Highlights of the March 2012 Issue

ARMY FITNESS:
Mission Essential Fitness —
Fort Riley Soldiers Embrace
New Regimen

Modeled after the Mission Essential Fitness (MEF) program at Fort Bliss, Texas, which has been highly successful under the guidance of Dr. Doug Briggs, the MEF program at Fort Riley, Kan., is having a similarly positive effect on soldiers. The post's MEF facility, designed specifically to meet the needs of this functionally based training, features circuits of fitness equipment that can accommodate units (up to 45 soldiers) at a time, as they work through the different stations under the watchful eye of trained and certified staff.

Fort Riley Fitness staff tested the program starting in December 2010, and based on its success, began scheduling three classes a week in June of 2011.

“We started a pilot program with a group of soldiers to see the progression of the program and evaluate how they responded to the training,” notes Fort Riley Fitness Center Director Vincent Spencer. “The results were encouraging because we were tapping into exercises — the Olympic lifts and power lifts, for example — that soldiers are gravitating to these days, so the pilot program went really well. We did a control group and we also had a regular physical readiness training (PRT) group that did its traditional regimen in the morning, and then we tested the groups and compared the results. The MEF group came out with improvements at the highest rate of 95 percent.”

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