There’s nothing quite like getting outside and getting your hands dirty from gardening that helps ground you. Gardening is a wonderful hobby and activity that many of our older adult clients engage in. The problem is that they also usually complain about back pain the day or two afterwards.
Can anything be done to reduce or prevent back pain while gardening?
The higher your general fitness level is, the greater your capacity to live a full, rich life is. Think of it in as a graph. If your general fitness level is a 4 and gardening is a level 5 or 6. You are close enough with your general fitness level to do this activity. However, it’s just out of your normal capacity so you’ll probably be sore and your risk of injury is higher. Conversely, if your fitness level is an 8 now gardening is below (or easier) than your normal abilities making the activity easy and your risk of injury very low.
The first thing that you can do to minimize or eliminate back pain is to make sure you are strengthening your back and core consistently by doing weight training. Exercises that don’t require any spinal movement (rotation, twisting, bending) should be staples in your program. These would be exercises like carrying something heavy around, planks, rows, and bird dogs. Or if you’re feeling very adventurous you can combine two of the exercises together to multi-task, like doing a side plank row.
If you have any back pain, it’s possible you’ve got something structurally going on (stenosis or disc issue), and seeking professional medical help may be warranted. Having back pain doesn’t mean you can’t garden. It just means you should limit moving the spine by twisting, rounding, and doing ridiculous crunches would not be advised. If you are unsure about what a strengthening program would look like, make sure you download our free healthy back handbook.
Change your Gardening Positions
The second step you can take to maximize your gardening time while minimizing your aches and pains is to change up your postures or gardening positions. It’s common to get going on a specific task, be it weeding or planting, or fertilizing and you stay in relatively the same position for 30 or more minutes at a time. If you can do that without pain and aches, good for you. Most people can’t. So for the rest of us, changing up the positions frequently, every couple of minutes, can do wonders for not making you as sore.