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Back in September, 9 members of the Tufts Lacrosse team were hospitalized following a workout led by an active Navy SEAL who happened to be a recent Tufts grad and former LAX team equipment manager. It was huge news at the time and it was later determined 24 of the 61 participants in the Navy SEAL-led workout suffered from exertional rhabdomyolysis following the workout.
The 9 hospitalizations of members from the Tufts Lacrosse team prompted an investigation from the school into what went wrong and on Friday Tufts published its findings. What they ultimately found was the Navy SEAL who led the workout was unqualified to do so and the workout itself should have been vetted by members of the athletic administration.
In its finds, Tufts University wrote that “exertional rhabdomyolysis is a serious condition resulting from overtraining and is associated with muscle pain and acute skeletal muscle injury.” 24 of the 61 participants in the workout developed exertional rhabdomyolysis from the workout which was determined to be primarily upper-body in nature.
The investigation determined that the active Navy SEAL and former Tufts Lacrosse equipment manager “did not have any credentials that qualified him to design, lead or supervise group exercises.” It also found the Navy SEAL “was not familiar with Massachusetts regulations, NESCAC or NCAA policies and regulations, or Tufts Sports Medicine Operational Policies and Guidelines.”
What that ultimately led to was the dangerous workout which “focused almost exclusively on upper extremity muscle groups” and included around 250 burpees + other exercises in 60 minutes was not vetted by the proper channels. The findings went on to say the “Navy SEAL Workout Plan was not shared by the Tufts Director of Sports Performance with appropriate Tufts employees sufficiently in advance for those employees to evaluate and assess the appropriateness of the workout.”
Tufts Athletics has strict standards in place for acclimatization. The investigation determined the principles of acclimatization were not followed in this instance and that “the conditioning period or activity was not phased in gradually and progressively to encourage proper acclimatization.” It seems as if that’s a long-winded way of saying there was no warm-up period and they dove straight into a strenuous workout.
A full list of the findings and recommendations from the investigation into the Navy SEAL-led workout and consequent Tufts Lacrosse hospitalizations can be found here. Ultimately, the recommendations are all common sense.
Going forward, anyone leading a Tufts LAX workout should be required to have proper credentials, whatever that may be determined to be. It also calls for annual continuing education for the strength and conditioning staff and encouragement to embrace Tufts’ hospitalization protocols.
Taking a step back, it is wild to see how much sports has changed over the years. We didn’t have lacrosse at my school when I was growing up but I was on the crew team and the US National Team and other Ivy League schools would come down and train at our facilities for Spring Break every year. We’d be subjected to their workouts and it was later made clear they did NOT take it easy on us, in fact it was the opposite.
‘Warming up’ was usually running wind sprints of some sort with zero cool-down period before full workouts started. There was no 1-hour limit to workouts.
I’m not at all implying I would’ve fared well in this 1-hour Navy SEAL-led workout that led to hospitalizations. In fact, I probably would’ve been the first one in the hospital give my fitness gap from D-1 athletes these days. But these multiple tiers of control over a single workout seem foreign to the organized sports world I was once accustomed to. Is this NCAA overreach? Is this the way things should be? All of the above?
