Survival of the Fittest? The Scientific Basis for the Royal Navy Pre-Joining Fitness Test
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Royal Navy introduced a pre-joining fitness test to the selection procedures for RN Ratings from Summer 2003. The scientific basis for the test came from the present study to investigate if anthropometric and physical fitness measures predicted training failure. Fitness and anthropometric data from 1641 trainees were collected, together with their training outcome (i.e. pass or fail), during the period from September 2001 to March 2002. In addition, a retrospective interrogation of medical records identified those who reported any lower limb injuries. The overall rate of training attrition was 22%. Success in training was associated with: gender; age; physical fitness; and, in the case of females, Body Mass Index (BMI). The reported incidence of lower limb injury (LLI) was associated with: gender; physical fitness; and, for female trainees, BMI. The reported incidence of LLI was approximately 50% in the 'least-fit' female group compared to 10% in the 'most-fit' male group. 16% of females and 2% of males were considered 'unfit' (i.e. did not attain the prescribed run standards of 13 min 15 s and 11 min 13 s respectively). 3% of trainees were considered 'obese' (a BMI > 30 kg.m-2) whereas more than 25% were overweight (BMI > 25 kg.m-2). As a result of this work, selection candidates must now demonstrate a minimum standard of aerobic fitness prior to arrival at HMS Raleigh. The future impact of this selection measure on the reported incidence of lower limb injury and financial costs of training requires further investigation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".