Army recruits from the South are less fit - and get injured more often, study says

Does where you live determine your fitness level — and could it predict how well you’d do at boot camp? According to one new study, it’s very possible — and the results don’t look good for the South.

A study from the researchers at The Citadel, the University of South Carolina, the American Heart Association and the U.S. Army Public Health Center found Army recruits from the South are less physically fit and more overweight than recruits from other parts of the country — and they’re getting injured more often, too.

In the study, published in the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice on Jan. 10, nine researchers looked over the rosters of all recruits who entered basic Army combat training from 2010 to 2013. They looked over data that included the recruits’ heights, weights, home state and other demographics.

They also looked at data taken from a diagnostic Army Physical Fitness Test after two weeks of training and records of any injuries recruits suffered by the recruits.

The researchers found that recruits from a cluster of 11 southern states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia) where fitness levels were low were among the 16 states where recruits were more likely than average to become injured during basic training.

The data stack up with other data from agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. According to CDC data, the South is the epicenter of the nation’s obesity emergency. More than a third of adults in Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana and West Virginia were considered obese in 2016.

Most other southern states, including Georgia, have obesity rates of between 30 and 35 percent. Florida does a little better, with a little more than a fourth of residents considered obese, according to the CDC.

That does not mean every person from one of those states is not physically fit - far from it. But the study’s authors say the findings call attention to “the disproportionate burden that certain states are having on national security.”

The declining physical fitness of incoming recruits is not a new concern.

“We have 18- and 19-year-old kids coming into basic training that can’t skip or perform a forward roll,” Frank Palkoska of the US Army’s Physical Fitness Training School told Foreign Policy magazine in 2015. “They have not learned the motor patterns to execute these basic movements. ... Lack of fitness is a societal problem. The injury rate is developing into a taxpayer concern in terms of medical care and lost training expenses. And the lack of qualified recruits it is becoming a national security issue.”

And in The New York Times in 2010, contributor and former Army infantry captain Tim Hsia wrote, “Despite the military’s stress on physical fitness, many senior officers and non-commissioned officers I have spoken to are adamant in their beliefs that today’s soldiers are physically softer than the soldiers of yesteryear.”

This study is one of the first to explicitly connect a recruit’s home state, level of fitness and rate of injury. And those injuries are costly — the authors of the study said each recruit lost to injury costs the Department of Defense around $31,000.

“The candidate pool of US military recruits is dwindling. It is estimated that 27% of Americans 17 to 24 years old are too overweight to qualify for military service, with obesity being the second highest disqualifying medical condition between 2010 and 2014,” the authors wrote in the study.

“Even those who do qualify, they are coming in at lower and lower levels of fitness and getting injured,” Daniel Bornstein, who led the study, told the Post and Courier. “It really hampers (the Army’s) ability to get soldiers ready for battle.”

The authors said the results could help frame the public health discussion in a different way than it has usually been viewed by lawmakers and officials. Rather than speaking about obesity as a hazy health issue, now it can be seen as a vital problem clearly affecting military readiness — or at least that’s the idea.

“It is our hope that the states identified through this analysis, along with federal entities, work to establish policies and environments proven to support physically active lifestyles,” Bornstein said in a statement reported by the Military Times. “If such actions were taken, physical fitness levels among residents of these states would rise and each state’s disproportionate burden on military readiness and public health could be minimized,” he said.

“If we’re not going to do it for the reason of public health and health outcomes, fine,” Bornstein told the Post and Courier. “We need to do it for national security purposes.”

This story was originally published January 19, 2018 at 11:44 AM with the headline "Army recruits from the South are less fit - and get injured more often, study says."