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Is ‘just enough’ good enough for you?

  • Published
  • By Chief Master Sgt. Brian Mosier
  • 305th Civil Engineer Squadron
MCGUIRE AIR FORCE BASE, NJ. --  If you're like many Team McGuire Airmen, you probably started your day off with a rigorous physical training workout at the base gym -- but are you embracing the fitness culture or squeaking by in the back of the pack? 

We all know the standards and most people have memorized how many push-ups and sit-ups they need to max out their points, but when you're stretching and getting ready for your morning routine what's your goal? Are you out to do "just enough" or are you aiming for that excellent rating? Keep in mind an off day is all that separates "just enough" from "failed to meet standards" and we all know what follows that ... boot camp. 

Hopefully "just enough" isn't good enough for you and you're not planning leave and TDYs to delay that annual test. Instead, you should embraced fitness into your daily routine and push yourself harder for more push-ups and sit-ups and a faster run time at each unit PT session. In many cases you may want or need to sacrifice some personal time to either reach your fitness goal or to hold you over between unit sessions. I'm confident that if you're doing all this you won't be avoiding that test; instead I'll bet you're pumped on the challenge of beating last year's score. 

But what happens on deployments? Do you take advantage of the break or do you continue to push yourself and others to maintain your high fitness level. I know sometimes the mission and threat interfere with unit and personal PT programs, but that shouldn't change your goal of meeting those high fitness standards -- it just makes that goal more challenging to meet. From my experience, the majority of people tend to actually improve their fitness on deployment, but, you guessed it, there are still a small handful of "just enough'ers" enjoying the break and dreading the return to a standard PT program. Don't be one of them. 

Supervisors, is "just enough" good enough for you? Have you looked around to see who's hiding in the back of your unit PT formations or who's slacking on that last lap? Are you making excuses at deployment sites to avoid a fitness program? Take a close look at your next PT session and make sure your expectations are known and that you're setting your Airmen up for success. Loosely enforced standards and acceptance of "just enough" will hurt your Airmen down the road, and I know that's not your intention. Our demanding mission requires every single Airman to be fit, equipped, trained and ready in order to be successful so we need to make sure we're all doing our part to set our Airmen up for success. 

It's no surprise that we would never accept "just enough" in our duty sections. Instead, we demand and expect excellence and when necessary we take corrective action to ensure we achieve it. Also, continued patterns of "just enough" in the duty section typically result in poor performance reports, lack of awards or decorations and ultimately slowed or stopped career progression. However, when we embrace the excellence standard, all the doors are open. We usually also receive strong performance reports, awards, decorations, and career progression is on track or even accelerated. So should we expect different rules regarding fitness? 

Fitness is a standard like any other standard that we are expected to uphold. If you're riding the fence at "just enough" you will probably find yourself on the wrong side every now and then, and when that happens all those career progression doors start closing down. Sometimes you can re-test and get back on track with only a minor bump, but other times the re-test may be too little too late and actually take years to recover from. So you see, it's a whole lot easier to quit accepting "just enough" and simply embrace the fitness culture. 

The next time you're in the gym, look around for those "just enough'ers" hiding in the back of the formation or stopping a lap short. Mentor and challenge them to step up and embrace the Air Force fitness culture.