Bending

Hi Tathagata

I couldn't agree more. Bending over type activities are always a challenge, particularly when your hands are loaded. Here are a few tricks.

Always bend from the hips when loaded, not from the waist.

Put your feet at least shoulder width apart so you can get your belly between your thighs without compressing your belly and pushing your bladder backwards.

Stick your butt out to maintain the tautness of the pelvic floor.

Use your thighs to bend as deep as you can at the knee (ie plie) for heavy loads, or just half plie and bend deep. You will soon have thighs of steel. Personal trainers will cast rose petals before you because you will have the highest Squat figures they have ever seen!

Do as much of the stuff you would normally do at ground level, up on a bench instead. DS2 made me a brilliant garden trolley with wheels at one end and a handle at the other, like a portable barbecue. All from bits of scrap steel from his workplace, with wheels salvaged off an old barbecue. It has a bottom shelf and one at hip height that I can use as a bench, or for carrying stuff around, like my crate of reticulation fittings, pots, potting mix, fertiliser, punnets etc. Heavy things at the wheels end.

Get down onto hands and knees, or kneel or half-kneel to work at ground level. Make sure you have good knee pads strapped on while you are gardening so you can get down and dirty as much as you like without having to move your kneeler all the time.

If you half kneel, with one foot planted and the other leg kneeling, change sides frequently so your body can balance. Same applies to sitting with both legs on the same side.

Oh yeah, I use a toddler chair or stool in the garden and the house as well, when I don't feel like kneeling. It is very low, and I kinda squat on it.

When you stand up get up sideways onto your feet and hands with knees well bent. Lift your butt and use your thigh muscles to straighten your legs to almost straight, *then* straighten your torso. This is much easier on the knees and the pelvic floor than a cantilevered rise from squat to standing. This method is good for getting up from low chairs as well. You just have to be able to get far enough forward to tip your butt up. It is a Feldenkrais thing. It is just like the perpetual motion ostrich toy which dips its beak in a glass of water.

Never, never bend from your waist, or rise from your waist. Stick your butt out first! This keeps your organs forward and out of the way of intraabdominal forces generated when you are in cantilever mode.

It is like learning to dance. Once you learn new manoevres for getting old tasks done your body will eventually choose to do things in these unaccustomed ways because it reduces your suffering. It is a positive learning experience. It is a bit clunky at first but your body will eventually get the hang of doing anything the new way automatically.

This is the head space change I often talk about. I think my POPs just don't bother me these days because I have learned subtle changes to the ways I do life, to keep the pressure off my pelvic floor. It is not that my body has healed up broken and stretched fascia, so much as learned ways of using what I have left more effectively. I don't really avoid doing anything. I just do it differently, and get help more often.

One last thing. Consign the short skirts and shorts to the charity bin. You need to be able to use your body freely without risking TMI for your co-workers!

Hope this helps.

Louise

wow Louise, such great advice!
I definitely find that as well. gotta stick the bum out or it feels awful. but i love all your alternatives!
i spend the afternoon gardening, and just opted for very dirty knees as can't find the kneeler anywhere, and wasn't going to squat or bend over. but i like becoming one with the earth. but i definitely do a lot of stuff on the ground, or at arm height, not much in between.
will try some of your other ideas!

Kiki

Kiki, the knee pads I am referring to are designed for tradesmen who work down low to the ground, eg flooring installers, carpenter and cabinetmakers who install onsite, etc. You can buy really well-fitted pads that flex at the knee and fasten with velcro, but I just use hard, black rubber pads that have straps threaded through them. The straps go through a loop and fold back and fasten with velcro. They were in the handy(wo)man section of the hardware store.

The other type of kneeler is a hard foam pad that has tall handles at each end. You can get those through aged care aids shops, but I think if the knees need the help, then the strap-ons are better because they live on your knees for the afternoon and leave both hands free for carrying stuff.

The pads also prevent a lot of dirt getting ground into the knees of your legs or your trousers, so there is less scrubbing and less cuts, abrasions, bruise and insect bites on your knees. Hell hath no fury like a meat ant squashed! I find it better to wear light trousers with my knee pads because they sometimes pinch and chaff a bit. No doubt the ones designed for tradies would be more comfortable.

I fail to see why these pads are not standard issue for women who kneel. I bet there are more women than men in the world who work in a kneeling position, but I guess if you work at ground level you literally don't matter as much because you don't get paid as much as somebody who works at a 'higher' level. Your knees are literally expendable. Enough of my feminist rantings.

Louise

I'm having the same trouble. I have a low plastic stool (it's actually the kids') that I sit on and bend forward with my knees out to either side. I had thought I would be okay because there's nothing about that position that would strain anything. And yet, after spending an hour pulling up weeds, it takes me two days of extra bulging and bad back pain to recover!

Hi Ribbit

Yes, I agree that pulling weeds on a low stool is not good. I prefer to lever weeds out, or cut through their roots with some old secateurs, or a tomahawk, or kneel on two knees and one hand and pull with the other hand, or kick them out (need a sharp blade on the end of my boot). Pulling the weed towards me with my butt stuck out feels better than pulling it up, if I have to use both hands.

Actually, I *try* to mulch my weeds out of existence and use glyphosate sparingly. I find that if I leave the weeds there until the stems lignify, and before the seeds set, I can pull them out more easily, and with less dirt attached, and prevent future seed set. Prior to that the effort is wasted, because they just break off above ground level and grow again. Mulching also makes it difficult for weeds to germinate, there are less of them, and if they do germinate they don't thrive because it is such hard work getting up through the mulch.

Or you can enjoy them while they are small, mow them when they start to overtake their allotted space, then mow them again when they try to put up new seed heads. This works in our part of Western Australia, only because the winter (only) rain starts in May and stops in October, so the weeds just run out of water and dry up until the following May's new germination.

There are some weeds I don't mind at all, eg capeweed and soursob, because they dry up to nothing after flowering, so there is nowhere for snakes to hide. They prevent other weeds from proliferating, like a green mulch.

Tall weeds, however, like wild oats, wild radish and barley grass are a real fire hazard during the summer and good snake hiders.

The prickly ones like doublegee, caltrop and Paterson's Curse have to be grubbed out while they are small or they just make for a painful summer garden and goodbye to bare feet and legs.

I guess it is more about knowing what weed you are dealing with and deal with them strategically. My Uni definition of Weed is "a plant in the wrong place". They are just plants after all! Knowing what they are going to turn into later in life is my main weapon for surviving their presence.

If it is going to hurt somebody or hide biteys it has to go. If it is soft and low it can stay. If it dies away to nothing like bulbs, it can stay. If it is invasive it has to go, or all my hard work cultivating its competitors will be for nought. If it is poisonous to people or animals I would rather not have it, unless it has a pesticide or repellant function.

Know your enemy, and pick your fights!

Louise

Thank you, Louise. I just got two bales of straw for mulch. I haven't been well enough to put them down yet, but I will.

A little frustrated with my garden right now. Lots of green, few blooms, almost no veggies. No bees! To my knowledge this is the first time this location has been gardened, so maybe it just needs a season of composting first.

That's the thing with gardens, Ribbit. Sometimes they are only in their own control, but every now and then they give you a little surprise. Nowhere in the holy books is it written, "Thou shalt not have weeds in thy garden." Nor is it written, "Thy garden shall look good all the time." Gardens are always changing, and there are always things in them that are not their best. Hope you are enjoying your summer. Winter has set in with a vengence here, with some vicious frosts the last few mornings.

Saturday I drove to the city for a dance class. There were still patches of frost on the sides of the road in the shade at 9.20am. That means it has been *very* cold overnight. For us, that might mean down to 6 degrees C below freezing. My passionfruit vine is nothing but a blackened lump rag, poor thing. I doubt that it will survive to spring.

L