Health & Wellness: Essential Fitness Equipment for Firehouses

Maintaining peak physical well-being isn’t a choice for members of the fire service. It’s a prerequisite. The demands of our life-saving profession include maneuvering heavy equipment, lugging hoses and carrying victims away from danger, all of which require sound “functional” fitness levels.

Functional fitness in the fire service has been a talking point for the past 10 years, but what does the term mean? Further, does your workout and the fitness equipment that you have in the station support functional training? What makes an exercise functional for firefighters, EMTs and medics?

To answer these questions, we first must define what functional training means. The definition can be varied and broad; the term often is abused and overused.

Station items = equipment
The best definition of functional training that I found over the years—and one that I believe applies very well to the fire service—was created by the professionals at Mayo Clinic. It identifies functional training as activities for “training the body for the activities performed in daily life.”

In the context of firefighters and first responders, our daily life or shift requires us to lift, carry, push, pull, drag, climb, twist and hoist, all of which are done while we wear restrictive gear and work in unstable planes of motion for prolonged periods of time. This demanding work requires a strong core, mobile and flexible joints, full-body strength and cardiovascular conditioning.

Therefore, for an “exercise” to be functional for a first responder, it must help us to perform in our demanding environment. For a “workout” to be functional, it must promote those components of core and full-body strength, mobility and cardiovascular capacity.

The other component to functional training is the equipment that’s used to resist and perform these functional movements. Twenty years ago, there was a push to get fitness equipment into firehouses to encourage members to work out. At that time, bulky machines that focused on isolation movements (chest fly, leg press, leg extensions) were the rage, and that was what most firehouses purchased.

Based on the definition that’s noted above, we should understand that isolation exercises and selectorized equipment don’t meet the functional demands of the job. Furthermore, although heading to the local gym, with its updated equipment, certainly can be beneficial, having workout equipment right in the firehouse can cater better to our unique functional fitness needs. Unfortunately, sometimes, available budgets and facility space aren’t obtained easily for the much-needed equipment needs.

There is hope, however. Some affordable and highly effective pieces of equipment can help us to maintain our fitness levels even when funds and space are tight. Many of these items already are in and around most firehouses and don’t need budget approval.

The items that are noted below include some staple pieces that are very versatile and functional. Other equipment usually is free or requires minimal investment.