ENHANCING OUR NS FITNESS SYSTEM

This was actually an issue that the SAF had already been looking at for some years. G6-Army had in 2016 started looking seriously at how to enhance the system of keeping our NSmen fit. It was easy for our NSFs to get fit and maintain a healthy lifestyle during active NS, when there were training programmes and mentoring by unit commanders on nutrition and other aspects of health and fitness. The bigger challenge was to keep them fit when they became Operationally Ready NSmen in reserve. While there were programmes such as IPPT, IPT and RT to help them maintain their fitness, their many family and career commitments sometimes made it difficult or inconvenient for our NSmen to go to SAF camps for these fitness programmes. Moreover, a programme sometimes may not meet an NSman's specific training needs.

Conditions had also changed. High-quality fitness training was available commercially. And, younger NSmen had become more negative about what they regarded as being forced to get fit or be punished. G6-Army realised that the SAF had to think about shifting the focus from assessments and RT to building the general fitness of the NS community. It concluded that it was necessary to make significant changes to how the SAF conducted physical training for NSmen.

The new approach would require a big shift in mindset. The Army would have to inculcate a habit of keeping fit early in the NS cycle, and encourage NSmen to maintain this habit in the years ahead. It would also have to make the fitness training for NSmen more convenient and accessible. The vision was ambitious — and compelling. But questions remained, the most important of which were how to ensure a high standard of training and instruction, and how to provide the same standard of safety and care for our NSmen during the training.

The G6-Army team knew that it would take time to achieve all that they aimed to do. The team set about developing a roadmap that called for NS physical training to be conducted in accessible locations outside of FCCs and eventually for physical training to move online so that NSmen could do fitness training wherever it was most convenient for them. The roadmap included trials and pilots to test run the fitness programme, to make sure that it would be effective in encouraging NSmen to adopt an active and fit lifestyle. It was also necessary to make sure that the back-end system would work.

The next trial was to test the feasibility and effectiveness of virtual physical training. This involved two NS brigades, 9 SIB and 21 SIB. For this group, the G6-Army team focused on the physical training and not the administrative elements of the programme. The results were encouraging - the participants gave positive feedback, particularly on the convenience and quality of the programme. The pilot ran for the rest of the year, and the team was optimistic that with the results from a full year of trials and the lessons learnt, the objective of moving NS physical training out of camps to locations more convenient for NSmen and eventually online could be fully realised.

On 15 May 2021, with the COVID-19 Delta variant raging, the Government enforced more stringent measures and Singapore entered Phase 2 Heightened Alert (P2HA). In tandem, the SAF announced the suspension of IPPT and other fitness training until 13 June 2021. This suspension was similar to the one imposed in the previous year's “Circuit Breaker”, but this time the G6-Army team was more prepared.

With the success of the pilot programme, the team felt ready to quickly implement the virtual training system throughout the SAF. Led by the Centre of Excellence for Soldier Performance, the team got to work with its partners - Personnel Command to capitalise on the NS Portal, Certis CISCO for fitness trainers to conduct the programme, and DSTA to ensure a successful roll-out.

The FIT@Home programme for NSmen was launched in July 2021. The response was overwhelming right from the start. Each session had a maximum of 45 participants, and slots were fully booked every month. The feedback was positive on the convenience and flexibility of the programme, and the effectiveness and engagement of the training. Some commented that the fitness programmes were as good as the virtual gym classes offered by commercial gyms.