Being that the warmer weather is now here, many of us are working outside in the garden planting flowers, fruits, and vegetables, and doing a fair amount of weeding. Although this seems to be a rather innocuous activity, each Spring and early Summer I get a large amount of patients who present to my office due to gardening injuries. Many of these injuries are quite common and quite painful. I honestly never realized how dangerous gardening really is until I moved to Columbia, MD. Let’s take a look at a couple of the activities that are performed while gardening and evaluate some ways to help reduce the likelihood of injury.
A major activity that gardening incorporates is sitting, bending, and twisting. Even though at times a lot of weight may not be moved around, gardeners subject themselves to repetitive use injuries. Studies have shown that sitting alone increases low back pressure by 33% as opposed to standing. If you couple sitting with bending and/or twisting, then you really increase the low back pressure even more. In fact, even if you stand and bend and twist, you increase the pressure on your low back. Hour after hour, poor posture and improperly loading the joints, ligaments, and muscles of the neck, back, and shoulders tend to create more stress than the body can handle. These activities lead to injury especially because many people have some sort of back, neck and/or shoulder problem to begin with.
Another activity that gardeners partake in is dangerous lifting of heavy bags of mulch, fertilizer, and other garden ingredients. Some of these bags weigh as much as 50 pounds. This much weight (even if lifted properly) can put a lot of pressure on the back and create an environment for injury. In most cases, people do not prepare themselves for heavy lifting during the winter months and are therefore usually not muscularly fit to be lifting such heavy weight. In addition, people do not warm-up before gardening. It becomes commonplace to bend, twist, and lift improperly while moving these heavy bags around. This type of activity leads to neck and back injury.
An injury that I see more often each year is neck and shoulder pain that is a direct result of pulling large plants/weeds/shrubbery out of the ground. It is very important to properly brace your body and use proper tools to assist with removing plants/weeds that are embedded in the dirt. When you pull forcefully and the plant/weed releases quickly, you not only have to deal with the initial straining to pull the plant/weed out of the ground, but you also have to contend with slowing the shoulder and arm following the forceful pulling action. Injuries due to this activity will generally occur from the deceleration phase of the pull, or the action that occurs following extraction of the plant/weed from the ground.
A good way to prevent injuries from long hours of gardening is to take frequent breaks to stretch and to break up bad patterns. A good rule of thumb would be to work 45 minutes and then take a 10-15 minute break. By doing so, you will give your body a much needed break to recover and balance itself a little.
Remember that while lifting, you should lift from the knees up, not from the back…in other words, bend your knees and keep your back upright while lifting. Although this will not ensure that you won’t hurt yourself, it will help to dramatically decrease your risk for injury.
In addition, working on core stability will not only help to reduce spinal injury, but it will also give you more power when you work in the garden/yard as you will be able to harness more power, more efficiently.
I think that it is important to understand that gardening is NOT a passive activity. It involves a lot of complex body movements and places large demands on the musculoskeletal system. We should probably consider gardening to be a sport! There are definitely certain musculoskeletal demands and if performed improperly, injury will occur. If you take the health of your body for granted, you will end up with injury.
I hope that bringing some awareness to the activity of gardening will make you more conscious of your posture and movements while performing activities that put a strain on your body. Staying out of pain and remaining functional is the primary objective (of course the second objective is having a nice garden). If you do hurt yourself while tending to your garden (and unfortunately many of you will), I am here to help you with your injuries so you can get back out as soon as possible. Take care and good luck. Remember to take your time and take good care of your body.
