This is a review of Nate Morrison's "Military Fitness: A Manual of Special Physical Training", 2009.

Basic info for those unaware: Nate Morrison is an active member of US Special Ops and has a 15-year career with Pararescue. He has been teaching military physical training for 18 years, has many qualifications and knowledge and experience within this field. (info summarized from the back of the book)

Honest Review: This book is very reformational. It challenges what you thought was important in regards to fitness while supplying you with accurate and substantial reasoning in to why we should revamp our fitness program to include the essential instead of the nonsense fluff. It is very concise even at 290+ pages, and you will find that the information on every page is very useful and purposeful. Here is the table of contents...

Purpose and Overview
Examination of Methods
Explanation of Military Fitness
Introduction to Physical Training
The Super-Conditioning Principle
Self Assessment
Planning and Program Design
Warming Up, Cooling Down & Joint Mobility
Methods of Group Training
Calisthenics
Weightlifting
kettlebells
Marching, Running, and Grass Drills
Load Bearing and Ruck Marching
nutrition Considerations
Recovery Considerations
Troubleshooting & Rehabilitation
Appendices
References

Each of these contents are covered thoroughly and in synch with one another. He gives very helpful planning and prep advice as well as structuring short term and long term goals within your Workouts and routine. This book also has some personal feelings on why the military should revamp its fitness training and how to make special ops teams better suited for the job. Nate gives sound advice often times backed by Soviet/Japanese methods, Mel Siff, L. Riendeau, E. Johnson, and from his own experiences directly in the field. Overall a very solid book that is an exceptional deal at $35.

Personal Review:
This book is EXCELLENT, especially if you are aware and practice elements like POSE, Total Immersion, kettlebell, Joint Mobility, and follow people like Maxwell and Cotter, and other forms of efficient exercising and you are looking to structure this all into a meaningful program. I completely agree with Morrison's reasoning and have for about 6 months broken off of a CrossFit routine and more into a natural movement and skill based, body awareness control, load bearing, etc...Basically all of what Morrison presents in this manual. I was actually in the process of writing a training program for my job and it was awesome to actually have a very similar and professionally done manual that touches on the same principles and even caters it towards a military approach. It is nice to have a reference and a solid foundation from a guy who believes and practices the right stuff and applies and explains each in thorough yet concise details.
I have learned through experience that you should always train for your job and not the entrance test. While I feel that many of the current operators will have a more valuable opinion on this, I would be surprised if one would want a guy who trained to have a high PAST score as opposed to the guy that was truly training for the job (utilizing solid work such as this manual). I realize that is a bold statement and my opinion as well, but often times I feel like it is very easy fall in to the mix of trying to get high cal numbers, faster swim times, etc as opposed to those things that an operator faces day to day and mission to mission (which is exactly what this book is about). I would rather train myself to the physical lifestyle of an operator the best I could instead of training myself to the lifestyle of the best pipeline trainee.

I would love to see a good discussion about this book. I searched and did not find a complete review or previous discussion apart from a small two-post aside. Please understand that the last part was my personal review and I do highly recommend this book, especially to those that are training for Special Tactics.

Where can you get the book? Amazon is sold out and they say they don't know when or even if they will restock it..

Nease, C.

Try this, http://www.alpin-gruppe.at/

Try clicking the link on the top right of the forums and going to the catalog...go to page 3 of the catalog and the STS book is there along with others...not sure if his 2009 manual is available though.