How grades work

Grades 1–3 are movement literacy — what every able body owes itself. Grades 4–6 build the foundation, 7–9 real capacity, 10–12 the finished generalist. Grade 12 — matriculation, the floor of the finished man — means you can lift, run, swim, endure, fight, and carry another person out of danger. Grade 13 is the citizen tier: the same capacities re-proven under fixed loads, fatigue, and cold, held by annual muster — a yearly renewal, taken in company. Bars scale to your frame — by bodyweight, by height — until Grade 13, where the world stops scaling. Nothing is normed to the population; the bars would not soften if every man alive failed them. The grades are deliberately hard to hold — that is the point. A grade is not a score; it is a standing: something to expect of yourself, and something to be quietly proud of keeping.

Train

Your session, built from the tests you haven't passed yet. Do the work, log it, and retest when you're ready.

The tree

Every test in the standard, on one screen. Faint lines connect tests that build on each other — touch any dot to highlight its connections, and click it for the full test and training plan.

Assessment

Find your true grade. Each track starts where you claimed. Pass and you move up; miss and the next test is one grade easier. Passing any test credits everything below it.

Why the sessions are split this way

Fatigue corrupts measurement. Judged skills come first on a fresh body; jumps and sprints before anything heavy; the run on its own day; grip-bound bars last of all, because grip drains fastest and recovers slowest. Take 48 hours between sessions. A miss is recorded as an attempt with a date — that attempt is the sharpest training signal there is.

Regimen

Method

What you're measuring yourself against — and why you can trust it.

The oldest expectation

In the Greek cities, a young man finished his education in the gymnasion, not the library: two years of running, carrying, swimming, and fighting before he counted as a citizen. Rome marched its recruits twenty miles before noon and called it the basics. Strength was not a hobby or a look. It was a qualification for being taken seriously — and every man knew exactly where he stood, because the standard was public and it did not bend.

This is that expectation, rebuilt with modern measurement. Nothing here is nostalgia — the numbers come from today's data. What is ancient is the demand: that a free man be examined, that the examination be fixed, and that holding it be worth a quiet, earned pride. What you build here is not a physique. It is a standing.

One standard, thirteen grades

Ephebeia measures the whole body: strength, speed, endurance, mobility, water, cold, and composure under an opponent. Each of the nine tracks is a ladder of twelve fixed tests. Your grade is your weakest track — so the standard can't be gamed by leaning on what you're already good at. Grade 12 means you can lift, run, swim, endure, fight, and carry another person out of danger. Grade 13 puts the same abilities under load, fatigue, and cold — and must be renewed every year.

The tests never move

Most fitness scores grade you on a curve against everyone else — and as the average declines, the score flatters you. Here every test is fixed: a protocol and a number that stay put whether everyone passes or nobody does. Grade 6 means the same thing this year, next year, at 25 and at 45. That honesty is the product.

Fair to your body

Strength tests scale to your bodyweight and jumps to your height, so a 140-pound man and a 220-pound man face the same relative demand. Men's and women's numbers differ only where physiology does — the women's bars are set from female performance data, not scaled down from the men's. Grade 13 is the deliberate exception: its loads are fixed, because a pack weighs what it weighs and a casualty weighs what a person weighs.

Where the numbers come from

Every pass mark traces to something real: century-old national fitness badges, modern military entry tests, occupational standards for firefighters and soldiers, and a fit against nearly four million logged competition lifts. The running standards are cross-checked with standard pace models. When a number is still an estimate, it's flagged internally and corrected as results come in.

Whole before special

Grade 12 is set at the strongest all-round condition a body can hold without one ability eating another — a double-bodyweight deadlift and a 6:30 mile can live in the same person; a 3.5× deadlift and a 4:30 mile cannot. Specialize after you finish, if you like. The standard makes sure nothing was skipped on the way.

Corrected in the open

When a test proves mis-set — too easy, too hard, unfair to a body type — it gets corrected, and every correction is logged with its evidence. A standard that shows its work is one you can hold yourself to.

The point

Most men never measure themselves against anything fixed. They train by feel, compare themselves to the room they're in, and never find out what they could actually be counted on to do. The grades exist to end that. Holding one is not a fitness score — it is a standing: earned, renewable, and yours to be quietly proud of. It says you are the kind of man who can carry someone out of trouble, cross cold water, stand under load, and answer for it every year. Not everyone is. That is exactly what makes it worth holding.

The tests are waiting. They have been for a long time.