I just gardened again yesterday. And no, we’re not talking the leisurely, occasional weed picking and planting some small flowers sort of gardening, but a major overhaul of a very overfilled, weeded flowerbed in our front yard that has Japanese maples and a variety of other small trees in it which spread their leaves everywhere, making it necessary to clean the bed once every few weeks.

On top of that, I had to pull out whole sections of very strongly rooted weeds and bulbed flowers and plants that had spread beyond control and needed to be thinned out. When it was all said and done, I had pruned, pulled and tugged about 12 large plants, and had three very large piles of throw away stuff to prove it. I was wiped out, but most of all I was concerned about my back, which is sensitive to begin with, and definitely can get thrown off by vigorous gardening and all that bending, stooping and pulling, which your back isn’t used to.

So, I’ve learned that to protect my back, I don’t bend over from the top down any more, instead I really try to use my leg strength to help me bend far enough down to be able to get leverage to pull certain weeds and plants out. I also make sure that if I crouch, I’m doing it so that my back isn’t bent in any uncomfortable way.

I also went out and treated myself to new ergonomically designed shovels, rakes, and trowels so that I didn’t have to awkwardly handle any of this type of equipment, which was designed so that a smaller person such as myself wouldn’t have to grip the handle way up high but instead in my center core where my power is, instead of using my back. You can find a lot of this ergonomically designed gardening stuff at Target, and probably Home Depot and Lowes would carry similar items as well.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 17th, 2008 at 5:19 pm and is filed under Fitness Advice. 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.