MITIGATING MUSCULOSKELETAL INJURIES IN THE U.S. MARINE CORPS
Preventable musculoskeletal injuries pose a significant threat to military readiness. To understand why they happen, Pitt researchers have been working with U.S. Marines during officer candidate school training.
About one-third of the Marines who participated in a three-year study suffered some form of injury on an obstacle course, in a conditioning hike or during some other form of endurance training. In many cases, those injuries were severe enough to knock them out of officer training.
Bradley Nindl, director of the Neuromuscular Research Laboratory/Warrior Human Performance Research Center, visited Marine Corps Base Quantico in May 2024 along with fellow researchers to brief Corps leadership on findings from their study.
Designated as a Military-Friendly School every year since 2015, the University of Pittsburgh is among the top 15% of schools in the U.S. for exemplary services in support of military students. Pitt’s commitment to the military dates back more than 100 years.
“We looked at bone health, which is important because military personnel get a lot of stress fractures,” says Nindl, professor and vice chair for research, Department of Sports Medicine and Nutrition in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences. “We looked at psychosocial resilience, physical performance, the quality of their movement using technologies like markerless motion capture, and biochemical measures of bone turnover and immune function.”
In addition to markerless motion technology, which captures movement without the need for body suits or other wearables, Nindl and team used peripheral quantitative computed tomography to study bone health, force plates and other clinical and rehabilitation tools.
Ultimately, the research will help the Marines identify ways to prevent injuries.
Additional research coming out of the Neuromuscular Research Laboratory/Warrior Human Performance Research Center includes work with other branches of the U.S. military and internationally, including with militaries in Finland and Australia.
Nindl has a personal stake in the research. A former active-duty scientist for the U.S. Army, he studied warfighter physiology under stressful and arduous conditions with a focus on endocrine biomarker and neuromuscular adaptations. He still serves in the Army Reserve as a colonel and has had continuous military service since 1991.