Austin & Jordan,
As a connoisseur of exercise literature, I wanted to pick your brain on a potential study to correlate resistance training with job-related injury (and hopefully reduction thereof) for emergency medical services providers (e.g. paramedics). One of my big interests is EMS provider wellness. Job related injury rates are high and commonly from lifting patients, but I can’t find any specific data looking into resistance training and injury rates in this population.
My question is in study design. Obviously the best feasible design would be a prospective cohort trial, looking at injury rates among those that engage in resistance training versus those that don’t. However, I want to do something that won’t take years. I obvious have no objective data of provider’s exercise history, and specific injury data is protected information. That leaves me with a survey, which gives me concerns about response bias and sample size. Do you think such a study could be sufficiently powered to correlate regular resistance training and rate of injury? Do you have any suggestions on study design otherwise?
Hey man! Good to hear from you.
I’m going to bump this down to the Rehab forum to get @Derek_Miles and @Michael_Ray 's input, since they’re probably the most familiar with the injury risk reduction literature in the context of sports, and we’ll take it from there.
Thanks, Austin. I look forward to their opinion.
I did find an article out of Arizona looking at a fitness program intervention for fire department recruits that demonstrated a reduction in injury rate and cost. https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/injuryprev/22/3/181.full.pdf
Stuart McGill did some work with firefighters but Im pretty sure it found no relationship between a fitness intervention and injury outcomes. Since it doesn’t fit my biases Im pretty sure it was not a generalizable study 
Michael,
Your best bet for a close corollary is likely looking at military fitness/injury and resistance training. I am not aware of specific studies off the top of my head (I will look) but I know that cohort is well studied and likely has decent overlap as operators.
Thanks, Derek.
I’m thinking of simplifying it to describing the leisure-time exercise characteristics and barriers of first res ponders. I’m investigating validated physical activity questionnaires and find them overall disappointed. Few of them separate strength versus steady-state training, and those that do are quite complex.
Are you familiar with any reasonable physical activity questionnaires that aren’t too complex, but also stratify resistance vs other training?
A quick update for anyone interested. From my lit search, EMS providers have high incidence of obesity and comorbid disease. Around 25% of them meet the CDC/AHA/ACSM exercise guidelines. Better baseline health is associated with increased physical activity. Otherwise there isn’t significant data on what factors contribute to increased physical activity, especially in the less healthy population. I’m going to determine how to target the less healthy population.
Here are a few relevant studies of EMS health fitness characteristics:
Studnek JR, Bentley M, Crawford JM, Fernandez AR. An assessment of key health indicators among emergency medical services professionals. Prehospital emergency care : official journal of the National Association of EMS Physicians and the National Association of State EMS Directors. 2010;14(1):14-20.
Maguire BJ, Hunting KL, Guidotti TL, Smith GS. Occupationalinjuries among emergency medical services personnel. PrehospEmerg Care. 2005;9:405–11.
Studnek JR, Ferketich A. Organizational policy and other factors associated with emergency medical technician seat belt use. J Safety Res. 2007;38:1–8.
Studnek JR, Ferketich A, Crawford JM. On the job illness and injury resulting in lost work time among a national cohort of emergency medical services professionals. Am J Ind Med. 2007;50:921–31.