Fighting fire with a strong foundation

“Last year, Megan Mulready injured her back and had to call 911. “A bunch of firefighters came up to my place and said, ‘What’s going on?’” Mulready said. “I said, ‘Don’t you dare mess with me. You need to stay healthy so you can help other people.’” That’s the same energy Mulready, an athletic trainer and assistant clinical professor at NAU, brings to her latest professional endeavor: pro bono tactical athletic training for first responders. Over the last year, Mulready and a handful of her NAU students have dropped in on the Flagstaff Fire Department’s Firefighter Recruit Academy to lead recruits in basic injury-prevention exercises and share information on early signs of injury and dehydration. It’s a universally beneficial arrangement: firefighters learn how to avoid the heartbreak and pain of injury; students who hope to become athletic trainers get hands-on experience at the very beginning of their careers; and the larger northern Arizona community stays safer with more firefighters on the ground. A longtime athletic trainer for collegiate athletes and a one-time intern with the Arizona Diamondbacks, Mulready said she’s passionate about bringing the same standard of care to first responders. “I can get an athlete into a doctor’s appointment within an hour,” Mulready said. “I can get them an MRI in days, I can get them booked for surgery within a week. I genuinely believe all people who put their lives on the line for our community deserve that type of access.” An injury-free academy Mulready’s partnership with Flag Fire began last year, when she proposed integrating optional athletic training into the department’s recruit training with the goal of halving the academy’s rate of injury. Fire department leadership responded with an ecstatic “yes.” “It worked,” Mulready said. “The academy members had zero injuries last summer.” Mulready attributes her success to the way she employs the simple but powerful tenets of athletic training: prevent and educate. Every week, she and her students break up the class of recruits into groups of four or five and run them through a basic strength, balance and flexibility circuit targeting the hips, core and upper extremities—areas where firefighters tend to suffer injuries from repetitive movements like climbing ladders, lifting hoses, and yes, lifting injured people like Mulready. The assistant clinical professor gives her students a trial by fire, asking them to learn, program and demonstrate exercises for the recruits. Natalie Hess , a sophomore enrolled this semester in Mulready’s course AT 200: Prevention of Athletic Injuries and Emergency Care, signed up to volunteer with the fire trainees to get more hands-on experience with physical therapy and athletic training, two fields she’s interested in pursuing. “This volunteer experience allows us to have real hands-on experience for the injury prevention side of things,” Hess said. “It helps us be involved and use what we learned in the real world. I am so grateful I get to be a part of it.” Fellow sophomore Alix Henning , another AT 200 student, said she’s enjoyed learning more about on-scene preventative care, not just how to respond once an injury has happened. “This has taught me how to approach different classes of patients in order to find a rehabilitation program that is suitable for them,” Henning said. “When training an athlete, you can somewhat have an idea of what they will be doing and it is usually repetitive. With firefighters, they don’t know what it is they will be running into. So, it is really important to strengthen every aspect of movement to prevent injuries in the middle of an emergency situation. It is also important to remember that random scenarios will come up, so they need to have the ability to modify under pressure.” More than motion When they’re not doing exercise drills, Mulready and her students teach the firefighter recruits a few basic health principles with a fire-focused slant. Take hydration, for example: It’s important for all Arizonans who spend time outside, but it’s doubly so for firefighters, who move, lift and dodge things in intensely hot environments while wearing nearly 100 pounds of gear. Before coming to NAU, Mulready spent time as an athletic training intern for the Arizona Diamondbacks. “Some collegiate football players have to pass a hydration check before they can go to practice the next day,” Mulready said. “We weigh them in their uniforms and pads before and after practice, and if they’ve lost 1-2% of their body weight, it means they’re dehydrated and they need at least a liter of water to replenish. Firefighters need the same kind of checks in place to stay safe. I’ve been teaching them about electrolytes, quick-acting carbs and other things that can prevent sprains and cramps when they get dehydrated.” Moving forward, Mulready hopes to expand her athletic training services to the Flagstaff Police Department’s training academy and to other first responder academies in the region, from Winslow to Sedona to Prescott. She also hopes to expand the training to include seminars on sleep, nutrition and recovery methods such as foam rolling and stretching. Ultimately, the assistant clinical professor hopes that with her help, local first responders can do exactly what professional athletes do: stay injury-free in order to do their jobs well. “My goal is to take people who want to be in a very physically demanding job and give them the tools to be successful,” she said. “Whether you’re in baseball or in firefighting, you’re doing physical work and you need to protect yourself.” Jill Kimball | NAU Communications (928) 523-2282 | jill.kimball@nau.edu

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