A chiropractor can help prepare your body for fall yard work such as raking and picking up piles of leaves by aligning the spine, strengthening supporting muscles and improving range of motion in joints.
People often associate muscle pain in their lower and upper back with raking and picking up leaves during fall yard work. How does a healthy spine prepare the back muscles for this type of work?
Dr. Luke Stringer: Yeah, great question, Liz, and before you know it, we’re going to be raking up leaves and then shoveling snow if you live in the Midwest or East Coast like you and I, and it’s going to be here before you know it. So, the best day to plant an oak tree is when? 50 years ago. So, the best time to start getting your spine ready for activities is today.
So healthy spine, it’s a kind of a loaded question, right? So, what constitutes a healthy spine? A healthy spine is a spine that moves well, so full range of motion. So, if our spine is limited in range of motion, that could be also an extremity, joint, knee, hip, shoulder, elbow, what happens is by not moving well it increases the stress and tension in the muscles that move that joint. So now if you have the hamster effect, you have limited range of motion, increase the stress and tension in the muscles, if those muscles are working harder, they break down internally.
What happens is it gets formed into something called adhesion. It’s like glue in a muscle, like you and I get into a baseball game, getting some of our Big Chew chewing gum, stick it in our shoulder. Our shoulder is moving, but it’s not moving well, right? So, you start there. Spines have to move. They have to move or get your spine adjusted. Adjustments in rhythm over time can restore spinal range of motion.
Next thing is how healthy are the muscles? So, if you’ve had injury, a injury, or you’ve got chronic postural changes, then we need to treat that tissue, because chances are if the joint’s not moving well, the muscles across that joint are designed to do that. So, through specific analysis you can find the muscles in the lower back, in the shoulder, in the neck, and the upper back that aren’t allowing the joint to move well, and then you can obviously restore health to that tissue by simply performing some specific myofascial work. So, by restoring the range of motion to the joint through improving tissue health is going to allow the joint to move better.
And then, lastly, the structures in your body anchor into your spine. So those structures, muscle and tendons, allow us to move with freedom and stability. So, then we have to have balanced muscle strength. So what muscles are we using when we’re bending and raking and shoveling? Well, it’s the muscles in your lower backs, it’s muscles in your core, it’s the glutes, the hamstrings, the muscles between your shoulder blades, muscles in your neck that keep you in good alignment.
So, then you’ve got to figure out are we deficient? Are we compensating? If so, what do we need to fix it. Obviously prescribed specific rehab that you can do to engage those muscles. So then when your spine moves well with healthy muscle tissue, it allows it to move with freedom and stability and you’ve got supplemented balanced muscle strength, then there’s no reason why you should be breaking down raking the yard this fall.
A healthy spine can also affect joint function. Can you describe how people prepare their spines to support normal and healthy joint function and avoid injury during yard work?
Dr. Luke Stringer: Yeah, absolutely. So, motion is lotion, right? So, if you jumped in a Ferrari, you wouldn’t just put the foot down and pin it. You’re going to spend a good 5 to 10 minutes, or you should at least, warming that engine up, and then you can open it up. So same with your spine. You go out and do any form of exercise, that’s just walking a dog, raking the yard, shoveling snow, you want to warm up for that exercise. You don’t want to go from a cold environment, aka sedentary, you’re not moving, to then all of a sudden asking muscles to lengthen and create stability.
So just do some basic exercise. Again, our YouTube channel does not have a ton of rehab specifically around yard work, but it’s basic range of motion, the spine, taking it through its four planes of motion, so bending forwards, backwards, laterally bending, and then rotating. And then activate the muscles that you’re going to be using, so do a little bit of core work, some posterior chain activation, some shoulder mobility work, some shoulder stabilization work.
It sounds kind of a little over the top, but if you’re going to spend an hour in the yard, bending, lifting, pulling, twisting, raking, you want to make sure your body can handle that. The last thing you want to do is pull your lower back and then end up being out of commission for weeks, months due to that.
There is a lot of repetitive motion involved in yard work such as pulling and lifting. How can a healthy spine help prevent repetitive motion injuries?
Dr. Luke Stringer: Yeah, back to our first question. The spine has to move well, and if it’s moving well with full range motion, that’s a prerequisite for a healthy joint. So, start there. Get your spine adjusted, go through the rehab prescribed by the chiropractor. Next thing is healthy muscle balance, so, again, muscles that cross joints. So, when you do yard work, you’re going to be bending forward. So that’s all the muscles in your lower back. You’re going to be using your arms and shoulders, that’s all the muscles in the chest, the shoulder, the back.
The muscles need to be healthy with full range of motion, so if they’re limited in range of motion, we need that treated. So, chiropractors simply train, not every chiropractor but many, in how to treat the soft tissue to get rid of adhesion, adhesion particularly forms in repetitive motions, kind of like a micro-stress that builds up over time.
And then lastly, a spine that is in alignment that moves well needs to be stable, so make sure all the muscles that you’re going to be using are engaged. So go through range of motion, stability, strength and then work to make sure that when that joint’s moving, it’s moving well with full range of motion, it’s got stability from those foundational structures, and then all those muscles and ligaments tend to allow that joint to move freely and stably.
How can a chiropractor help prepare people for pain-free yard work?
Dr. Luke Stringer: Yeah, great question. We have a ton of patients who come in in and around the winter and the fall time, and they’re like, “I’m here because I have an acreage, and I’m going to be shoveling and raking leaves and all the above. I want to see what’s going on.” So, a chiropractor is going to be able to evaluate your spine through its alignment or misalignment. If the spine is out of alignment, clear stress and tension in the joint, the tissue, the nerve. That’s going to essentially lead to an increased chance of pain and dysfunction.
And then also joint function, so what muscle are we using or joints we are using? Well, hips, lower back, your whole spine, really. So, then we’re going to be looking at subluxation, subluxated joints that aren’t moving well, or they’re out of alignment, then, again, increase stress and tension in the joint.
We can evaluate your global alignment. So where is your curve? Because the curve allows us to absorb gravitational forces. If you’ve got too much, too little, you’ve got shifts, that transfers weight. So, when you’re outside, and you are loading the spine, shoveling, putting stress through it, if the spine’s out of alignment, it’s not going to be able to handle that as well.
So, a chiropractor can evaluate your alignment functionally, structurally, and find joint dysfunction. Then, obviously, by going through a treatment plan specific to that patient’s case to get the spine in alignment, both on an individual joint level and a global spinal level, then that’s going to allow you to have the ability to move well and reduce the chance of injuring your lower back doing the yard work.
To summarize, what are some tips and proper techniques people should adopt for lifting, pulling, and bending while raking, picking up leaf piles, and doing other yard work?
Dr. Luke Stringer: Yeah, great question, and we’ll focus on two. One, the diaphragm, the diaphragm is a cylinder. If everyone listening, wherever it is at home, in the car, if you take a big breath in for me right now, I guarantee the majority of you, if you watched where the breath went into, all the chest was the one that came up. Why? Corporate America, we sit down at our desk. We’re in that flex posture, so, essentially, we’re all chest breathers.
Well, the diaphragm sits a little lower in your abdomen. It acts like a cylinder in the car. So, when you have good diaphragmatic control through good cardiovascular, or pardon me, good breathing patterns, that engages the diaphragm, and that engages the core. So, if you are out in the yard lifting, pulling, bending, raking leaves, picking things up, and everything’s coming through the chest and the diaphragm’s not engaging, well, that means the core is not engaged.
So, if the core is not engaged, this is going to create compensation. Lower back muscles are going to have to work harder than they should, those glute muscles on the outside are going to have to work harder than they should. When things are working harder than they should they have an increased chance of pain or breaking down and essentially becoming injured.
So, again, our YouTube channel, South Loop Chiropractor, has awesome exercises on how to isolate the diaphragm, how to find it, how to breathe on it. You could go high level stuff. You’ve got the guy Wim Hof, who walks marathons in this Norwegian wilderness with, essentially, a cloth around his private parts, because he’s mentally engaging his diaphragm. He’s the industry leader of how to engage your diaphragm. And that creates complete stability in the body and allows you to function at a high level, not just physically, mentally.
And then the other one is how you are doing it, right? So, if you are standing up and your knees are straight, and you just fold over from your hips, that creates flexion at the low back. However, when you’re just straight flexion, it ramps up the disc pressure in your spine. If you’re doing it sitting, it’s around 300% increase in your disc pressure. When you’re standing, it’s less than that, but it’s still a lot.
So then if you are consistently bent over, and you’re compressing the front of the spine, well, where’s those disc compression? That compression is forcing the disc fluid into the back of the spine. So then if those discs are unhydrated because we don’t see a chiropractor, we don’t do our spinal mobility, that collagenous tissue, which is kind of the bread of a donut that keeps the jelly in, keeps the disc fluid in, that gets all broken down, and it’s not supple and essentially malleable.
The next thing you know that disc fluid pressure is going to break through. Then the next thing you know you’ve got disc fluid in your nerve canal, and when you put pressure on a nerve, that’s just that slipped disc, that pain which we see a ton off with patients who are folding, and then shoving a rake or a shovel in the yard, or they’re shoveling snow, or whatever it is. Then the pulling up, that just blows backs out.
So, how do you bend? Again, proper lifting mechanics, you bend in the knee, and you hinge from the hip. So, knees bend first, and your butt goes backwards, which brings you forwards. It’s a lot different than just folding over and kind of bending from the hip.
I’d say those two things are critically important for people to make sure they’re engaged and active when they’re working, and then, specifically, being able to do the work such as lifting, pulling, bending, raking, all the things that we just discussed. If you get those two figured out, you’ll be in pretty good shape.
If you are interested in speaking with Dr. Luke Stringer visit www.southloopchiropractor.com or call (312) 987-4878 to schedule an appointment.
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