The time for planting the garden or the plants around the house is just around the corner, if not, already started. Every year people spend time planting and will complain of back pain from the time and efforts they spent while they were out planting. If you have your plants picked out and you want to avoid pain, you should read on to make sure you don’t end up planting any pain in your low back!

Low back pain while planting typically is caused by lifting something heavy, repetitive lifting, or the amount of time you spent bent over while planting. In order to prevent or address pain caused by these, you have to consider which one is likely to cause your pain. 

If you will be lifting heavy bags of mulch, heavy bags of dirt, or even a heavy flower pot you should consider the concept of creating intra-abdominal pressure while you lift. Creating intra-abdominal pressure by using diaphragmatic breathing will help stabilize your low back and help prevent your low back from getting strained when you go to lift something. If this concept is new to you, watching this video will be helpful to understand! 

Video for Intra-abdominal pressure:           

        Breathing and Workouts 

If you don’t plan on lifting something heavy, but know you’ll be doing a lot of repetitive bending or lifting. The diaphragmatic breathing and intra-abdominal pressure will also be effective at making sure your low back doesn’t get too stressed from the repetitiveness. Another idea you should keep in mind is that anything that is bent repetitively over and over is going to end up stressed. Think of your low back like a piece of wire that is bent back and forth at one spot over and over. The bending causes one spot to become damaged or weakened. Consider changing up the way you are bending over to help prevent one spot from taking most of the work!

Lastly, if you are going to be working bent over for an extended amount of time while you plant, spread mulch, or pull weeds then you need to move your joints in the opposite direction you had them for that period of time! What is meant by this is, your joints and muscles were made to move in many different directions but when you spend enough time in one your body sends pain alarms to tell you to get up and move. So in order to prevent pain from coming on from being in one position for too long, consider these concepts; manage how long you spend there by placing time limits, get up and move so your joints become lubricated, and lastly, continue that concept of diaphragmatic breathing! 

However, if you are getting to this article too late or you’ve planted some pain in your joints rather than plants in your garden, come see us at Focus On Health Chiropractic and we will take care of you to make sure you can get back to gardening before it’s too late!