If you’re going to spend time this fall cleaning up your yard, bending, lifting, pulling, twisting, and raking, you want to make sure your body can handle that. Here are some tips to follow to avoid pulling muscles, especially in your lower back.
Evaluate Your Spine and Joint Health
A healthy spine is a spine that moves well with full range of motion. If our spine or any of our extremities is limited in range of motion, what happens is by not moving well it increases the stress and tension in the muscles that move that joint. So now you have the hamster effect, you have limited range of motion which increases stress and tension in the muscles and if those muscles are working harder, they break down internally.
A chiropractor is going to be able to evaluate your spine through its alignment or misalignment. If the spine is out of alignment, there is stress and tension in the joint, the tissue, the nerve. That’s going to lead to an increased chance of pain and dysfunction.
We also need to look at what muscle and joints we are using. The hips, lower back, your whole spine, really. Then we’re going to be looking at subluxation, subluxated joints that aren’t moving well, or they’re out of alignment, again, increase stress and tension in the joint.
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 train 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.
A chiropractor 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, raking or shoveling, putting stress through it, if the spine’s out of alignment, it’s not going to be able to handle that as well.
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.
So, a chiropractor can evaluate your alignment functionally, structurally, and find joint dysfunction. Then, 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.
Prepare Your Muscles
How healthy are your muscles? So, if you’ve had an 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. 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 restore health to that tissue by simply performing some specific myofascial work. Restoring the range of motion to the joint through improving tissue health is going to allow the joint to move better.
When you do yard work, you’re going to be bending forward. So that’s all the muscles in your lower back. The muscles that keep you in good alignment are those in your core, the glutes, the hamstrings, the muscles between your shoulder blades and the muscles in your neck. You’re going to be using your arms and shoulders, that’s all the muscles in the chest, the shoulder, the back. The structures in your body anchor into your spine. So those structures, muscles and tendons, allow us to move with freedom and stability. So, then we have to have balanced muscle strength.
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.
Warm Up
You don’t want to go from sedentary to then, all of a sudden, asking muscles to lengthen and create stability. Do some basic exercise. Our YouTube channel has tips on basic range of motion, the spine, taking it through its four planes of motion, so bending forwards, backwards, laterally bending, and then rotating. Then you should 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, and some shoulder stabilization work.
Engage Your Core
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 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.
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, and 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 and engage the diaphragm, how to find it, how to breathe on it. That creates complete stability in the body and allows you to function at a high level, not just physically, mentally.
Bend Your Knees to Lift
How are you bending and lifting? 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. When you’re just straight flexion, it ramps up the disc pressure in your spine. If you’re doing it sitting, it’s around a 300% increase in your disc pressure. When you’re standing, it’s less than that, but it’s still a lot.
If you are consistently bent over, and you’re compressing the front of the spine, well, where’s the 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 malleable.
The next thing you know that disc fluid pressure is going to break through. Then you’ve got disc fluid in your nerve canal, and when you put pressure on a nerve, that slipped disc, that pain which we see a ton off with patients who are not bending properly. They are folding and then raking or shoveling in the yard and then they pull up, and that just blows backs out.
So, how do you bend? Proper lifting mechanics is 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 bending from the hip.
These things are critically important for people to make sure they’re engaged and active when they are working, specifically lifting, pulling, bending, raking, all the activities required for yard work.
