“We’re going to ensure that our tank crewmen are fully capable of removing 50-pound projectiles from the ammunition rack and loading them into the main gun in a sustained manner in a combat situation,” said George Wright, an Army spokesman.

But for now, the Army has no immediate plans to change its sex-adjusted recruitment and annual fitness tests, even though the Marine Corps, which tenaciously promotes itself as the most hard-bodied service, has started to toughen up its standards for women.

But even for the pull-ups, the Marines are still making some exceptions. To get a perfect grade, women will have to do only 8, compared with the 20 required for men.

“I don’t think it’s a very high bar,” said Capt. Ann G. Fox, a Marine Reserve officer who during her first deployment in 2004 worked with the Iraqi Army and who thinks women could do better if it was required of them. “I think the test should be the same as the men 20 pull-ups. People train to what they’re tested on.”

That was the experience of Greg Jacob, who was a commander at the combat training school for enlisted Marines at Camp Geiger, N.C., and said that he asked his female trainers to do the same number of pull-ups as their male students, even though women were not required at the time to do pull-ups at all.

“I saw women who could only do one or two pull-ups be able to bust out, over the course of four or five months, eight pull-ups,” he said. “And that was because they were training to that standard.”

Mr. Jacob, now the policy director for the Service Women’s Action Network, an advocacy group that worked to end the female combat ban, acknowledged the physiological differences between men and women, but said they were overstated. “There are lots of men who don’t have the same muscle mass as other men,” he said. “There is physical diversity regardless of gender.”