The Army’s program to enhance troops’ readiness and lethality through holistic fitness is “the largest investment in soldier readiness” the service has ever undertaken, a senior officer said.

In remarks March 5 at a Hot Topic hosted by the Association of the U.S. Army, Lt. Gen. David Francis, commanding general of the Center for Initial Military Training and deputy commanding general of Army Training and Doctrine Command, said the Holistic Health and Fitness program is the Army’s “primary investment in soldier readiness and lethality.”

In fact, he said, “Holistic Health and Fitness is the largest human optimization performance program ever fielded at scale.”

Known as H2F, the program is designed to encourage soldiers to maintain their health, fitness and well-being for peak performance by optimizing physical and non-physical domains while minimizing injury. The system promotes readiness with five pillars that include mental, sleep, nutritional, physical and spiritual wellness and is supported at the brigade level with technical specialists and equipment.

While the Army is working to expand the program to dispersed units such as recruiting brigades, multidomain task forces and units in the Army National Guard and Army Reserve, the effort to field the program to 111 active-duty brigades by fiscal 2027 is well underway, Francis said.

For brigades with fewer than 1,000 soldiers, he said, the Army is going to “pull and aggregate some of those smaller units together and put an H2F team on top of that called the H2F Area Support Team that will enable us to get to everybody out there.” Pilot programs slated for fiscal years 2026 and 2027 will explore the best way to deliver the H2F program to Guard and Reserve units, he said.

To field the program more quickly to units that haven’t yet received the technical specialists and advisers and get them into the H2F program now, the Army has created doctrine and a program of instruction for the H2F Integrator Course, which gives “young NCOs or officers the education on all of the domains and what resources are available on their installations to begin these programs,” Francis said.

Francis outlined several other initiatives that will expand resources such as training H2F advisers through a course that is now in development, modernizing the program’s data management system, in part, by providing wearables that can track soldier activity in multiple domains and offering pregnancy and post-partum performance training.

“The key to success, especially with our dispersed units, is going to be the ability for us to collect data so that they can have a meaningful discussion with an H2F team, and if they’re not colocated with an H2F team, this will make that much better,” he said, explaining that at first it will be “independent of wearables, but the requirement will enable us to plug in wearables if the Army decides to go that way.”

A wearables study taking place with basic trainees at Fort Benning, Georgia, aims to help the Army decide whether the devices will improve performance data among the youngest soldiers and give commanders the data they need to optimize readiness.

“Our senior leaders put their money where their mouth is, and they are delivering this capability to our Army,” Francis said. “It’s going to make us more fit, it’s going to make us more ready and it’s going to help the whole person … a byproduct of that is increasing performance lethality and what we expect our soldiers to do.”