Whether it’s deciding what to eat or how to work out, soldiers are benefiting from the Army’s Holistic Health and Fitness program, according to leaders who focus on the program’s nutritional and physical domains.

The program, known as H2F, promotes combat readiness in the mental, sleep, nutritional, physical and spiritual domains with guidance that is supported at the brigade level with subject-matter experts and equipment. The aim is to help soldiers achieve higher levels of health, fitness and well-being while minimizing injury.

In remarks at a recent Hot Topic on Holistic Health and Fitness hosted by the Association of the U.S. Army, retired Col. Kevin Bigelman, deputy director of H2F, acknowledged that there always will be a swirl of opinions on how to best exercise, but what soldiers need “is very easily understood,” he said.

Soldiers “know that they train physically to withstand the rigors of combat, to prepare for the rigors of combat,” Bigelman said, adding that he thinks “the physical domain is also a really neat gateway to get soldiers to think about the other domains.”

When it comes to working out, Bigelman said young soldiers tend to gravitate to their strength coaches. Those coaches, part of the 22-member team of specialists embedded with brigades, help soldiers with their fitness and strength goals but also educate them, getting them to consider how sleep is critical to recovery, and how nutrition and hydration before, during and after exercise can influence physical gains.

These talks, Bigelman said, introduce soldiers to a new way of thinking about their lifestyles and habits and the other aspects of holistic health and fitness. “I think it’s a really good segue to get soldiers to move from physical to the other four domains of H2F,” Bigelman said.

Lt. Col. Brenda Bustillos, chief of the Soldier Performance Division in the Army surgeon general’s office, said that what soldiers put in their bodies is as important as physical fitness.

“Everyone has their own way of looking at and executing their physical fitness and what that should look like. It’s no different with nutrition,” said Bustillos, who, along with Bigelman, was part of the team that began developing the H2F concept in 2020. “We all have to eat, we know that in the hierarchy of needs you’ve got to have food, and you’ve got to have hydration. What that looks like for each and every one of us is quite unique.”

Through H2F, the Army is making strides in nutrition, moving away from decades of standardized feeding. “We’re moving into that era of instead of getting sweeping recommendations for cookie-cutter soldiers, we know how important it is to build up and meet each soldier where they are, and that’s truly what H2F is,” she said.

As with a high-performing race car, she said, soldiers need optimal fuel and meticulous maintenance, tenets that are “very clear in our Soldier’s Creed, we will always maintain ourselves, and often ourselves is what we put on the back burner.”

“We’re teaching our soldiers now that that front burner is where we need to be when it comes to our personal readiness, fitness, wellness, and H2F has a stellar pit crew of individuals to make sure that a human machine is not just going to make it to the finish line, but they’re also going to win,” she said.