How to pass the Navy PRT in 2026

Where sailors actually fail

Two things fail sailors on the PRT, and neither is the one people train hardest for.

The first is the Body Composition Assessment, which is not part of the PRT at all. It is taken first, and failing it fails the whole Physical Fitness Assessment no matter what you then do on the run. A sailor who trains for months and never checks their height and weight screen can be finished before the first push-up.

The second is the forearm plank, and the reason is specific: it replaced curl-ups, and the training habits that produced good curl-up scores do not transfer. Curl-ups were repetitions against a clock. The plank is an isometric hold to failure, which is a different quality entirely and responds to different work.

The floor on every event

These are the Probationary figures — the least you can do on each event and still record a pass. They are not a target. A sailor scoring Probationary across the board has passed and is also the sailor a command starts watching.

Every figure, for all eleven age bands and both sexes, is on the Navy PRT standards page — this guide quotes only the ones it is making a point about, so the table lives in one place and cannot end up saying two different things.

Push-ups

Two minutes, on the deck, elbows to roughly ninety degrees, body in a straight line. The two-minute window is the thing to plan around: this is a pacing event disguised as a strength event, and sailors routinely spend their whole score in the first thirty seconds.

For a 20–24 male the Probationary floor is 37; for a female of the same age it is 16. Both are reachable well inside two minutes by anyone training deliberately, which is exactly why finishing near the floor usually means pacing rather than strength.

Key training principles

• Pace, do not sprint. Going out at maximum for thirty seconds and then failing at fifty is the single most common way to leave points on the deck. Work out a rep-per-fifteen-seconds rate you can hold and rehearse it against a clock.
• Train the position, not just the movement. A push-up that breaks at the hips does not count, and form failures under fatigue cost more reps than strength ever does.
• Practise partial recovery. Short pauses at the top, held in position, buy more total reps than resting on the deck — and resting on the deck may end the set.

The forearm plank

Held to failure and scored on time, which means there is no ceiling to coast to. Every additional second is more score, right up until you cannot hold the position.

The 20–24 male floor is 1:10 and the female floor is 1:00. The top of the male table for that band is 3:20 — roughly three times the floor, which is an unusually wide spread and the reason the plank is worth training seriously rather than surviving.

Key training principles

• Accumulate time, do not chase a single maximum. Several holds with short rests build more tolerance than one all-out attempt that wrecks the rest of the session.
• Brace rather than sag. The position is a full-body brace — glutes and quads engaged, ribs down. A sagging plank fails on form before it fails on endurance.
• Rehearse the last thirty seconds. The scored part of the event is the end of it, and knowing what that feels like is most of holding it.

The 1.5-mile run and its alternates

The default cardio event. The 20–24 male floor is 13:30 and the female floor is 15:30.

Where a command authorises an alternate, or a medical waiver requires one, the 2,000-metre row, the 500-yard swim and the 450-metre swim each carry their own scoring table. They are not conversions of a run time, so a strong runner is not automatically a strong rower on the scale, and it is worth scoring both before assuming which serves you better. The calculator scores all four.

Key training principles

• Know your split. The floor is a pace, not a distance — convert it to a per-lap or per-half-mile split and train against that number rather than against a vague sense of effort.
• Do not test every session. Running the full distance flat out weekly builds fatigue faster than fitness; most useful work sits below test pace.
• Rehearse the start. The most common run failure is going out thirty seconds per mile too fast and paying for it in the last half mile.

Common questions