The warm weather has come round again and the garden is out there, wordlessly calling you to action. If not much has happened out there yet it soon will as the warmth and light take effect. There’s so much to be done as we try and prepare the plot for growing that perfect lawn, vegetables and flowers.

An epidemic of digging is followed every year at this time by an epidemic of low back pain, neck pain and other injuries. Most of these are preventable with just a bit of planning and preparation.

Winter is typically a time of much reduced physical activity and exercise for most people, turning us into less fit physical beings. The warm weather then calls us to action outside at the very time we are worst prepared to face significant physical demands on our bodies.

Warming up is one of the advice tips given and this has some validity but I don’t think it goes anywhere far enough. No matter how well you warm up, if you do too many hours digging without building up fitness for it you will suffer. If the forces you put on your bodily structures exceed their tolerances, something will give however warmed up you are.

It’s vital to do some preparatory work in terms of warming up but we would be unwise not to pay attention to another aspect of performing an activity, the amount of time we choose to spend doing it. Many of us are less fit after the relatively inactive winter period and our body’s tissues are not hardened to tough work especially if it is extended in time. Initial training after an athlete has had a lay-off is easy and graded carefully with no full throttle performance of their event until they have trained their tissues comprehensively.

Most people fall into the mistake of overdoing things significantly when they start out a new activity, usually because the body does not tell us that we have overdone things until its too late. This makes the decision about the level of activity we should do very difficult to judge. If we get out there in the garden, grab a spade and start digging we are highly at risk of doing too much.

Physiotherapy practices and chiropractors and osteopaths all report a significant increase in painful conditions and injuries from outdoor pursuits such as tending the garden in the springtime. Back pain is overwhelmingly the most common presentation although other joint injuries and ligament sprains are also represented. Typically people aggravate an injury they already had before.

11 Ways to Prevent Injury and Get Fit for Gardening

1. Keep up activity and exercise during the winter so you are not totally unprepared.

2. Follow a stretching routine each time before you start.

3. Kneel down if you can, especially for planting, weeding and collecting debris.

4. Decide before starting what breaks you are going to have and when.

5. Start with very short defined times of activity initially and keep the task down to two hours or less in the first few days if you are fit. If you have problems this will need to be lower.

6. Plan a graded increase in activity, using pacing technique, sticking to times you have decided.

7. Make sure you stick to the times you have decided, especially if you feel really good and want to do much more. This is a trap.

8. Use good lifting technique and ask someone to assist if loads are heavy.

9. Avoid mowing by swinging the mower from side to side; walk up and down with it instead.

10. Avoid doing two activities which are posturally similar one after each other. Give your tissues a break by choosing tasks at different heights and angles.

11. If you feel you may have overdone it, leave the activity for a day or so just to see if it is muscle soreness. When you restart, go back with a lower time than when you brought the problem on.

Decide how much to work at before the start and then stick to this with paced increases in level.

Tags: Alternative Health, Alternative Medicine, back injury, back pain, back pain relief, Frozen Shoulder, health, injury management, pain management, physical fitness, physiotherapists, physiotherapy, Piriformis Syndrome, sciatica

This entry was posted on Monday, April 13th, 2009 at 11:47 am and is filed under Alternative Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.