The Army announced two major changes to its fitness standards Monday: soldiers in 21 combat jobs will have to pass a gender-neutral test, while the standing power throw — occasionally called the ‘yeet’ event — will be thrown out for all soldiers.
The move rebrands the Army Combat Fitness Test as the Army Fitness Test and will become the service’s “test of record” starting June 1. The test, which is semi-annual for active duty and annual for National Guard and Reserve soldiers, will carry over five events: the three-repetition maximum deadlift, hand-release push-ups, the sprint-drag-carry, plank, and a two-mile run.
Starting Jan. 1, 2026, men and women will have to meet the same requirements if they are assigned to any of 21 combat-focused military occupational specialties, though the final required scores were not released Monday. The new ‘sex neutral’ fitness requirements will apply to soldiers and officers in the infantry, special forces, artillery, armor, cavalry, mortarmen, and combat engineers.
“For those 21 MOSes, they will all be graded on the male scale, so it will be sex neutral,” Command Sgt. Maj. JoAnn Naumann told Task & Purpose. “The passing score for most people will be a 300 with a minimum of 60 in every event. For those in those 21 specialties, the passing score will be 350 with a minimum of 60 in every event.”
For soldiers in non-combat MOSes, there will continue to be separate minimum scores for men and women.
“Really no significant change for that population right now, until we see what that new scorecard looks like,” Command Sgt. Maj. Stephanie Carl said. “Even that, we’re still not expecting drastic changes to it.”
Army officials are still working through changes to the test scores that evaluators use to grade soldiers during each of the events. The Army expects to release scorecard changes in the coming weeks.
Naumann said soldiers in the 21 combat-focused MOSes can reference the current scorecard to get a basic idea of what the requirements will look like and “if they have to start training a little harder at something, then they’d at least know approximately where it will be.”
Using the current score card, changes are not as dramatically different, depending on the event. For example, soldiers across all age groups have to get a minimum of 10 push-ups to pass that event. For the plank, each age group has the same time requirement for both men and women.
To pass the deadlift event with 60 points, women 17 to 21 years old previously had to deadlift 120 pounds, but under the new standard, they would have to lift 140 pounds. For the sprint-drag-carry event, women in that age group would have to complete the event in under two minutes, 28 seconds instead of three minutes, 15 seconds.
Those minimum and maximum passing scores may change with the new scorecards.
“The one thing that’s definite is no standard will be lowered,” Naumann said. “The minimum passing standard for any age group, sex, anything like that, will not go down.”
On Jan. 1, 2026, the “combat standard” for the 21 MOSes on active duty will go into effect. But until then, all soldiers will still be considered passing with the 60-point minimum in every event and a total score of 300. For combat soldiers in the National Guard and Army Reserve, the new standards go into effect June 1, 2026.
“I think that it will give every soldier, particularly in those 21 MOSes where everyone is going to have the same standard, it will give them the confidence in themselves and in each other that they’re meeting the requirements that they have the fitness necessary to be in those physically demanding fields,” Naumann said.
If combat soldiers don’t get a score of 350 after their second test attempt, they would be forced to reclassify into a new job based on the “needs of the Army at that time,” Carl said.
The changes come after the test became a political battleground centered around the question of whether the military’s fitness requirements are or should be different for men and women. The topic was reignited by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth who vowed during his confirmation hearing to review “standards” in a “gender-neutral way.”
However, changes to the Army’s fitness test have been underway for the last year and a half because of directives mandated by Congress. The fiscal year 2024 national defense bill required the Army to implement “increased minimum fitness standards” to its fitness test and specified the 20 combat MOSes it applied to. The Army added the Special Forces warrant officer to make it 21.
“Just like I wouldn’t put someone with a low test score on their ASVAB into a cyber job because there’s a certain level of intelligence that we assume is necessary to do that job, there’s a certain level of fitness that’s necessary to do certain jobs,” Naumann said. “It’s about being a fit force that’s ready to fight.”
In 2022, the Army Combat Fitness Test replaced the decades-old Army Physical Fitness Test with a six-event test designed to be closer to the physical fitness needs of combat and to decrease the rate of musculoskeletal injuries. Authors from a March 2022 RAND Corporation assessment said that more data was needed to provide that ACFT events could “predict both combat task performance and injury rates.”
Soldiers will no longer have to complete the standing power throw event in which they had two chances to throw a 10-pound medicine ball backwards over their head for the greatest distance.
Carl said it was taken out of the test because studies showed that the throw had the greatest risk of injury. Carl also said that the service couldn’t “scientifically validate” the event as a measure of power because a soldier’s height and technique could influence the “strength of your power.”
Political arguments centered around women and the Army’s fitness test go back to the birth of the ACFT. It became the Army’s “test of record” in 2022, two years later than the service originally expected.
Implementation plans for the ACFT plan prompted lawmaker fights in 2020 about the now-defunct leg tuck event and by 2023 senators even proposed that the service throw out the test entirely and revert back to the APFT.
An early version of the ACFT held male and female soldiers to the same physical fitness standards, regardless of age. In 2019, initial testing showed that 84% of women who took the test had failed while men across 11 of 63 battalions had a 70% pass rate. The test trials prompted criticism from the Service Women’s Action Network, which called the Army’s implementation “rash” because “too many otherwise qualified soldiers are failing elements of the test.”
The March 2022 RAND assessment of ACFT data found that even among the best-performing MOSes, nearly one-third of women did not pass. RAND authors said that the pass/fail policies would heavily fall on women in the Army and require the service to “decide whether it is willing to accept the impacts that current pass rates will have on the force.”
Naumann said she doesn’t think the test changes will have a major impact on retention.
“I don’t think we’re going to suddenly see drastic changes in failure rates. There’s always been some people who fail whether through personal choice or just in ability to get there. I don’t think that we’re going to suddenly see mass amounts of retention problems,” she said. “I would argue people want to be in organizations that have high standards.”
The political debate over fitness standards for women have continued under Hegseth, who has come under fire for his comments about women in combat that he made before taking the role of defense secretary. In his book, Hegseth wrote that “women cannot physically meet the same standards as men” and on the Shawn Ryan podcast he said, “I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles. It hasn’t made us more effective.” Hegseth has since attributed previous remarks as part of his concerns over different standards for men and women.
In a March memo, Hegseth called for a review of physical fitness, body composition, and grooming standards across the military branches. Later that month, he directed the military services to develop “sex-neutral” physical standards for service members in combat arms jobs. As part of the order, the branches were directed to “develop comprehensive plans to distinguish combat arms occupations from non-combat arms occupations,” which could vary for each service but in the Army generally pertains to infantry, artillery, armor, cavalry, and special operations forces.
Naumann said the fitness test changes “fall in line” with those directives but “it’s not a result of that.”
Patty is a senior staff writer for Task & Purpose. She’s reported on the military for five years, embedding with the National Guard during a hurricane and covering Guantanamo Bay legal proceedings for an alleged al Qaeda commander.
