The Effects of Training in Undulation Training for Development of Hierarchical Fitness and Improved Firefighter Job Performance

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In the article, “Undulation Training for Development of Hierarchical Fitness and Improved Firefighter Job Performance,” a research was conducted when a critical problem emerged from the extraordinary job risks of firefighting. In this article, it was recognized that firefighting was a high risk occupation in which many activities were life threatening. Yearly incidences brought on from these life-threatening activities and conditions included cardiovascular disease from the inhalation of smoke as well as musculoskeletal injuries from the physical demands of the job. The problem was lying in the fact most fire departments were failing to adequately prepare the firefighters in terms of health and physical fitness to take on the physiologically challenging demands of the job. Now, there are contemporary training methods to boost physical fitness and cardiovascular health in order to make the firefighters “emergency prepared.” However, despite the emphasis on physiological training, previous research had shown that the traditional physical training programs were inadequate to prepare firefighters because it featured systematic physical exercises during specific mesocycles and little variety. In this research, standard resistance training, or standard training control, was compared to and put to the test against undulation training, a method to draw out a specific systematic arrangement of different physiological factors and components in order to accommodate the need for simultaneous development of physical fitness and performance needs. The purpose was to determine the influence of both types of training on muscle adaptation as well as assess how well the trainings transferred over to situations and testing areas that really utilized... ... middle of paper ... ...y. The small sample size made the results a little less reliable, especially since the subjects were taken from only one fire academy instead of multiple which created random bias. The conclusion the author made was that the study showed that undulated training was the way to go for firefighters who need the multidimensional muscular and performance training in order to succeed at their job. Undulated training, in this sense, had greater potential. In 2000, the NFPA created a new firefighting ordinance that created health and physical fitness requirements that firefighters had to pass in order to be cleared to perform their jobs. This was to motivate firefighters to perform the best they could in order to succeed, including improving firefighter health by helping them avoid serious injury or disease and improve their performance in order to succeed at their job.

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