Health & Wellness - Physical Fitness - Weightlifting

Aug 17, 2026 #BritishArmy #WarriorFitness #BAWF
How do you get Army fit?
Find out how the culture around training soldiers to be battle ready has changed, and see some of the people driving a new mindset on military barracks.
Is the traditional way soldiers train a thing of the past? Discover how British Army Warrior Fitness (BAWF) and functional training are revolutionising military conditioning from the gym floor to the battlespace.
We head to Larkhill, Wiltshire, to look inside state-of-the-art facilities where physical training instructors explain why high-capacity functional fitness using barbells, kettlebells, and real-world tactical movements is replacing old-school PT to prevent injuries and build stronger, combat-ready personnel.

Train smarter, not harder: How the Forces got military fitness wrong for decades

The Ultimate Strength Exercise​

In the early sixties, a new form of strength training burst on the scene and swept across the country like wildfire. It was called functional isometric contraction and was the brainchild of Dr. John Ziegler, a physician from Olney, Maryland and promoted by Bob Hoffman, owner of the York Barbell Company in York, Pennsylvania. While very few sports coaches or athletic directors in high schools and colleges approved of lifting weights, they embraced the isometric system wholeheartedly. What the school administrators and coaches liked about isometric training was it was neat, no plates to store or pick up after, safe, and quick. An entire football team of forty players could go through a workout in a half and hour. Sometimes even less than that.

Power racks sprung up everywhere. YMCAs, commercial gyms, high schools, colleges, and in home gyms. These were typically made of wood, two vertical pieces, usually two by fours or two by tens, which were attached to a small wooden platform and secured at the top with another piece of wood. Into the uprights were drilled holes large enough to pass a bar through. How many holes were drilled depended largely on how many positions were going to be used during a workout.

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