Injuries are a leading cause of lost duty time and separation from service, so you need to avoid injury during training and on deployment in order to achieve performance optimization. These resources can help you stay healthy and able to give 100% to your mission.
Physical training injury prevention
The Army Public Health Center provides tips you can use to help prevent injury, including how to safely increase intensity and duration of workouts, vary workouts for balanced conditioning, and warm up to prepare for activity, with guidelines for resistance training, running, and extreme conditioning programs.
Naval Special Warfare provides this booklet to help BUD/s candidates prevent injury as they prepare for the rigorous training they will face. Photos and descriptions of 17 stretching exercises focus on prevention of injuries of the upper extremities (especially shoulders) and lower extremities (hips, knees, and ankles).
Building the Soldier Athlete [PDF]
This 125-page book describes the basics of the Army’s physical readiness training program. It emphasizes methods to reduce injury rates, including phased training, with sample schedules and illustrated descriptions of exercises. Additional material includes strengthening resources, buying the right running shoes, shoe-lacing techniques, and more. (Note: This large PDF downloads automatically; it can’t be viewed online.)
Building the Soldier Athlete supplement [PDF]
This 80-page supplement to Building the Soldier Athlete focuses on recovery from injury or illness. It outlines programs for all levels of injury, including lower-body and upper-body injuries. It provides illustrated descriptions of phase-specific and injury-specific exercises. (Note: This large PDF downloads automatically; it can’t be viewed online.)
The Navy and Marine Corps Public Health Center’s Injury Prevention web page addresses the impact of injuries on mission readiness and recommendations to help prevent injuries. The links on this page provide access to a variety of government and organization web-based resources to help Sailors avoid preventable injuries.
See also HPRC’s “Where do you serve?” section for your branch of service for additional policy and other branch-specific information. See our home page for links to each service branch.