Study design: A group of 160 incumbent male railroad workers was administered a battery of isokinetic and isoinertial lumbar/cervical lifting tests that served as a paradigm for whole-person functional testing of manual handling tasks.
Results: Results demonstrated that the workers' performance was near normal or somewhat above population averages according to previously derived heterogeneous normative samples. However, there were some differences among the four laboring crafts that made up the present incumbent worker sample.
Conclusions: The implications of these differences are discussed.