Ask an Expert — Gardening Counts as Exercise: Protect Your Body While You Work

Gardening can be a full-body workout, so it’s important to treat it like any other physical activity. Hydrate and stretch throughout the day and use correct techniques and tools to help you avoid injuries and minimize pain and soreness.

Helpful Techniques

Three techniques can help with most gardening tasks. These distribute the work to larger muscles or improve your body’s natural movement to help you avoid repetitive strain injuries. These occur in muscles, tendons and nerves from repetitive movements or overuse. They mostly happen in hands, wrists, shoulders, elbows, knees and lower back.

1. Squat — This exercise works well for picking up and putting items down. It engages the quads, hamstrings, hips, glutes and abdominals and helps avoid strain to the back, knees, ankles, neck and shoulders.
2. Pivot technique — This technique allows you to change directions without twisting. It works well for shoveling and dumping dirt or moving bags and other materials from one side to another. It also helps avoid strain to the back, knees and ankles.
3. Back-and-forth weight transfer — This technique helps when moving items back and forth with a long-handled tool, such as a rake. This helps avoid hunching over, pulling and twisting. It uses larger leg muscles that prevent straining the back, shoulders and arms.

Your garden layout as well as soil type can also determine the amount of work, materials and equipment you need to make tasks easier and less stressful on the body.

Safety for Various Soil Types

Heavy Soils

Heavy soil types, such as clay or loam, hold nutrients, don’t drain well and are dense, making them a challenge to work with. That resistance can make working with tools harder, which in turn can cause injuries to the wrists, lower back and shoulders. Tips for working with heavy soils:

• Work with smaller loads when shoveling, hoeing or digging.
• Amend the soil when planting to make it less dense and easier to work with.
• Take breaks more often to avoid over-exerting yourself.
• Wear proper footwear with ankle support and grip.

Sandy Soils

Sandy soil drains quickly, lacks cohesion and is unstable, increasing the risk for ankle injuries, falls and repetitive strain injuries from working with loose soil.

• Amend the soil to retain nutrients and moisture,
• Use tools with wider scoops to help capture more soil at a time,
• Wear proper footwear that provides ankle support and full foot coverage.
• Consider making walking areas and working areas more stable by laying wood chips, flagstone or pavers.

Rocky Soils

Rocky soils have features of both heavy and sandy soils, with rocks of all shapes and sizes added to the mix. To maintain safety:

• Work with smaller loads.
• Take breaks more often.
• Wear proper footwear.
• Work carefully with equipment to prevent injury.

Click here to see a video on the three techniques of movement in the yard and garden.