Manual Handling
- Around 1.1 million people have work related ill health.
- 1 in 4 days are lost to back pain - 5.3 million working days are taken off due to work injuries.
- Average days lost are 17 days per incident.
Stress is now interestingly taken into account of as a work related issue and is often interconnected with Muscular Skeletal Disorder. Forward thinking companies look at where the high stress factors are and try and reduce them rather than just looking at Manual Handling.
The peak time of a woman or man's health & strength is 25 - 35. Before this bodies & bones are possibly not fully formed yet and after this cartilages start wearing out and get more brittle, the latter is particularly the case for women because of the reduction of oestrogen levels when they get older and get their menopause etc. Things like muscles, because they have blood running through it can regenerate at any point in your life. There are many things we can do to wear out our cartilages, ligaments etc. more - from carrying things badly to too much vibration from machinery etc in arms.
How best to carry something is much more complex than keeping your back straight and bending your knees, there are lots of factors to consider. Including the environment you're doing your work, keeping more an S shape when lifting to follow more how your spine works, keep your head up, breathing in when & tucking your bum whilst lifting and breathe out when lifted. Being hydrated to help your muscles work better. Warming up before working and stretching down afterwards. Keeping the feet flat to not shorten your Achilles heel too much (the tendon that attaches muscle to bone. And an important one - to not twist as much as possible whilst carrying something heavy. Your spine can take a lot of weight but when used incorrectly can result in nasty things like a herniated disc.
We were practically shown tips of how to best lift things and to put them down, factors to consider when doing things. And tools & techniques we can use to help us. A feature of this was a long handled spade - apparently England is one of the only places that have short handled non-pointy shades which involves much more back bending and twisting. I found this was good for shoveling and just digging up earth, but say you had tough roots and had to extract things from the ground - the amount of bending you might have to do because of that, makes it easier if you use a shorter fork/ spade to as not have to have more extremities of repetitive bending.
The other thing I would say, is that we should have all done lifting and trying out tools exercises together at the same time, whilst the instructor stepped back, observed and pointed out where we were going wrong/ what we can do better etc, as many of us were much too self-conscious to do individually and in front of everyone. Also he talks about using the right tools, warming up and stretching down, maybe he could have shown us examples of how to do this, and this almost should be incorporated in the work routine - as a way of perpetuating what good practice is in the work place. If the employer enforces some of these measures anyway, that would help with people doing their work more correctly. Also if things were demonstrated more when people are actually doing the work, it might help make all of this more effective.
I worked with Billy and volunteer Beth for the last two hours of the day in the Conifer Lawn. We were near Seven Acres. We cut back some Hypericum beanii and dug them out because of a bindweed infestation there. This Hypericum is important as denoted by it's label on the bottom right hand side. If there are letters and numbers there, it means that that the plant was collected by a particular plant hunter and given to Wisley. So propagation by cuttings were made of these before they were dug out.