What It Really Takes to Prevent Soft Tissue Injuries

Sarah Miranda | Quanta Services

Kevin Rindal | Vimocity

Deb Maier | Vimocity

Hello. Welcome. Thanks so much for joining today. I see we got folks filtering in here, so, we'll give them minute.

But while we're waiting for people to join, a little background on, why we're here today. So really excited. We have some great experts speaking today, so I'll give them a little introduction a little bit later down the line. But really just to level set, you know, obviously in the industry, there's been a huge shift over the years to really focusing on serious injuries and what that looks like.

And really though, what we see is that although serious injuries tend to be going down serious injuries and fatalities, You know, one of the types of injuries that really remain pretty constant across the board is soft tissue injuries. You know, they're often called sprain strains, musculoskeletal disorders, but really what we're going to be focusing on today is what are some strategies that actually prevent these soft tissue injuries and what actually moves the needle. So, to level set here, soft tissue injuries remain one of the most common, actually the most common type of injury in the utility and construction space.

They also are the most costly. By costly, I mean, they take people away from the job at a higher rate than on any other injury. And when we think about just also outside of work, the life impact that has people not being able to do the things they wanna do.

So really important topic and really excited to be jumping into that today here. For those of you who I haven't had the privilege to meet yet, my name is Deb Mayer. I am the marketing director here at Vimosity.

I'm formerly a professional distance runner, and this topic is very near and dear to my heart. Had a lot of injuries myself and saw and experienced firsthand. When your livelihood depends on your body operating at the highest level and you're injured or you have something flare up. It really does impact contracts, your ability to work, earn an income.

But then there's also all of the mentally and emotional side of things as well around not being able to enjoy the things that you like to do, being taken off of your normal kind of day to day time with your crews, whatever that looks like. So, I'm really looking forward to jumping into this. For those of you who are not familiar with Vomosity, so we actually started very much as a soft tissue injury prevention program. That was our main focus.

Over the last couple of years, we've really expanded to focus on all of the risk factors that impact a worker's ability to perform at the highest level on the job. Really just focusing on providing safety leaders, operational leaders with resources, and a delivery mechanism to be able to, just integrate some of these workforce readiness principles into the, day to day flow of work. So really looking forward to introducing our speakers here. So we have Doctor.

Kevin Rendal and then, Sarah Miranda from Quanta. So I'll start just with a little intro into Sarah and then we'll jump into Kevin. But, so Sarah, as many of you guys know, a well known in the industry. I've known her ancillary for a couple years now, but just really kind of had the chance to connect with her recently.

And just lots of parallel, she has a really extensive background in sports, sports medicine, injury prevention at the highest level, and really has dedicated a lot of her, career to bringing those principles to the frontline leaders. So, Sarah, really excited to have you. Would love to just turn it over to you to give a little bit of an intro into your background as well.

Yeah. Thanks, Deb, for hosting this and putting it on. I'm very happy to be here. I'm a big fan of what you and Kevin and the team are doing out there.

So like you said, I've been in the employee health and wellness space for about twelve years now.

Happy to say I've been with Quanta for six of those, and I've been tasked with kind of starting our health and wellness program. So that's six years old as well. Prior to that, I did work with athletes and then anyone with any kind of injuries, trying to kind of promote injury prevention.

So yeah.

Great, awesome. And now turning over to Kevin, I'll give a little intro. So funny enough, Kevin and I think I've known each other for a better part of a decade. His background is in sports medicine. He's a sports chiropractor by trade.

And actually I had the pleasure of working with him as a professional athlete and he's worked with the USA swim team. But he's really dedicated the last several, basically decade of his career to bring these same principles to the workforce. I think there's very few people in the industry that have as much experience and passion behind, preventing these types of injuries and just elevating the workforce, as Kevin. So Kevin, I'll turn it over to you to give a little bit of an intro as well into your background.

Yeah, thanks so much Deb. Doctor Kevin Rundahl, CEO and co founder of Mossity. And yeah, there's such a parallel between, professional athletes and professional industrial athletes. And so we're excited to have this conversation today about how we can take those same principles and bring those to the workforce. Thanks so much Deb and Sarah.

Yeah great, well Kevin while I have you on screen there, I think maybe just to level set, obviously there's a lot of different names these injuries go by. People call them sprain strains, musculoskeletal disorders, you know, slips, trips, falls. Could you maybe just paint a little bit of a picture of like what actually are these injuries physiologically? Like what actually makes up a soft tissue injury?

Yeah soft tissue really refers to anything related to like muscle or ligament or tendon and also the joint capsule so that's the soft tissue that surrounds the bones that come together at a joint and they're definitely the most common, injuries Deb, led into. About forty percent of all injuries fit into this category. In athletics it's the number one injury classification so it could be a rotator cuff, it could be a knee, it could be a back, but oftentimes they happen from repetitive use or overexertion are the two common mechanisms. But what I will say is that there's this whole other layer related to soft tissue injuries that oftentimes we don't focus on and that's the impact of things like dehydration or nutritional impact or inflammation in the body or maybe even poor biomechanics that cause us to maybe not use our strongest muscles or put our body in a position that biomechanically just puts a lot more stress on our body and so then that puts additional wear and tear on those tissues.

Great yeah and obviously you've worked with thousands of elite athletes and athletes of all different ranges.

Just curious in athletics, what do you see as the common causes and does that kind of carry through to the workplace? Are there different causes of workplace injuries?

Yeah, so again a lot of times it does come back to repetitive motion so it's the day in the day out of the work and the repetition. Sometimes it's a blunt force and those are a little bit more difficult to to prevent at times and then, slips trips and falls can also be a common cause of a soft tissue injury. Auto accidents are another one.

In terms of how they relate to an athlete, what an athlete, really focuses on is they know that they're going to experience impact on their body, they're going to be exerting themselves and so what they do is they train for what we call durability and so durability is basically your body's ability to absorb that force with less impact and so that means doing things like strength training, mobility training, cardiovascular conditioning and then like I said before the hydration nutrition some of those other components help somebody be able to absorb more force. I always joke with people, if I were to take one snap in an NFL football game, there would be a serious injury or fatality because I don't have the durability of an NFL running back. And that's because they're constantly training for that durability. And so as we think about industrial athletes there are all these components that we can add to help them be more resilient so that they can retire strong.

Right yeah that's definitely an interesting point and as you know often we think about it's mobility that caused the injury or lack of mobility that caused it. You mentioned things like hydration, nutrition, what would you say are maybe some of the other indirect causes or things that come to mind that are often overlooked when we're thinking about what actually feeds into these of injuries?

Yeah fatigue I think plays a big role, so that could be working extra long shifts, it could be, not showing up to work not fully recovered. I think that what we need to really appreciate is that most athletes maybe train or compete two to four hours every day but industrial athletes, are basically competing so to speak. I mean it could be twelve to eighteen hours at some time and so when we're fatigued neurologically that causes us to be less coordinated, we can't exert as much force, sometimes cognitively, we also take shortcuts without even intending to just because of the fatigue so I think all those factors play into why industrial athletes maybe are at higher risk and things that we just need to be conscious about when it comes to putting crews out in the field and, you know how we set up schedules even can play a role in that.

Great and yes, Sarah, kind of leading into that, you know Kevin just mentioned obviously construction and utility work is just very physical in nature that's just how it goes like people are out there working, Kevin mentioned eight, ten hours often, you know, very little rest or, you know, it is just physical. That's the work. Just curious kind of from that side, but also maybe even beyond, like, why do you see why do you think these injuries still remain so prevalent in industry, you know, kind of decade after decade?

Yeah. So I'm definitely gonna agree, with everything that Kevin said. So, you know, our crews in the field, it's not that they don't care about safety or they don't care about getting injured.

Really, they're working incredibly hard. So the environment and the situations that we put them in, I mean, it's a lot, you know, like Kevin said, it's not two or four hours of practice in a day.

It's often twelve hours, so your time, your recovery time looks very different.

The window that you have to, you know, rehydrate, get in that proper nutrition, get in some connection with your people, kind of calm down those muscles in the nervous system. Looks very different than our athletes, you know. So and then it's not part of the culture right now typically to teach them and have clear direction on how to spend those recovery hours. So kind of some parallels there.

Yeah. I appreciate that what you just hit on there, Sarah, is like that that idea that people don't wanna get hurt. It's not that people are coming to work saying, you know, I'm not gonna do x y and z because I wanna get hurt. I think that's one common thread that we can all agree on is nobody wants to be in pain and definitely wanna commend, you know, a lot of the work that organizations do to prevent these injuries and, you know, obviously sometimes received in different levels of engagement or whatnot. But, I think even dating back to the early 90s stretch and flex became very prevalent in a lot of construction sites.

So for some of those things that you see organizations tend to do, what would you say are some of the most common approaches that the organizations either you've worked for or what you see in the industry try to take to prevent these types of injuries?

Yeah, so definitely stretch and flex is probably the most common used method to kind of try to combat, you know, musculoskeletal issues.

I think for me that should be a minimum and I mean we're happy if most companies are doing that. If our crews are doing a stretch and flex, it's a good foundation, a good first step and that is probably traditional injury prevention.

So what we're trying to do is move it into more of the recovery pieces including in the nutrition, making sure that they understand what hydration looks and feels like, and teaching them, you know. It's funny. So there's Super Bowl one, the quarterback for the Kansas City Chiefs. There's actually like a famous photo if you're familiar.

Lynn Dawson was actually the quarterback and so if you're watching this, Google get your phone out and Google Lynn Dawson. But there's a picture of him at halftime and he's actually smoking a cigarette and, you know, no one thought anything about it at the time.

He's out there to win, and I think at that time, it was enough for him to put in a hundred percent effort at this and in games, and there was not any thought given to the time in between practices and games. So it's kind of the same for our crews in the field. You know, when you know better, you do better. Now, you know, fast forward to the Kansas City Chiefs of today, Patrick Mahomes, I mean, we would be in an uproar if he was drinking a soda and had a cigarette on the sideline at halftime. But we're learning more so we're trying to implement the knowledge that we have.

Yeah, that's a great point. I think it's often easy to look back and hindsight is twenty twenty, but it was the point in time.

Just curious from your perspective, some of those approaches that may have been early on good intention without starting trying to prevent these, What would you say are maybe some of the like common downfalls that you see in that or things that don't always stick or address all of the causes?

Yeah, no.

Also, yeah, so when I first started in this space and we were looking at stretch and flex programs, it was typically like a poster hanging on a wall and it was all static stretching. It's you know been down and touch your toes for twenty seconds, do some hip circles.

Really no thought given to job specific needs. Right? So some of our crews, they do a lot of overhead work.

They're using a lot of shoulder, biceps, overusing these muscles, right. So their stretch routine really should not look how if someone's working on the ground and they're doing a whole bunch of digging, it's different muscles that they're needing to recruit repetitively, so the stretch and flex should look different. So we've gone in there and we've kind of revamped it. We understand that dynamic stretches prior to work are a little bit better.

They warm you up. The proprioception is there which kind of cuts down on those slips, trips, and falls. Wakes up their brain so if they do that before they go over some safety points, that's kind of, so we talked about the structure of the stretch and flex, we try to educate them on the types of stretching, give some basic coaching cues on form, what muscles they should be feeling and activating, and then kind of timing, right? So if you do that right before you hit your very important safety points, those tend to stick because you've kind of woken up your brain through the movements.

Yeah. And thank you for that, Sarah. And I think one thing we've talked about a little bit offline is just, you know, Quanta is very well known for the capacity model.

For those of you who aren't familiar, it's really making sure that we're engineering the ability for humans to fail safely. And one thing about soft tissue injuries that I think is really unique compared to other injuries is just you can't necessarily engineer out all controls. There is a human aspect of it where really requires buy in from an individual in order to take these actions, change their approach to doing a specific task.

Just curious from your perspective, Sarah, where have you kind of found success in getting some of that buy in among workers for kind of understanding why this is important and actually changing behavior because of it?

Yeah. I mean, so kind of two two things. Right? So if if we're working with a company and their rates of injuries are going up, the buy in's there because they tend to want a quick fix, like stop the bleeding now.

So they'll kinda do whatever you say to do. We're open minded.

But the other approach is going to be, you know, really just explaining the industrial athlete mindset. So I love that we, you know, use that terminology because these crews absolutely are, you know, athletes. They're using and counting on their bodies to make a paycheck and to perform. So teaching them, they tend to like, I said, you know, usually if I'm doing any kind of educating, it's like, you know, it's usually ninety eight percent males in the room who are, you know, in the trades and they're really gritty and not that I can't be, but that's not typically how they see me when I first walk in. But drawing those parallels to these athletes, some of their heroes, they tend to kind of perk up and go, oh, yeah, you know, Tom Brady was able to extend his career, LeBron James, you know, all these names and their heroes.

So that's actually really helped with the buy in.

Yeah. That's great. I can definitely resonate with with that sentiment. There is something about just universally applicable, I think, to sports and generally LeBron James, depending on what team you root for. But, but yeah. So curious if there's any, like, examples or anecdotes you can share with the audience of, you know, something that maybe you've tried that where efforts really seem to gain a lot of traction or, you know, maybe it was a group you worked with where it wasn't necessarily resonating and how you kind of pivoted.

Yeah. What I mean, so we've kind of got the formula down now, and I think we've just learned little by little. I don't know that I have, like, a wonderful great, like, example, but keeping the stretches super simple. I mean, you know, eight to ten, and if they're stretching for, you know, after lunch break or something, we make it even simpler. So maybe just three or four moves that are very specific to the work that they're doing that day has really worked for us. Right? If they have some big long routine and it's gonna take more than four to five minutes, they may not do any stretches, but if we can make it doable and, you know, get some pictures and videos involved and they really understand the movements, that's what's been working for us.

Absolutely. Thank you. Kevin, curious from your perspective, Sarah kind of touched on a couple things there.

She mentioned updating the actual stretches or movements they're doing to be more in line with twenty twenty six and not nineteen ninety six, but also just the consistency, Sarah, I really appreciate what you brought up there of like, just try it once and be like, that didn't work, the consistency aspect. Then, just I think starting with the why were kind of the three things. But curious, Kevin, you've worked obviously with a lot of safety groups, operational leaders and trying to roll out programs like this.

What do you see that safety teams, like the challenges they normally face when they're looking to roll something like this out?

Have on the flip side have you seen actually kind of work in practice to make this a consistent effort that just overall does see moving the needle of reduction of these types of injuries?

Yeah absolutely. I've never come across an organization that says that this is easy and that buy in just comes like that. I mean everyone will tell you that they've tried multiple different strategies and it's usually the flavor of the week and you know maybe it starts off strong but then fades pretty quickly and so there are a couple things that I think are critical. Number one is it really has to be about educating people on the why.

I know that oftentimes when we are you know launching a program we'll actually dive in pretty deep on like some of the like the science behind like this is how your body works and we equate it to like brushing and flossing your teeth but doing it for your muscle and your joint health and then we always tie it back to that why of like what do you care about in life because if people I mean across the board it doesn't matter which group I'm presenting with or our team is presenting with you ask people if they experience pain stiffness or soreness and eighty percent of the hands go up every single time and so people you know know about discomfort they see how that impacts their ability to do things like hunt fish you know spend time with their family and be fully present and so I think when you can tie this back to something that goes beyond just their job in their quality of life and longevity and many people in the trades, mean they're part of a long family of people who've worked in the trades and so they've seen previous generations really broken down by the time that they get to retirement and not being able to fully enjoy that and so I always explain that investing in your body is kind of like your four zero one ks you what you have you know when you get to retirement is all those little deposits that you're putting in over the course of your your life and so being able to pay attention to things like the warm up is just one component but then again the hydration the nutrition and oftentimes I try to use language like hey you're a high performing vehicle you'd never put you know junk gasoline into to a high performing vehicle because it's not going to perform at that same way and so think about nutrition like that.

You're fueling your body and giving it those resources. Just using examples that I think people can relate to in the bigger picture of why they should care about that I think really does, develop that buy in, in the sustainability for sure.

Yeah, I love that Kevin in the sense of like how you say something and saying something in a novel way definitely hits a little different. The difference between saying drink water versus we've worked with some hydration experts who say, Hey, when you're dehydrated, your body has basically turned your blood into sledge blood. Like that visual alone suddenly resonates a lot more.

I know we've touched on quite a bit of the movement aspect of things, but Kevin, I'm wondering if you could just dive into a little bit of what you've seen work in terms of actually reinforcing some of these other underlying factors, body positioning during a specific job task, sleep, all those sort of things that feed into this. Anything you can share in terms of what you've seen work in reinforcing some of those concepts in a daily day day to day operations focused?

Yeah absolutely and I think it goes back to teaching people to fish not just telling them what to do and so relating it to you know if you're going to pull back your your bow you're going to get in a split stance you're going to have one arm, one leg before the other so that you can exert the most force and everybody gets that and so it's like okay when you're exerting force and you're performing this job task let's think about positioning our body in the strongest position or even relating it to athletes like every shortstop, every linebacker, every boxer they all get in the exact same position when they're defending or they're preparing to react and so when you can again relate body positioning to hey this is your strongest position so you can exert force on something so that that force is not being exerted on you and you're breaking down It just reframes ergonomics and body position so they're not just being told what to do.

They're having the bigger picture of why and then they can start to apply that principle if they're on the job or if they're getting something off a high shelf in their garage at home. It just starts to become more of their approach to life versus, just something that they would check a box at work.

Great. Again, down to the brass tacks here, know Kevin, went into this, but just to really push this, you know, if safety or operational leaders were encouraged just three things, if they could just consistently encourage three things that their crews do on a daily basis, what would you kind of chalk those three things to be if you had to choose?

Yeah absolutely so I do think that the daily warm up is a huge part of it because that primes like Sarah mentioned it primes your brain too just to be prepared for work and we know that when you're talking about things like safety like at a tail board and you're moving at the same time your brain is actually more receptive to to the information that's happening and it also just wakes up all those tissues so that warm up I think is is really really important.

Number two, is the hydration nutrition over the course of the day. Think that, the research continues to show that those are things that, help your body become more resilient and less prone, to injury just the way that the tissues heal recover, and then number three is recovery at the end of the day. I think there's a culture where you know people want to get off work and drink a bunch of beer and do all kinds of stuff and that's not setting your body up for the next day and what I am seeing is more and more people are buying into a healthier lifestyle and they're realizing that man the decisions that I make really impact what things look like tomorrow and in the future and so the people who are focused more on recovery they're finding that you know their careers are expanded they're able to perform at a higher level and so I think that we're seeing that aspect really start to bleed over into, industrial athletes as well.

Appreciate that. Sarah, we'll kind of phrase that question to you in a different way, but, obviously safety ops leaders have so much on their plate. I'm sure you can relate as, you know, leaving a wellness department there at Quano with three hundred plus organizations. But, you know, if they were to take just one to two immediate steps, like starting Monday, they were gonna start doing something.

What in your mind are like the one or two things that you would want someone to walk away with and be like, take these steps or consider these implications or whatever it might be, to really start moving the needle or making progress on supporting their crews and preventing these types of injuries?

Yeah. So well, first off, you let Kevin go first, he took all the good answers. He's good. But I'll build on it.

I'm confident that you'll come up with something even better.

So, yeah. So first off, I think the way that he's talking about the bow and teaching, it does make a lot of sense. What I've found is our crews largely were a part of sport at some point.

They're used to being coached and ergonomics and proper, you know, like athletic positioning and all that. It does if you explain it that way, think that makes a whole lot of sense. Right? Athletic position and can prevent a whole bunch of injuries and help them perform better. But, you know, one or two steps that I'd say, you do have to have stretch and flex. You do have to have a proper warm up.

If everyone in the field could spend three, four minutes waking up their muscles before they get out there, I think that is, you know, a minimum, but we've got to have it. And then two, it does have to be restorative time outside of our shift hours. Right? So getting the right amount of sleep.

So many things fall into that. Right? I mean, getting the nutrition that we need so that the sleep is quality sleep.

You know, I've been wearing my Oura Ring and, you know, tracking and myself the amount of quality sleep that that I get if I have a late meal and even if it's a healthy meal, I mean, I I lose out. I lose plenty of points just eating too late. Right? Much less when I have one or two glasses of wine or something like that.

I mean, so I'm highly affected and most of our crews in the field are too. It's just teaching them that and even maybe getting some wearables out there. But yeah. So my two things are gonna be definitely the movement of warm up type stretch and flex and recovery time.

Great. Well, thank you both Sarah and Kevin so much. I mean, I definitely appreciate you both lending your expertise and experience to this topic. Think a really relevant one.

But, yeah, I think if, for those of you who maybe we didn't answer your question or perhaps you have looking for other resources, these are definitely some people who can help you out. So if you haven't yet in the chat, definitely feel free to put in any questions. We'll definitely follow-up with you on that.

But yeah, just I think overall, definitely understand that these injuries are multifaceted. There's obviously a lot of different causes. And because of that, we wanna make sure we leave you guys with some resources. So up on screen there, thank you.

You'll see a QR code. So we know again, safety ops leaders have so much that they are reliant on doing on a regular basis. So definitely feel free to scan that. You'll get some access to some free resources that'll help you on this topic.

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