Looks a bit wimpy to me… if I was 10 years vounger
Weapons of fat destruction
This boot camp is definitely not for the pink and frilly
Thirty minutes into the first 1½-hour workout and there are two guys in the bushes throwing up. It's somewhere around 6 a. m., not a good start to a Monday work week. And there are four weeks to go.
Welcome to boot camp for nine-to-fivers. Soldiers-of-Fitness is a basic training program that pushes participants to their physical limits and teaches them to work within a team environment to achieve common goals.
SOF, as it's called, is the brainchild of former Canadian soldiers who are now in the reserves and have taken military fitness and training techniques and modified them for the couch potatoes of the world. It's for those who don't like a gym environment yet want to improve their fitness and endurance.
Over the next four weeks, these 20 or so "recruits," about two-thirds of them women, will be introduced to an array of running, exercises and props, including "misery" -- two 10-foot-long steel tubes filled with rebar -- and "pain" -- a six-foot-long tree trunk about 2½-feet in diameter, which takes four people to move.
Recruits will haul them up and down the hills of a Toronto park, aided in part by grads called OPTers (on-going physical trainers), who have chosen to return for more of the same.
Platoon members will take their "rifles" -- 4-foot pieces of 2½-inch tubing -- and crawl through mud, do chin-ups, prisoner squats and a variety of different push-ups and sit-ups.
They will run stairs, toss 20-pound sandbags, dead lift a 45-lb weight until their arms can no longer raise it and push a van full of steel up a hill.
There will be "missions," where the recruits have to spot and disarm "explosive devices" -- yellow ribbons strategically hidden in the bushes where they will be running. They are disarmed by the "platoon," conducting a series of exercises.
It's all done under the watchful eyes of military corporals and fitness instructors.
The program culminates in a final graduation day, where the troops will use their new physical endurance and military tactics to take over a target and avoid the tennis balls being shot at them by the enemy.
It's not like the boot camp of the movies. There's no sergeant yelling obscenities, but there is discipline. Soldiers form ranks on command and failure to follow orders results in additional exercises.
Yes, muscles will ache, but the beauty of the program is that it doesn't matter if participants are runners or couch potatoes. It's designed so that people can push themselves to the max. But the platoon is only as strong as the weakest person, so no one gets left behind. Colleagues shout encouragement when a participant starts to lag and everyone works together to achieve the objective of that day's mission.
Still, those who attend, and they range from the self-employed to police officers, real estate agents, stay-at-home moms and executives, say they love it.
Take Erica Reddy and Samantha Hewit, realtors for Royal LePage Signature in north Toronto. They wanted to do a boot-camp-type fitness program, but didn't want to do one from those "frilly pink Web sites. We wanted something a little more hardcore, a little more exciting," says Ms. Hewit, 26.
"Our jobs are really stressful and this just adds a healthier aspect to the fast-paced nature of life," she says.
Jean Seaborne, 48, an RCMP officer, has been in the Toronto program since it started in May. "I love the camaraderie, the fellowship and the push," she says.
SOF (
www.soldiersoffitness.com) operates in Ottawa, Edmonton, Calgary and Toronto. Participants can sign up for a five-day, four-week program for $400, or the modified training program, which is three days a week and costs $200. Corporate sessions are also available for companies interested in building team spirit.
http://www.nationalpost.com/related/topics/story.html?id=727799
