When Shoveling Snow, Never Bend or Twist
Winter is amazing! The cold air feels refreshing, the landscape transforms, and trees and homes glow with beautiful lights, creating a stunning nighttime spectacle. The hot cocoa and books reading the snow sledding and skiing begin, the hand holding gets just a little tighter as we take our loved ones down with us on the ice. Winter is coming, and snow will soon come with it. Some less amazing parts include breaking out your shovels, waking up earlier, and driving slower to get to work on time. More importantly, we must maintain our health while shoveling snow to stay active for work and play this season!
Have Good Form
Snow is coming, that’s a lot of fun, it also increases a lot of stress. It’s important to think about shoveling snow correctly to prevent injury and back pain. Sometimes we can get away with poor snow removal methods for a while. Eventually our back starts to feel that “alternative method” soon. One way to look at it is that every time we bend with our back, we are putting more purchases on our credit card. The day will come when our bill is due. Our back hurts because we bend with it, even though it’s meant to stay immovable.
Bend With Your Hips
Many people make the mistake of moving their back during exercise to make it stronger. However, the point of the core and our low back is to resist stress and motion. Every time that we move with our low back we reinforce a bad pattern and train our back to get injured.
We should bend with our hips. Everyone says don’t lift with your back, but what they mean is lift with your knees. Sadly, that advice is only partially helpful because it gets too hard on our knees and we really should lift with our hips! After all, that’s where the biggest muscles in the body located. Logically, we have the biggest muscles there because they are the primary movers of the body.
Another thing to consider is we need to use our thigh as a fulcrum against the shovel. When you can’t push the snow any further and need to do some shoveling use the handle as a lever and your thigh as a fulcrum.
One last thing, the worst thing you could ever do for your back is bend and twist while holding something heavy. We just aren’t designed for that sort of thing. The pounds per square inch on our back increase exponentially when compared to how we should handle that heavy snow.
Doing this correctly shouldn’t cause any pressure tightness stiffness or stress in your low back. If that’s not the case, we have a problem.
Most people don’t realize that pain doesn’t have to be part of our daily activity. The challenge of this age is knowing what to do and avoid, but struggling to put it into practice. However, putting that knowledge into action in our daily lives is still a challenge.
If you’re not quite getting it, that’s okay! That’s what I help people with all the time. Getting a better sense of how their body is supposed to move to avoid injury. Come in, and we can discuss how to help with your winter, spring, and summer shoveling projects. My favorite part of the day is teaching someone how to avoid and prevent future back pain.