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I see you haven't gotten much traction here, so I'll just share with you a little of my knowledge and experience. I was not an AST, but I know several extremely fit people who didn't make it. I can't give you a plan, but I'll share what I've heard. I was honor graduate of my boot camp company, meaning I had the best overall average in everything, including fitness tests (I think, they never said exactly how it was calculated, but I did very well in everything). I also have trained for rock climbing and mountaineering, so I have some basic knowledge of serious training regimes.

First what I know: boot camp is easy. If you do a modicum of training before hand you'll be just fine. I assume if you have aspirations to go AST, you consider yourself to be pretty fit to begin with. The PT requirements are all available online or from your recruiter. Make sure you can do all those with ease (of you come in moderately fit, they'll get you up to the minimum, but you're not shooting for the minimum given your aspirations). To go above and beyond, you'll be doing flutter kicks (with heavy boots), squats (not weighted except maybe a pack and rifle), crunches, push ups, swimming, and stationary bike. The first 4 you will do every day, any time the CCs want to. You'll also do a lot applied isometric exercises: holding your helmsman or canteen straight armed out in front of you, sitting while aiming your rifle unsupported (no elbows on knees) for seriously long times, upwards of half an hour (although I don't know exactly how long, but it felt like an eternity). I admire your dedication if you train for that type of thing beforehand, it would be exceedingly tedious.

AST: From what I understand, you basically have a full time job in the pool for the first 8 weeks of AST school. I'm not sure there is a practical way to adequately train for that, unless you have the time (6-8 hours a day), a pool/ocean, and people willing to wrestle you in the pool all day. But obviously get in the pool or ocean or lake as much as you can and completely exhaust yourself. Start slow, but keep building up intensity and duration. Take up full body training, cardio endurance, strength, power. You generally want to start a serious training cycle with a long base training in endurance--so swimming for hours, running, cycling, rowing, whatever. Then add strength--hit the weight room or however your strength train, focus on muscles you need in the water. Finally add power--high intensity interval training, hills. Keep training endurance throughout, but you can taper off a bit.

Whether or not any of that makes sense to you, go to a bookstore and look through the sports training section. Find training manuals for anything that you think might apply. I doubt there is a CG AST training manual, but there might be a Navy SEAL one or similar. Swimming would help. I learned a lot from this book about how the human body responds to training and how to craft a training plan. It's written for mountaineers, but a lot of the principles could be applied to anything. In case you're wondering, mountaineering is extremely physically taxing in ways similar to something like AST school: pushing your body to near physical limit--heavy pack marching up steep slopes with less air than usual--for 8-10-12 hours, then you wake up and do it again, and again, and again. Not saying you need to buy this book, but take a look at the table of contents to see how it's structured, I would recommend any book that has a similar structure or addresses the same types of concepts.

There's a lot to take in--that's why people write entire books on the stuff. Again, boot is easy, but if you want to go AST, you need to start training like an AST now. If you're not willing to put in that kind of dedication, I would guess your chances for success at AST school are pretty slim. Good luck and sorry for the essay, but I hope it's useful.

That's the challenge. It is all questionable. Some of the classified stuff even, should never had been classified and only was to avoid public awareness.... But yes, I would never discredit someone's social avatar, character, or name.. Hum, think I am going to just go with it. Thanks for the response.

A Coastie's Chronicle of the Dishonorable