The Corps didn't use waist measurement. If I recall, if you were overweight they'd have a metric that used waist and neck size as well as weight. This accounted for heavy lifters that were low body fat pct but heavy weight. If it still didn't work then you could get calipered for body fat. We had a few folks who needed that, mostly those under 6' tall, over 200# but benching 400+.

In all it was a good program. Weight was the basic metric but there were fail safes in place for those in great shape (with body fat/bmi to prove it) who were over the "standard".