He's now enlisted and starts basic training this month. He and about 15 other recruits soon found themselves sweating their way through a 90-minute workout involving repetitions of squats, pushups and laps around the lot.Įvery week, before these workouts, Robinson steps on a scale and gets his neck and waist measured.Īhlstrom's 90-minute weekly workouts ultimately helped Robinson drop 65 pounds by March. One recent Wednesday, Robinson showed up with a water bottle and wearing his high school's track and field jersey. That's certainly the case for Robinson, who started showing up at the Army's recruitment office in Waldorf, Md., for weekly workouts outside in the parking lot. 'For those young men and women who were able to join, I can tell you it changed their life,' he says. 'I can't even tell you that I had an impact on this issue.'īut recruiters' grassroots efforts do make a difference, Snow says, for those individuals able to lose enough weight to meet the Army's standard - a number he estimates to be about 1,000 to 2,000 people a year. 'It's a wicked problem,' he says, adding that he'd spent years 'talking myself blue in the face' but without much success. In his military days, Snow says, he routinely talked about the significance of obesity prevention and mitigation, both inside and outside the Army. Powerful forces such as food insecurity and the ways cheap, high-calorie junk food is heavily marketed add to the challenge, says Jeffrey Snow, another retired major general who headed recruitment for the Army and Army Reserves until three years ago. The Army, the military's largest branch, needs to recruit about 130,000 people a year to carry out its missions, and therefore faces the brunt of the recruitment challenge that childhood obesity presents. Across all segments of the military, 31% of young adults ages 17 to 24 cannot enlist because they're too heavy, according to the Department of Defense. House-bound pandemic life and his summer job at an ice cream parlor added still more pounds.Īn increasing percentage of young people face that same problem. Repeated attempts to lose weight on his own didn't work. 'I would look at pictures of myself and I would get upset,' Robinson says. 'I had to do it because I didn't want my parents to worry about paying for school,' the 18-year-old says.īut last year - midway through his senior year of high school - Robinson tipped the scales at 240 pounds, making him too heavy to qualify under the U.S.

He also needed the Army benefits to help pay for college. Marcus Robinson wanted to follow the older brother he idolizes into military life. So he started to get in shape - showing up at an Army recruitment office in Waldorf, Md., for weekly workouts in the parking lot. Marcus Robinson (center) wanted to enlist in the Army but was too heavy to qualify for the military's fitness standards.

Basic training army tracker