If so how do you know? We already know the overall economic impact of work-related injuries and illness are high in the fire service and is ranked as one of the most hazardous occupation. Unfortunately many programs have not been around long enough to provide any evidence. Worse yet, some programs are unable to collect any data due to limited resources.

A few years…

The topic of health and wellness in the fire service has been growing over the years. This can be attributed to a number of factors: workers compensation, absenteeism,, injury reduction, and or improved fitness to decrease adverse health risks/events to help our firefighters.. All of these things are positives in helping our greatest resource - the firefighter.…

In our last article we discussed sleep within the fire service and hopefully provided some insight into how the job itself will affect their overall quality of sleep, which will lead to a number of health issues (type 2 diabetes, heart disease, hormonal imbalances, etc…), In this article our goal is to discuss how the poor sleep will affect the brain as well as hormones, and provide some simple strategies that may help improve your well being.

What are hormones? Simply stated, they…

How is your sleep? This is a common question that often comes when discussing a firefighters health and wellness. Over the years it has become clear to me that the real enemy is not heart disease, fire, or the traumatic exposures but rather the poor sleep quality. It is not uncommon to hear from a firefighter “Coach I have changed my eating habits and started to exercise but I can’t lose weight” and in reality if they do have poor sleep they are climbing an uphill battle. So…