Can fitness and movement quality prevent back injury in elite task force police officers? A 5-year longitudinal study

Abstract

Elite police work has bursts of intense physically demanding work requiring high levels of fitness, or capacity, and movement competency; which are assumed to increase one's injury resilience. The purpose of this study was to follow members of an elite police force (N = 53) to test whether back injuries (N = 14) could be predicted from measures of fitness and movement quality. Measures of torso endurance, relative and absolute strength, hip ROM and movement quality using the Functional Movement Screen^TM and other dynamic movement tests were obtained from every officer at baseline. When variables were grouped and considered holistically, rather than individually, back injury could be predicted. Seven variables best predicted those who would suffer a back injury (64% sensitivity and 95% specificity for an overall concordance of 87%). Overall, the ability to predict back injury was not high, suggesting that there is more complexity to this relationship than is explained with the variables tested here.

Practitioner Summary: Members of elite police forces have exposure to intense physically demanding work. Increased levels of fitness and movement competency have been assumed to increase injury resilience. However, complexity in the interactions between exposure, movement competency, training, fitness and injury may occlude the true relationship between these variables.

Keywords:

• predicting injury
• back pain
• fitness
• strength
• range of motion
• assessment
• FMS

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada for financial support. Participation of the officers of the Toronto Police Service is also gratefully acknowledged.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.