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From Men’s Health
In December 2018, just before Christmas, Timothy Cox sat in a chair in his quiet, exhausted office. The army officer was drenched in sweat, his muscles throbbing up and down. He tried not to dwell on the fact that reaching his goal would require months more: the 5 a.m. workouts. Saturdays on the track. Reducing the ice at the Sonic drive-in, his only vice. His rest period nearly over, he stood up, walked over to his whiteboard and jotted down a number: 600. The number didn’t just mean perfection on the Army’s recently revamped fitness test. Like a four-minute mile or a two-hour marathon, no one yet knew if that was even possible. But Cox was determined. He looked at the number again, then got back to work.
Between where Cox, now 39 years old and a major in US Special Operations Command in Virginia, was in December and where he finished in July 2019 as the first soldier to register a perfect score of 600 on the new test d Army Combat Readiness (ACFT). some major changes in her routine. The previous fitness assessment was a simple mix of push-ups, sit-ups and running. The ACFT, introduced at the end of 2018, has inflated to include six different exercises, including a maximum deadlift of three reps, a standing medical ball throw, hand push-ups, a grueling sprint-drag-carry. , a leg that burns the abdominals. tuck, and a two mile run. “If I want to do this,” Cox recalls, thinking, “I have to work on my pumps.”
It should be noted that Cox wasn’t exactly stepping off the couch. A former high school state champion in the 800-meter (about a half-mile), he ran the track and played Division II basketball for McPherson College in his home state of Kansas. It’s rare for an athlete to participate in two such disparate sports, but Cox is kind of an anomaly. At six-foot-three, he’s taller than almost any long-distance runner you’re likely to meet, and at his in-season weight of 180 pounds, he was still around 30 pounds out of the few runners that matched his stature.
When the track ended and the pre-season for basketball began, Cox was hitting the weight room, consuming protein and gaining weight to keep himself in the paint, settling in at 210 pounds before the first whistle. . He did this every year. Hollywood’s leading men are winning Oscars after undergoing equally dramatic body transformations, but for Cox, it was just part of his approach to being a well-rounded athlete. “What I am proud of my [high school and collegiate] career is being the most complete athlete I can be, ”he says. “I want to be able to move large amounts of weight, I want to be fast, I want to be agile.”
So about those push-ups: Cox says when he evaluated his first ACFT results – an almost perfect 587 of 600 points – the hand push-ups were his “weakness”. With the same determination he applied to his college training, he attacked. The first Tabata style workouts. For 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off, Cox was running as many hand pumps as possible, four or five minutes in total, twice a week.
He also adapted a classic track training: repetitions of 400 meters. Traditionally, you would hammer a lap at a pace of 5 km to mile, doing a U-turn or 200 meters, in between to recover and complete eight to 12 intervals. Cox says he would walk the first 100 yards of recovery, drop and tear 20 to 30 hand pumps, then walk the next 100 yards before starting the next interval. While his pace of 85 to 87 seconds would be pedestrian for a mid-term college, “back then I was a long way from college,” he laughs. “It hurts.”
This was all in addition to his other workouts, which were important: six days a week, he would wake up at 5 a.m. to go to the gym, one day combining traditional muscle groups like his back and biceps, chest and triceps the next day. The legs had their own day, and with every workout, regardless of muscle group, he added core work and grip. Then he would leave the gym to arrive at his unit for a 6:15 a.m. fitness training, which he was leading, and could include running, gymnastics, and more.
Saturday mornings, on the other hand, were always spent on the track, and true to his Christian faith, he rested on Sundays. Beyond his newfound resistance to ice cream, Cox maintained his low-sugar diet and ate at home with his wife and children. Before morning workouts, he always ate a light breakfast of oats and bananas or toast and eggs with coffee.
Over the course of seven months, Cox saw his performance improve steadily, scoring a 595 and then a 598 out of 600. After a short business trip in July and without warning, he was asked if he wanted to retest. There was no time to hesitate. “Once I got past the hand-held pushups,” he says, “I knew I could do it, and that’s where the realization set in.”
For his accomplishment, the military commended him, and a few military-centric publications called him out. But overall, Cox’s life continued on its normal course. In July 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, he was posted to USSOC in Virginia, where he now spends his time learning a new role and, yes, still doing consistent workouts, but with a few modifications. .
Basic rules in response to the virus have meant that in order to put on iron, he had to build a home gym, and his races are entirely solo. Group workouts consist of his wife and four children on the living room floor with blaring music. If he had to, he says, he could still get a high ACFT score of 500, but perfection, for now, is back in 2019.
Cox also doesn’t hesitate to credit many of his military counterparts for their help writing it down in the US Army records. He mentions the physiotherapist on his unit, who introduced him to foam rolling and the lacrosse ball. He thanks the nutritionist, the physical trainers he consulted and the push-up friends who helped him design his workouts. He thanks his wife and the army, his children and his faith. Most importantly, he thanks the men and women with whom he served.
“Yeah, that was largely by myself,” Cox says of his training. “But my best practice was probably when I had a soldier next to me pushing me to be the best. This competitive spirit that we had was contagious.”
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