Article Excerpt: 
If you drive by the construction site at the Douglas County Hospital at 7 a.m. or 12:30 p.m., you might catch a glimpse of the wave, the bobble head, the PMer or even the tea pot.

No, these are not names for the latest dance crazes. They are stretches and the crew from Mortenson Construction does these, along with several more stretches, during two scheduled stretch breaks.

At the hospital construction site, there are roughly 30 crew members who participate in the stretching, said Darl Flake, assistant project manager for Mortenson Construction and the foreman of the surgery center's expansion project.

Flake said the superintendent of the project or the foreman usually leads the stretch, which takes about five minutes.
According to Chris Tschida, one of the safety directors from Mortenson Construction, the Minneapolis-based company working on the hospital's surgery center expansion project, the mandatory stretch breaks started back in the late 1990s. About 1995, the company started to do some research on how to combat soft tissue injuries like sprains and strains, said Tschida. The company started a pilot stretching program and found that there was a reduction in injuries, as well as better production from its employees.

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