Military Injury Prevention

Good Morning Barbell Medicine team! As a brief introduction, my name is Allen Mardis, and I work for the Dept of the Navy in a Sports Medicine Clinic on a Marine Corps base. As a collateral duty I have recently been assigned to take over an injury prevention presentation that we give weekly to a group of Marines Awaiting Training. They’ve completed recruit training but are waiting for a class to start for their MOS.

The powerpoint I’ve inherited is, in my opinion, not quite up to date with current research. The topics it covers are foot/shoe wear, squat and deadlift pictures that nocebo everyone, foot type (high vs low arch) and matching proper shoe type to it (i.e. motion control vs neutral or stability type shoes), arch support inserts being necessary to prevent ankle, shin, knee, low back injuries (my coworkers routinely prescribe custom orthotics for quite literally every patient). Don’t get me wrong, there is some good information in it about proper recovery and nutrition so it’s not all bad. Anyway, long story short I’m looking for ideas to put together a better presentation with more current research to back it up. So far I’m leaning towards promoting strength training, pointing out the benefits of it for running and hiking as well as just being stronger (and harder to kill…) and calling it injury risk reduction instead of injury prevention. I’d love to hear more ideas. I have started to re-listen to the BBM and Pain/rehab podcasts but if anyone has some episodes to focus on I’d appreciate it. Thanks!