Relação entre o desempenho em testes físicos genéricos versus testes específicos ou tarefas simuladas: uma revisão narrativa aplicada ao Corpo de Fuzileiros Navais

Abstract

Good physical conditioning is essential for the military’s prompt employment, being one of the components of physical and cognitive human operational performance. The instrument by which the Marine Corps (CFN) of the Brazilian Navy assesses the physical fitness of its military personnel is the annual Physical Fitness Test (TAF-a), composed of a 2.400 m running, 100 m swimming, floating in the water for 10 min, push-ups, pull-ups and crunches. Physical tests can be classified as: generic test, specific test or simulated task. TAF-a is an example of a generic test, as it is not related to any specific task. In the past decade, generic physical tests have been reviewed and criticized by foreign military potencies for not being good predictors of operational performance. Considering this problem, the objective of this study is to discuss whether the performance in generic physical tests is a good predictor of the performance in combat tasks of the Marine’s Infantry, since the Infantry is the basic element of combat of the CFN and the combat tasks are the most physically demanding. Searches were carried out in the databases National Library of Medicine (MEDLINE), Scopus and Cochrane Library using the descriptors military, physical fitness test, military tasks and synonyms, combining them with boolean operators AND and OR to assemble the search sentence. The search retrieved 331 results in total, with only five original articles included at the end that correlated generic physical tests with specific tests or simulated tasks. Studies have shown that most generic tests focus on health indicators such as cardiorespiratory and muscle endurance, not accessing other recognized fitness components (such as strength, power, balance and agility) associated with combat tasks related to activities of the Marine’s Infantry. In addition, studies have found different correlations between generic physical tests and specific tests or simulated tasks, suggesting that there is no consensus regarding the predictive power of generic tests. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that TAF-a performance is not a bad predictor of performance in combat tasks for Marine’s Infantry. However, studies have also indicated that specific tests and simulated tasks are better predictors of operational performance, recommending its implementation.