Back Friendly Yard Work Tips in Vero Beach

If your Vero Beach home has a yard, then odds are that you do yard work on occasion, whether it’s mowing the grass or tending to your garden. Unfortunately, because yard work is a physical task, you can risk injuring yourself, especially your back, if you’re not careful. This is due to all of the repetitive bending, lifting, and twisting involved. Such actions can cause significant stress on your joints, muscles, and ligaments. To help prevent such injuries from occurring, you’ll want to engage in core exercises and strength training.

Exercising to Prevent Yard Work Injuries

Core exercises will help develop your abdominal muscles, which support your lumbar spine and pelvis. By strengthening your abdominal muscles, you’ll be able to bend, lift, and twist much more effectively without risking injury. There are a number of core exercises that can help to strengthen your abdominal muscles, including sit-ups, squats, pushups, and jumping jacks. Other core exercises that are effective include planks, leg crossovers, forward and backward lunges, and hip presses. You can do all of these exercises without equipment, although lunges and squats can be made more challenging using dumbbells.

In addition to doing core exercises, you should also engage in lower body strength training and cardiorespiratory exercises. For example, walking, running, cycling, and swimming. These exercises will help to improve your stamina as well, which will help keep you from getting tired while you are performing yard work. Being able to perform yard work without getting tired is actually more important than you might think. The more tired you get doing physical activity, the higher the risk of injury becomes. When you improve your stamina, you won’t get tired as easily, and you’ll be less at risk of injuring yourself since it will be easier to focus on performing your tasks using proper form.

Performing Yard Work Using Proper Form

Exercising can certainly help to prevent injuries; however, it’s also important that you know how to use proper form. For example, you should engage your abdominal muscles whenever bending or lifting to help provide support to your back. You should also bend your knees and use your leg muscles to lift. You should never lift using your back as this is how the majority of back injuries occur while performing physical labor. It’s not uncommon to injure yourself in this manner even if the object you’re lifting isn’t that heavy.

When lifting something, get as close to that object as possible. Bend your knees and bend forward at the waist while engaging your abdominal muscles. To lift the object up, straighten your legs while keeping the object close to your center of gravity. Make sure that your legs and arms are doing the lifting and not your back. It’s worth noting that one of the reasons why improving your stamina is so important is that people sometimes begin using poor form when lifting heavy items because they are tired.

Use these tips to help prevent potential back injuries while doing yard work. If you do injure your back, then be sure to contact us at Florida Spine in Vero Beach to schedule an appointment today.