Army cuts athletic trainers, will use unit medics to treat injuries

The Army is cutting certified athletic trainers from the fitness training teams across the service, Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Jim Mingus said Tuesday, replacing them with strength coaches.

But regular medics might get extra training to deal with fitness-related injuries when the trainers are gone.

The overall goal, he said, was a fitter, stronger Army.

“We will not have arrived until we have a no-neck Army,” Mingus joked. “Everybody in the Army, their traps are going to go from the base of their head right down to their neck.”

Athletic trainers are civilian specialists trained to help prevent or treat injuries that often occur during normal fitness training like weight lifting and running. To replace them, the Army says it will use more strength coaches, fitness specialists who focus on creating and monitoring workouts but who often lack training on injury prevention.

As for the injuries that athletic trainers might have helped with, soldiers will now have to go find a medic in their unit.

A typical Army platoon, Mingus said, already has its own medics who are present for unit training and exercises. “We just need to train them on how to identify and be able to do some of that treatment there,” he told Task & Purpose.

The move will effect the teams set-up in large units under the Army’s holistic health and fitness program, or H2F, the Army’s massive overhaul of its fitness and wellness training for soldeirs. Those teams, which are made up of about 20 people for brigade-sized units, had been designed with seven strength and conditioning coaches and four athletic trainers. But going forward, the Army is cutting its athletic trainers and moving to 11 strength and conditioning coaches.

Mingus said the units with H2F access are seeing fewer injuries, faster recovery times and better marksmanship scores. According to H2F data provided by the Army, for units with the program, they have seen a 14% decrease in musculoskeletal injuries, 23% greater Army fitness test pass rate, and 27% more soldiers qualifying as experts for rifle marksmanship.

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Changing approach to fitness

H2F was announced in 2017 as cultural shift towards improving soldiers’ total wellness that goes beyond physical fitness, to include taking care of their mental health, getting enough rest, and eating well.

As part of the program, the Army embedded teams within their formations to give soldiers more direct access to fitness professionals without needing to make appointments at clinics or hospitals.

Those changes, first reported by Military.com, came down to credentialing and budgeting issues, Mingus said. Athletic trainers are considered health providers and are overseen by the Defense Health Agency, which oversees the entire military’s medical staff. But the H2F program does not include DHA positions.

“If you’re in the health providing business, you have to be credentialed, licensed and overseen by DHA, which is outside the Army’s control,” Mingus said at an event hosted by the Association of the U.S. Army in Washington D.C. “We wanted to keep this as an Army program. We wanted to be able to control our teams and how they interact.”

While a strength and conditioning coach focuses on improving fitness through proper technique and deliberate planning in training, an athletic trainer, or AT, is trained in the medical science of injury prevention and recovery.

The strength and conditioning coaches are “probably not going to be able to do it in treatment, which is why your medic, your battalion surgeon, your brigade surgeon — there are [occupational therapists] within a division, they need to come in and perform those functions with the strength and conditioning coach,” Mingus told Task & Purpose. “It’s just a slightly different pairing.”

Mingus, a major proponent of H2F, said the Army is no longer testing the feasibility of it as a pilot, but rather sees it as an established program “for the entire Army.” The service initially equipped 20 of its maneuver formations with H2F teams and the goal is to outfit 111 active duty brigades with their own H2F teams by the end of fiscal year 2027.

The Army is using pilot teams within National Guard and Army Reserve units to determine the best configuration because their needs and training schedules are obviously different. Those H2F units might be established in “centralized locations where soldiers can be advised by human performance subject matter experts either virtually or in person,” according to an Army release.

“It is absolutely here to stay,” Mingus said. “The optimized human component of how you fight is actually, I think, more important than anything else that we will do. Fitter people are hard to kill. That’s just fact.”

Beyond the physical successes, he said the program is leading to “many other intangibles” like soldiers experiencing less mental health crises and committing fewer “acts of indiscipline.” Those ‘intangibles’ have equated to 22% lower behavioral health reports and a 502% reduction in substance abuse profiles.

He said that the investment in the program — which costs roughly $3 million to stand and $2.5 million to sustain — will equate to $3 million in annual savings per formation.

Mingus also said the goal is to have the program pay off for soldiers who want to have lifetime Army careers or for those who retire with enduring injuries — many of which cost the government through Department of Veterans Affairs healthcare.

“Think about the number of NCOs and senior officers that retire and their quality of life is just crap,” he said. “We owe that to our troopers that are out there that if you want to commit to 20, 30, whatever number of years, you ought to know that you’re going to go into your next life with a pretty decent quality of life.”