How to stop yourself getting injured while gardening
One of the reasons gardening is such good exercise is that the sheer joy of it disguises how hard you’re working, so you end up exerting yourself more than you would at the gym.
When I manage to steal a moment to prune a tangle of triffids, I have trouble stopping. Before I know it, I’ve been waving a chainsaw aloft on a pole for four hours.
The only downside is that the endless yanking, pushing, lifting and bending can lead to, or exacerbate, aches and pains.
NHS Digital figures for 2020-21 (Also known as the great lockdown gardening and DIY boom) record 12,355 admissions to hospital in England with injuries related to “overexertion and strenuous or repetitive movements”. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Madeline Hooper, a retired PR executive who lives in the Hudson Valley north of New York, reached a point where she could no longer ignore her sore neck. “I love gardening,” she says
“And it doesn’t matter how long it takes to weed the bed – I’m weeding the whole bed. But I had terrible neck and upper shoulder pain.”
Being a can-do type, she sought help from personal trainer Jeff Hughes, whose simple, commonsense approach worked.
The pair have now teamed up on a US TV show called GardenFit, in which they travel around America, admiring gardens while helping to educate the world about how to garden painlessly.
Posture is everything
The first thing to know is that posture is everything.
“If your head is back and your chest is puffed out and your shoulders are back and down, you feel tall and powerful,” says Hughes. “Whatever you do, you will incorporate the correct muscle, whereas when you hunch, you are incorporating muscles that aren’t designed to do that job. And that’s what we do when we get tired.”
When your shoulder gets tired of lifting your arm, stop lifting your damn arm.
Hooper’s technique was a perfect example of this. “Your shoulder lifts your arm,” says Hughes, “and your trapezius lifts your shoulder. If you’re doing something all day and your shoulder gets tired of lifting your arm, your body’s smart. It goes: what else can lift the arm? All of a sudden your trapezius is doing something it wasn’t designed to do, and of course your neck is going to hurt.”
The solution is simple: “When your shoulder gets tired of lifting your arm, stop lifting your damn arm!