The Australian military recently looked at whether its generic fitness assessments — max push-ups and chin-ups — actually predict how well soldiers can perform military tasks, and it found that a maximal box lift and place to 1.5 m better predicts performance on these five real-world tasks:
- “bombing up” an M1 (Main Battle Tank Crewman),
- repetitively loading an M777A2 (Artillery Gunner),
- dragging a casualty (Infantry),
- bridge building (Combat Engineers), and
- lifting a pack onto a the tray of a truck (1.5 m) (All Combat Arms).
The box lift was strongly correlated not only with the last task, but with all five, while push-ups and chin-ups were strongly correlated only with bridge building.