Gardening is a favorite pastime of many Americans. It is an opportunity to breathe fresh air, beautify your home and exercise your muscles. Back pain, however, can take the joy out of gardening. But a bad back does not always signal the end of your gardening hobby. Oftentimes it is merely your body’s way of telling you to correct your posture and be more careful. So, if you want to deal with your back pain and continue gardening in a healthy way, read on to learn a few tips for safe gardening techniques with a bad back.
1. Wear comfortable clothes and shoes.
2. Stretch before you start gardening: Take 5 to 10 minutes to loosen up your muscles and get your blood flowing.
3. Use proper posture: This is perhaps the simplest and most important tip for people gardening with bad backs – you must lift and bend correctly while working! If you have good posture when gardening, you are going to have less pain. So, instead of using your back muscles to lift, you should take advantage of the stronger muscles in your thighs and buttocks. You can utilize these muscles by bending your knees, leaning over from the hips and keeping your back straight from the base of your neck all the way down to the end of your spine. If you find this difficult to do on your own, you might want to consider wearing a back brace for extra help maintaining proper positioning when bending and lifting.
4. Use a wheelbarrow and kneeling stool: If you are going to spend a lot of time working close to the ground, use a lightweight portable garden stool to protect your knees and joints while kneeling. Make sure you don’t strain your back when moving from place to place in your garden by lifting heavy things on your own. If you don’t have a wheelbarrow, it’s a good investment for your health to buy one. Ask for help from family or neighbors to load heavy items into or out of your wheelbarrow or divide up a large load into several more manageable smaller loads.
5. Keep flowerbeds narrow and weed-free:You will save yourself from straining your back if you don’t have to lean over lots of plants in a wide bed. Instead, design your garden so that you can easily maneuver around plants without having to reach too far. Also, make sure not to leave bare patches of soil where weeds will want to grow. Mulch the surface of your garden beds and use ground cover plants to maintain moisture and suppress weeds. This will minimize the need for bending over and straining your back to remove unwanted plants
6. Use appropriate tools:If you use gardening tools with handles that are too short or too heavy to allow you to easily reach the areas you need, you will increase the likelihood of straining your back. Instead, try using lightweight tools with long handles or extensions
