Overexertion Injuries: Why Haven’t We Solved This?

Board members from the Board of Certifying Professional Ergonomics (BCPE) team recently attended the National Safety Council Safety Congress & Expo in Indianapolis, where OSHA released its annual Top 10 Workplace Safety Violations for 2026 and NSC shared new analysis connecting those violations to injury and fatality data.

As expected, the discussion focused on familiar hazards such as fall protection, lockout/tagout, ladders, machine guarding, and hazard communication. These same categories continue to appear year after year, highlighting workplace risks that organizations still struggle to control.

But one finding stood out to us.

The National Safety Council’s analysis reported 946,290 DART (Days Away, Restricted, or Transferred) cases associated with overexertion, repetitive motion, and related bodily conditions during 2023-2024. Nearly 698,000 involved overexertion while moving or manipulating external objects. NSC also identified overexertion as the leading cause of serious nonfatal workplace injuries.

For ergonomics professionals, this is not surprising.

The question is not why overexertion injuries appear in the data. It is why they persist despite decades of awareness, training, safety initiatives, and technological advances.

Part of the answer may be that overexertion risks differ from many traditional safety hazards. A missing guardrail, damaged ladder, or unguarded machine is often visible. Work tasks that increase the risk of musculoskeletal disorder injuries are frequently embedded in the way work is designed and executed. They stem from repeated lifting, forceful exertions, awkward postures, workstation design, and system constraints, making them more difficult to identify and address before injuries occur.

Another challenge is moving from awareness to action.

Organizations have spent years discussing musculoskeletal disorders, material handling risks, human factors, and workplace design. Yet injury rates suggest that awareness alone is not enough. Effective prevention requires competent and qualified professionals who can identify MSD risks, evaluate work systems, influence upstream design decisions, and implement practical improvements.

That is why aiming for board certification, continuing to work on education and competency development, deepening your understanding of relevant assessment tools and equipment, and staying attuned to scientific research remain essential.

Ergonomics is not a one-time initiative or compliance exercise. It requires the ability to apply proven principles to changing work environments, emerging technologies, and evolving organizational needs.

This was a central theme of BCPE’s recent session, Strengthening Safety Programs Through Ergonomics Expertise, at the NSC Congress.

As panelist Marisol Barrera, CPE (Ergo Forward, BCPE Director), noted during the discussion, “It is imperative ergonomics professionals be part of the broader safety conversation. Their expertise helps shape how organizations think about prevention, design, technology, and ultimately how work gets done.”

This perspective guided the panel discussion focused on moving beyond reactive injury management and toward proactive risk reduction. Moderated by Julia Abate, CPE (The Ergonomics Center), the panel featured James Rethaber, Ph.D., CPE, LSSMBB (Fit For Work, Past BCPE Director), Ram Maikala, PhD, CPE (National Safety Council MSD Solutions Lab, BCPE Director-at-Large Elect), and Cathy White, CPE, CSP, CIH (Dow, BCPE Director).

Together, they explored the importance of continuous improvement in design, systems thinking, human factors integration, the early application of ergonomics expertise, and the importance of having competent and qualified HF/E professionals at the forefront of these teams.

As organizations invest in AI, wearables, computer vision, exoskeletons, and other emerging technologies, the importance of ergonomics is growing, not diminishing. New tools can help identify risk, but preventing injuries still requires competent and certified professionals who understand the relationship between people, work, equipment, and organizational systems.

The OSHA Top 10 highlights persistent compliance challenges. The NSC injury analysis highlights where workers continue to get hurt. Together, they point to a simple conclusion: organizations that want different outcomes must focus not only on inspecting work, but on designing it better.

The latest data reinforces something we strongly believe: improving workplace safety requires more than compliance. It requires expertise. For more about the BCPE certification process, visit www.bcpe.org.