Mark Wildman

04/23/2026

01/24/2026

01/24/2026

Mar Vista Fire Station 62 is having a pancake breakfast fundraiser at the Mar Vista Farmer’s Market tomorrow, which is Sunday if you’re in the Los Angeles area.

This is a great group of guys who were one of the first crews into the Palisades Fire last year, and they’re out there every day, keeping the surrounding area safe and helping people with fires, accidents and all their medical calls.

I dropped into the station a few months back to talk to the guys about low back pain. We talked about squat technique, because most of the guys at fire houses that I’ve worked with have a very predictable series of problems. Fighting actual fires is the most intense and physically demanding part of the job, but what you might not expect is that in modern firefighting the majority of calls are medical, and this where we see the most injuries as repetitive stress builds up over time—usually from lifting extremely heavy people onto carts and then getting them in and out of the ambulance.

Heavy injured people are hard to move around, and it is hard on people’s back. It is not quite like deadlifting a barbell, although deadlifting a barbell helps quite a bit.

We talked about adding in kettlebell swing technique so that you can go hand to hand and get more transverse abdominis load.

And we talked a lot about deck squats, working deck squats into their program before heavy barbell training