The Swiss Army physical fitness test battery predicts risk of overuse injuries among recruits

AIM: The aim of this study was to quantify the discriminative power of physical performance tests to recognize conscripts with enhanced risk of acute and overuse injuries in specific, physically demanding occupational specialties of the Swiss Army. The five performance tests investigated represent the Swiss Army Physical Fitness Test Battery. METHODS: Physical fitness performances were assessed during recruitment procedures prior to military service, and injury occurrences were assessed during 18 weeks of boot camp. Complete fitness and injury data of 459 volunteers from four military occupational specialties were collected. Discriminative power of volunteers' aerobic endurance capacity, trunk muscle fitness, muscle power of upper and lower extremities, and balance for predicting risk of acute injuries and for predicting risk of overuse injuries was calculated using receiver operating characteristic curve analysis. RESULTS: The presented fitness tests had no discriminative power for predicting the risk of acute injuries. However, the trunk muscle fitness test was discriminative in predicting overuse injuries in all four military occupational specialties, progressive endurance run in three, balance test in two, and standing long jump in one. Only the seated shot put had no significant power for predicting overuse injuries in all four study groups. However, for different occupational specialties, different fitness parameters were discriminative to predict overuse injuries. CONCLUSION: It is possible to conclude that the fitness tests used allow detection of conscripts with enhanced overuse injury risk in physically demanding occupational specialties and therefore provide an indicator to select suitable personnel for physically demanding jobs in a military organization

The Roles of Stabilixation Policy and Wage Setting for Macroeconomic Stability : The Experiences of Economies with Centralized Bargaining

The paper discusses the roles of stabilization policy and wage setting for macroeconomic stability in economies with centralized wage setting such as in the Nordic countries, Austria, the Netherlands and Germany. because of their economy-wide character labout market organizations in these countries are forced to consider the macroeconomic effects of and likely government responses to their behavior. The paper gives aan account of how the allocations of responsibilities for various macroeconomic goals between the government and labour market organizations have developed during the post-war period with the emphasis on the responses to the recent supply shocks. The country experiences are used to draw conclusions on the advantages or disadvantages of various policy regimes and recent theoretical work on the behavior of trade unions is applied to explain the observed outcomes