title: The South African Defence Force physical training programme. Part III. Exertion-related injuries sustained at an SADF basic training centre.
abstract: The incidence and nature of exertion-related injuries were studied at a South African Defence Force basic training centre. A total of 404 separate injuries were sustained by 359 of 947 recruits during the 10-week basic training cycle. Of these injuries, 18,3% were sustained with (group 1) and 81,7% without (group 2) an obvious sudden precipitating event. Exertion-related injuries were responsible for a loss of 2711 recruit-days of basic training. While the knee sustained the largest number of group 2 injuries, lower leg trauma resulted in the greatest loss of basic training time. Forty-two separate radio-graphically confirmed stress fractures were incurred by 39 recruits, an incidence of 4,12%, which is considerably higher than that in the US Army. These data leave little doubt that the present training programme is costly in terms of training-time lost and may prevent large numbers of recruits from deriving the optimum conditioning benefits.
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D006801:Humans; D007718:Knee Injuries / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000209:etiology; D007869:Leg Injuries / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000209:etiology; D008297:Male; D008889:Military Personnel; D010806:Physical Education and Training; D005082:Physical Exertion; D013019:South Africa; D013223:Statistics as Topic; D013708:Tendon Injuries / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000209:etiology; D014947:Wounds and Injuries / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000209:etiology*