Earlier today, a press release was published on the website of a Pentagon news service with the title Why today’s Gen Z is at risk from bootcamp injuries. It is very funny.
You can read it here If you like (thank you Vice), but the gist is that a single guy from the US Army, a “clinical coordinator and chief of emergency medical services at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri,” has some concerns about the physical readiness of new recruits ages 18-25 .
“The ‘Nintendo generation’ soldier skeleton isn’t hardened by activities before arrival, so some of them break more easily,” says Major Jon-Marc Thibodeau, a man capable of with a generation of children at two years old to talk about pandemic lockdowns/isolation while at the same time being confused with the actual “Nintendo generation”, people who are now in their 40’s.
He doesn’t mean, of course, that their entire skeletons will shatter. That would be crazy. Instead, it simply refers to specific ones parts of their skeleton, such as fractures from falls and stress fractures, with most injuries being ‘overuse’ and involving the ‘lower extremities’.
The press release itself is equally condescending, saying things like “Today’s recruits have far more sedentary lifestyles compared to previous generations, which makes their skeletons more susceptible to injury because they are not used to the type of intense activity they are subjected to during basic training.” “.
I said that was funny upstairs because a) this man really talks/take great care of them Skeletons still inside living people, which is odd, and b) this is a story as old as time, and I find it funny that militaries and governments continue to be surprised by the poor standard of recruits, even though they are better than anyone else should be able to assess the health of the wider society to which they belong, and particularly those they are most likely to approach with offers of employment!
There have been records of military officials complaining about the crappy quality of recruits for as long as we have military records. Whether it’s medieval dues levied by malnourished peasants on the poor physical health of World War I conscripts raised in industrialized ghettos is not a new topic or complaint, and the physical “weakness” Pushing these recruits towards superficial entertainment pursuits, rather than the broader socioeconomic systems that have led to this point in the first place, is labeled as “doing a very poor job.”
If your current workout routine is literally breaking people’s legs and your only job is to workout whatever comes in the door, maybe…change your workout routine?
