In the profession of public safety, Fire-Police-EMS, there lies a strange disparity between fitness/ wellness and proactive injury prevention. In my 8 plus years on the street as a Paramedic and 14 plus years of clinical sports medicine / Athletic Training I have seen countless friends and co-workers injured from activities that should have never caused injury, and have witnessed responders performing exercises that will cause injury. There is a strange 'old school' like mentality that prevails in our profession. Most responders pass their physical testing as a requirement of employment and they never look back. That is not to say that many continue to exercise out of habit or necessity but the vast majority do not. Look at it from a different perspective, you get paid to sit for hours waiting for a call, you have access to exercise equipment at almost each and every station and most departments will give a gym membership at a steep discount. Use your time to your advantage, get paid to exercise! There are countless stabilization, balance, endurance and strength exercises that can and should be performed with little to no equipment each day.

Let's face it, if you take a little time to stretch, stay strong and remain fit, along with some basic attention to diet and sleep patterns and you will be well on your way to remaining healthy and fit. No one got into public safety to get hurt and retire early but that is what the statistics say are more than likely to happen, be proactive and make use of your time to be a 'fit responder'.

5 Tenets of fitness

1) Stay ahead of your body: By the time pain and injury occur the imbalances and dysfunction have become ingrained in your body, they are very hard to re-program once an injury or pain have begun.....be proactive.

2) Sleep: Fatigue will eventually get you! The more sound and restorative sleep you get the better you heal, the more efficient your immune system and the better your brain works...napping counts.

3) Eat well: This goes without saying, put good healthy unprocessed foods in your body and it functions better. Avoid sugars, processed foods, bad fats and especially over eating.

4) Stretch Daily: Learn the difference between static stretching and functional stretching, both are equally important but have very different applications in public safety.

5) Exercise daily: The benefit to learning about functional exercise is the simplicity of integration into your shift. Little equipment or time is required by the gains in strength-endurance-flexibility and balance are awesome. This is not accomplished sitting or lying on a bench!