditions, all based on starting and stopping
My attempt
Those situps might be a bit outdated these days (something about the health of spines), but doing them for one test won't kill ya ;)
After doing strength exercises every morning for two years and a solid year of boxing practice two to three times a week ... I scored abysmally low with an average score of just 40.4 - which is to say juuuuust under the line where poor turns into fair.
- 7 pullups
- 20 squat jumps
- 33 pushups
- 43 situps
- 24 squat thrusts
Going to use my cough as an excuse and say it's really difficult to do this stuff when you're also coughing and wheezing, but the reality is that I'm just not good enough. Yet.
I knew I wasn't going to do well in the squats - I can do half squats forever because of longboarding, but deep squats have always been a problem. Just don't have any leg strength at the bottom of the motion. Never have.
The biggest disappointment were the pushups, however. I do 150 of those every morning. On the test I only managed 28 ... and on a second try 33. Horrible! I probably focus too much on reps rather than good form in my morning routine. This should change.
Plus it was a real bummer that as soon as you stop a bit to breathe, your try is over. It really is about continuous motion and that's hard.
Oh and the situps aren't as bad as they seem at first. I managed to do 43, but I was coughing and wheezing through the last 10 of those. According to the score sheet this is on the bottom end of fair, but going into this test I didn't think I'd do more than ten.
Despite the somewhat terrible result, I have to say I really like this test. Think I'm going to include it into my weekly routine, plot it on a graph somewhere and use it to track progress. Eventually I might even reach a perfect score ... maybe. Probably not.
At least I might be able to break the plateau I've been on for the last six months or so! That'd be awesome.
Continue reading about Despite daily strength training I'm not fit enough for WW2
Semantically similar articles hand-picked by GPT-4
- 30 day fitness experiment with results
- How I became a 3 hour per day workout nutter
- On Saturday I became a Spartan - a story in 23 gifs
- How I ran my first half marathon faster than 84% of participants
- Took IQ test - found problem
Learned something new?
Read more Software Engineering Lessons from Production
I write articles with real insight into the career and skills of a modern software engineer. "Raw and honest from the heart!" as one reader described them. Fueled by lessons learned over 20 years of building production code for side-projects, small businesses, and hyper growth startups. Both successful and not.
Subscribe below 👇
Software Engineering Lessons from Production
Join Swizec's Newsletter and get insightful emails 💌 on mindsets, tactics, and technical skills for your career. Real lessons from building production software. No bullshit.
"Man, love your simple writing! Yours is the only newsletter I open and only blog that I give a fuck to read & scroll till the end. And wow always take away lessons with me. Inspiring! And very relatable. 👌"
Have a burning question that you think I can answer? Hit me up on twitter and I'll do my best.
Who am I and who do I help? I'm Swizec Teller and I turn coders into engineers with "Raw and honest from the heart!" writing. No bullshit. Real insights into the career and skills of a modern software engineer.
Want to become a true senior engineer? Take ownership, have autonomy, and be a force multiplier on your team. The Senior Engineer Mindset ebook can help 👉 swizec.com/senior-mindset. These are the shifts in mindset that unlocked my career.
Curious about Serverless and the modern backend? Check out Serverless Handbook, for frontend engineers 👉 ServerlessHandbook.dev
Want to Stop copy pasting D3 examples and create data visualizations of your own? Learn how to build scalable dataviz React components your whole team can understand with React for Data Visualization
Want to get my best emails on JavaScript, React, Serverless, Fullstack Web, or Indie Hacking? Check out swizec.com/collections
Did someone amazing share this letter with you? Wonderful! You can sign up for my weekly letters for software engineers on their path to greatness, here: swizec.com/blog
Want to brush up on your modern JavaScript syntax? Check out my interactive cheatsheet: es6cheatsheet.com
By the way, just in case no one has told you it yet today: I love and appreciate you for who you are ❤️