The Army has established a new skills qualification identifier for NCOs who become trained as experts in the Holistic Health and Fitness program, Army Vice Chief of Staff James Mingus said.

In remarks Sept. 24 during a Noon Report webinar hosted by the Association of the U.S. Army, Mingus explained that the Holistic Health and Fitness program, known as H2F, will now have NCO advisers “who have gone through and learned the fundamentals on how to assess, program and execute” components of the program.

The H2F program was established to address the need for soldiers to have a higher level of health, fitness and well-being for peak performance and to help empower them by optimizing physical and non-physical performance while minimizing injury. The system promotes mental, sleep, nutritional, physical and spiritual readiness and is supported at the brigade level with specialists and equipment.

Soldiers with the new skills qualification identifier, called the H2F Advisor or H2F-A, will act as consultants to brigade commanders and serve as a bridge between the embedded H2F Performance Teams and the H2F integrators at lower echelons, according to an Army news release.

Soldiers eligible to acquire the new skills qualification identifier will be staff sergeants and sergeants first class from across the Total Army who have completed their key developmental assignments, earned the H2F Integrator, or H2F-I, Additional Skill Identifier, and completed their rank-equivalent professional military education, according to the release.

A first cohort of advisers was set to complete the pilot program of instruction on Oct. 10 at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, said Hunter Rhoades, spokesman for the Army’s Center for Initial Military Training.

With one week to go in fiscal year 2025, there were 71 H2F teams embedded across the force. The number of these teams, consisting of experts such as strength coaches and nutritionists, is projected to grow to 91 over the next year and to 111 by the end of fiscal 2027, Mingus said. He added that “within about a year after that, I think we’ll have the whole Army.”

A prototype program will be introduced next year in the Army National Guard and the U.S. Army Reserve at four locations that will each have four teams, programs that will be “vastly different” for the two components, he said.

“You can have great control and great oversight and leadership inside those organizations a couple of days a month, but what do you do the other 29 days?” Mingus said, noting that Lt. Gen. Jonathan Stubbs, director of the Army National Guard, and Lt. Gen. Robert Harter, chief of the Army Reserve and commander of Army Reserve Command, “are going to help us understand that and get it on track.”

For decades, Mingus said, the Army’s physical fitness programs promoted and measured pushups, situps and a two-mile run.

“It created an Army that was very fit from a muscular and cardiovascular endurance perspective … but did not get after muscular strength, agility, power, speed and all the things it’s going to take our soldiers to win the next fight,” Mingus said.

At the heart of the 22-person H2F teams are the strength conditioning coaches who work with the chain of command to assess the program and execute functional fitness. The teams work for the commanders and provide subject-matter expertise on how to do the assessments and programmatic aspects of H2F.

“When you start to deal with the complexities of what a soldier needs to be able to do, it gets hard real fast, and we ought to treat our soldiers like professional athletes,” Mingus said.