JB99 said:
akm91 said:
PaulsBunions said:
akm91 said:
EagleCamden said:
Tramp96 said:
Are they in shape?
That's where I originally thought you were going with this. I figured you were going to tell us there were a lot of cadets with bellies hanging over their belt who didn't look like they could do 20 pushups.
Not a dig at your Corps...just a dig at how physical fitness standards across the board, from the military to civil police, have been way compromised these past few years.
some were, some weren't. The BQ's weren't but that's normal.
The physical fitness requirements have been laxed significantly due to the desire to keep cadets from punching, especially the fish.
Not sure that's DEI driven but definitely changes the discipline portion of being in the Corps.
They actually increased PFT standards my zip year (2019). It wasn't much, but every year has a higher standard now unless they changed it again. For example I think the minimum pushups for a male fish was 42 and now it's in the high 50's.
I didn't phrase it properly. It's not the requirements themselves but whether the outfits hold the cadets accountable to doing the PT. My son's outfit allow a majority of the fish to skip morning PT on consistent basis which erodes the sense of unity amongst his buddy group.
Based on below, the minimum for pushups is still 42 as of 2021 for male cadets (page 10)
2021 Corps Physical Fitness Standards
It was the opposite in my son's outfit.
And this is the crux of the issue as it has been for years and years. Different outfits value different things and it shows. My outfit allowed a bag-in any morning you had an exam which, for some, seemed to be multiple times a week. We were never, what would you say, physical specimens but often had the best GPA in the Corps, better than average march-in scores, and top tier inspection grades. Other outfits (I'm looking at you, Brogades) would run circles around our block but only for the 1.5 years it took them to fail out (joking... mostly). Some outfits were pretty good at finding a happy medium.
I'm sure that the differences across outfits is still largely the same for the same reasons but there is a trend of PT being less and less important in favor of retention. Even in an physically easy outfit, we got smoked every Friday at a minimum as fish. The next year, our fish rarely got smoked (Old Army's dead, so on and so forth).
TL;DR: It depends on the outfit but based on what I saw in my time and have heard since, I'd wager the average 2010 cadet was in better shape than the average today and that is because the Corps is focused on quantity, not quality.
