I’m guessing there must be a minority of active military out there that relates with the frustrating army situp.
For those unfamiliar, the situp is one of three events in our fitness test. You get two minutes to knock out as many situps as possible with the following general guidelines - your hands must be interlocked behind your head, someone holds your feet, a repetition is counted when your spine breaks the vertical plane perpendicular to the ground (shoulder blades must tocuh the ground going down), and a couple more obvious details.
My problem with army situps is that I feel the strain solely in my hip flexors and not much at all in my abs. I think it is due to the strain imposed on the hip flexors by having a person immobolize your feet. Then…after situps, we do a 2-mile timed run with those tight-ass hip flexors.
From a bodybuilding/strength training perspective, does this kind of situp have any benefit? I don’t think there is an aesthetic benefit for having great hip flexors, nor have I ever heard of weak hip flexors to be a limiting factor to improving one’s lift. I take maybe 5 minutes at the end of my workout to knock out some situps unassisted so I can ‘max’ the event with regularity, but I’m wondering if I should do them more often for some other benefit.
And just to throw it out there, for my age group, “maxing” or scoring 100% on the army sit-up for my demograhpic (male between 27 - 31 I think) is 82 situps in 2 minutes.
Navy one, your arms cross your chest. Hands must stay in contact with shoulders, and elbows must touch thighs on the up stroke. Still gay, still pointless. I used to try and prep by throwing situps in a few weeks out, but at some point, I really stopped caring. I can pass by a wide margin, and maxing out does absolutely nothing in my community but bragging rights. If someone hears me report my (comparatively) weak situp number, then I hear some shit for about ten minutes or so. Then it is back to business as usual.
You want to test our functional fitness levels? Fine, lets go do Operator Ugly (from Mountain Athlete site). Test really sucks, and I still do poorly on some things, but my strengths more than make up for my weaknesses.
When my friend first showed up at Ft. Sill he got 37 sit-ups. Later on in Iraq he did 112 in the alotted 2 minutes. My best ever was 72, Navy style. I still hate doing them and don’t really train them.
I like to train situps with perfect, controlled form, and then on the test do everything I can just to get max reps. By training with controlled form I mean not using arms for momentum, not just flopping back to the ground after each rep, etc. This hits your abs more than if you just crank them out, and I find helps increase my tested max as well.
Maybe my butt and tailbone are shaped funny, but when I do a lot of situps, the friction rubs my skin raw right above my butt-crack. I don’t really notice that it happens until I take a shower later and feel an unpleasant stinging and then find some loose skin in that area.