Fort Hood: Master Fitness Trainer / UFPM for 3rd ASOG (11th ASOS)

At Fort Hood, Texas, I was assigned within the 11th Air Support Operations Squadron, under the 3rd Air Support Operations Group (3rd ASOG). During that time, I was granted a waiver as an Airman First Class to serve as Master Fitness Trainer (MFT) / Unit Fitness Program Manager (UFPM).

That detail matters for one reason: you don't get waivers like that unless leadership trusts your competence and your judgment. That role wasn't "rah-rah PT." It was responsibility—training outcomes, compliance, readiness metrics, and accountability.

And it's where I learned one of the most overlooked truths about fitness programming:

When you design training for a population, your job is not to make it hard. Your job is to make it work.

You're not writing a plan for the most motivated person. You're designing a system for:

• different fitness levels
• different injury histories
• different attitudes toward exercise
• and different life constraints

You also learn fast that prevention matters. If you train people into the ground, you don't get a medal. You get more injuries and worse readiness.

That's where "safe programming" became non-negotiable for me—not as a marketing phrase, but as an operational requirement. Safety isn't softness. Safety is how you keep performance going long-term.

That entire experience became the blueprint for how I think about AI fitness:

• Input quality matters
• Constraints matter
• Progression matters
• And outputs must be safe enough to repeat.