Gardening. The unwanted effects on your body.

Spring has sprung. And because spring has sprung, all the gardeners are out gardening. But this gardening is producing a lot of load on people's bodies and damage in a lot of people's bodies to the point where a lot of them aren't having as much fun gardening because they're in pain all the time. Gardening needs to be looked at like any other sport. It's very strenuous. So you have to understand what gardening is doing to your body and how to prepare it so you can garden effectively and. And not have so much pain afterwards. And that's what we're gonna talk about today. I'm Mickey Mosso. I own Soul Core Fitness. I've been in the health and fitness field for 30 years. I'm a summer therapist and summer trainer, and I work under the osteopathic model. Osteopathy says structure dictates function. It simply means how structured my body is, means how function functional I am. Function means health. How will I breathe, think, digest, eliminate, pump blood, fight infections. It also means how well my body can move and function in life and the activities that I love so that I can have a fulfilling life. But gardening isn't really looked at as like something strenuous. It totally is. And people don't think about how should I prepare my body before and after stress so I can garden for the rest of my life, because that's what gives them joy. So you have to look at the body holistically, right? Like all activities, how is this affecting my body? And how can I work with my body the way it's designed so I can continue to garden or whatever you love for the rest of my life? That's how I like to talk about things on this channel, holistically. I don't talk in one, two, or three exercises to fix xyz. It's all about how can I best balance my body to do my life, whatever your life is. And so if you want to hear more about this holistic way of addressing things, then subscribe to the channel and click that bell to be notified. Where each week I put out a video. Don't forget to like this video and share with your friends. That way, the YouTube algorithm will say, hey, this is a good channel. This is a good video. Let's find more people to show it to so I can help more people. So before we begin, I just want to make a quick note here that I am not a gardener at all. I don't understand why people would to take their free time and perform manual labor willingly. I Love nature, but I'd much rather run, walk, or just ski or lay there in the grass. But I know people love it. And I had some members ask me to do a video, and it's something I didn't want to talk about anyway because of the story I'm about to tell you. So four years ago, I had a teacher come to me, and she was an art teacher, and she had a hard time just living her life. It took all her effort during the day to stand there or to sit, but she could barely sit to teach her students. It took so much of her energy, and she had to be so cautious what she did that by the end of her day, she was shot mentally, emotionally, physically. And she had enough. She came to me with a consult. I told her, yes, it's going to help you. And she got into the classes because I guess she could move, so she didn't need treatment. After about, I don't know, four to six months of being in classes, she was looking and moving great, right? She had no pain. She could perform her daily activities at school. She went for bike rides. She was having a great time. Then one day she walked in and she was like. I mean, literally 10 times worse than when she first came in here. I was like, what did you do? What happened? She goes, oh, weekend was nice. And I went and garden for, like, I'm guessing a little bit, like five hours. I'm like, oh, God. I said, did you warm up before or stretch afterwards? No. Ding, ding, ding. So what she had done is she did too much for her body. To give an example, she had prepped her body and got it strong enough to where she could perform her life. Like, if she prepped her body to lift up 100 pounds because she's good, she can lift that. That's her daily life is lifting £100. But then she wouldn't garden for five hours. Well, the example is now she wants to lift 500 pounds, but she never prepped her body to do to lift 500 pounds. These are stupid numbers. Don't get caught up in this. So she never got her body ready to guarding for five hours. She never warmed her body up before this strenuous activity, and she never did any corrective normalization exercise after her guarding. So with all those three factors happening, the body's like, all right, dude, that's it. Tightened up in a bunch of pain. Life, your sports and your activities all have a damaging effect to your body, AKA wear and tear. How much you become damaged depends on three factors. Your genetics how balanced you are and the amount of load you put on of your body during life and your activities. So genetics is pretty simple. You can enhance your genetic profile or enhance. Sorry, you can enhance your positive genetic profile or enhance your negative genetic profile by how well you take care of yourself, what you eat, the water, your mental, emotional and your physicality stretches, exercises and treatments. How balanced you are is the structure I was talking about before. Structure dictates function. So that's what I mean by balanced, right? Not, you know, not circuit tricks. So how well you're balanced is again part of your genetics, but very much is affected by what treatments, exercises and stretches are you doing on the daily to keep your body as balanced as possible or not doing to let it go wherever your body's going to go. And then a load on your body is two parts, right? You have to load if something's just really heavy, right? So if you're gardening, you're picking up trees and gigantic rocks. That's load, right? It's hard to do, but the load is also time under tension, meaning how long are you in a posture, right? So if I'm in this position for a long time and even without weight, well, that's a lot of load through my structure because I'm holding in position for gardening. In terms of load, you got both, right? You're picking up trees and rocks and you're in long term position for like three to five hours. That's a long time to have your body very strenuous. For the purpose of this video, to keep it short, because your entire body is being stressed, let's focus on three areas. Your knees, your back and your spine. So as we go through these different areas, I want to give you like a little bit of science relative to the area we're working and how that's working because it's not because the chemist says it, it's because, oh look, this really smart scientist discovered this great rule and here's how it applies to your body, right? So with the knees, there's a lot of squatting, right? A lot of dynamic squatting up and down and a lot of static squatting, squatting down, holding position. So what you want to know about a squat is as you start to squat down your thigh. So this is your thigh bone, sorry, Your thigh bone starts to move down, right? So it goes from vertical on down. Your kneecap is here. As the thigh goes down at about right before 90 degrees, your kneecap and your thigh are perfectly lined up. It's like a puzzle piece. They're good. That continues to about 90 degrees right there. Then once you get past 90 degrees, now you don't have full contact. And now you have a little bit of rubbing potential rubbing right there because it's not even right there. We have a law called Delpesch law, which means hyperproduction from hyperpressure, right? So if I've got pressure, I get hyper production of the tissue that's being rubbed, in this case, cartilage. It could be bone or tissue, but that production of that tissue is anarchic. It's random. It's, well, not random, but it's not smooth and nice. So that once smooth surface of your trochlea and the back of your kneecap, the posture kneecap, which was once smooth, is not smooth anymore. Now it becomes bumpy. Now even with a good squatting from, you know, to 90, now it's rubbing because it's bumpy. Now you have a bumpy surface which exasperates that delpish law onto your back. So your back has two factors you want to think about in terms of the load on your body so you can pay attention to it. The first is a lever arm. Okay? So Archimedes said, give me enough, Give me a long enough lever arm and I can pick up the world. But unfortunately for your back, that means there's more force. So lever arm, as I hold here, I don't know if you can see the whole thing here, but the end right here is a lot of force to hold that. So as I lean over a lot, right? So imagine this is your lower back right here as I big boom as I lean forward, right? Maybe I'm guarding or picking stuff, whatever. That lever arm, mainly in your back, there's some tension here, but mainly in your back increases. So as increases, then you're using either static force holding yourself in place, or that dynamic force. Your back is going to take a lot of that load. It's not bad if you knew how to do to prepare it, but you understand that there's a lot of load. The second part for your lower back is that you need to understand that from your belly button to your pelvis right here, there's no real bony structures. You do have a spine, I realize that. So from L3 down to L5. But your spine is not a column, right? Like the Roman column. It's not a column. It should be four degree curves. It's not. Each segment is not load bearing in totality. It helps, but it doesn't hold like a column. So if I don't have any bony structures to hold me in place. From here to here, it's all soft tissue. And that soft tissue is done through not just the musculature, it's part of it, but mainly through the fascial layers. So you can say you have different layers, like rings of fascia, right? So let's say you have hundreds of them to hold yourself in place. That way, when the forces come into your body, those forces, those layers of fascia and soft tissue, can attenuate, move the forces away. Are you a gardener whose body hurts really bad after gardening? Are you starting to realize a little bit about how strenuous guarding this to your body? Let me know in the comments. Last but not least is your spine. So your spine outside of pathology has a bunch of different ways it can move. It can move in flexion, it can move in extension, it can move in rotation and translation and then all combination of all four. But in reality, in osteopathy, what they talk about is everything happens, mainly rotation. You can't do any of those moves without any type of rotation in your joints. Not bad if you have good joints. But rotation, when I rotate a joint, my turn right there, like that, then my upper vertebra and my lower body vertebra come together, right? Because the analysis fibrosis. So when I turn, they come together. If I have enough space and my disc is fluffy, who cares? But if I don't, then as it rotates down now, I get fun things like this bulge, herniation, prolapse, arthritis, pinched nerves, all those wonderful things that everybody loves. The two main movements you have to be concerned about with gardening is flexion and rotation and extension and rotation. Okay? So with flexion and rotation, like I'm saying, scooping the dirt, right? I'm doing that. You have that lever arm I talked about. So first I'm statically, for the most part, kind of dynamically out here. And now I have a lever arm of my body and the shovel and how much dirt I pick up, multiply that, and then I take that and I, whatever I do, right, I do that, right? And then when I do that, I get some rotation in my trunk. And if my body, my core, my total core, not just my abs, can't stabilize my spine and move my spine properly, that's bad. That's why you get all those things that we don't like, right? The second is extension and rotation. So you have the same basic idea, right? So if I extend and turn, I'm getting that compression, but extension is A little bit different because in the back of your spine you have things called facet joints. Your facet joints are like the little steering wheels of your fsu, your functional spinal unit. A functional spinal unit means the joint between my upper vertebra and my lower vertebra, that joint between the totality, the whole thing, front and back and sides, right? And so you got a bunch of them up and down your spine. So those little facet joints are. They're total joints like your elbow, your shoulder, your. Or your spine. So when I rotate backwards and those joints compress, because they do and they, and they start to. Oh my God, I can't think of word. They start to rub each other. Then you get that del pitch law again, right? Because now I'm leaning back, the facet joints are being compacted and I'm rotating for further compaction. And I get that anarchic bone cartilage production. So I hope you see now how much gardening does to the body. But you love gardening, right? You want to keep doing it. So if you want to keep gardening, you want to do three things. You want to have an exercise program that in totality makes your body strong and mobile enough for the level of gardening you want to do, right? So it's like if I want to learn a deadlift 500 pounds, I need to train my body to learn a deadlift 500 pounds. Same thing for gardening. I want a program that holistically allows my body to do that. The second thing you want to do is you want to warm up before the activity. Like all sports and activities, you want to prepare your body before you do activity. Our bodies, no offense to anybody, are like those old cars. We need to turn it on and rev it up a little bit to get it going before we take it for a drive. Then after gardening, you want to take the areas of your body you use most, stretch them, correct them, normalize them, whatever word you want to do. So I want to do something for you. I don't show a lot of exercise in this program because there's too many. I don't know what you need, I don't know how you're going to take it, but I can show you a warm up. So a quick note. A warm up is something you can do obviously before gardening, but you can do anytime. A warm up has no contraindications outside of injury and stuff like that. A warm up is great for turn your body on, right? So as I warm up, I wake up the computers in my body. Now the computers in My body communicate to my brain, I get a better body mind connection, which means I move more effectively. And warm up warms up the liquid in your body. So like I talked about with the car, the oil and blood and. Not the oil, the blood and lymph and all that, all the fascia liquid inside your body is more viscous at the beginning. It's thick. So when I do a warm up, I now make that more liquid. Now my tissues can slide and move much easier with the warmup. We're gonna stick with those three areas. So I'm gonna back up here. So one, where you wanna work the knees, pelvis and spine. So with the. You first wanna warm up like a walk around a block, right? Just to get yourself warm. Not long, two to five minutes at a decent pace. Then you want to take your knees in a circle. That's a circle. That's what I want to do with my knees. So the reason I start with circles in the knees is because the micro movement manages the macro movement. So little tiny movements of circles with my knees and other things I'm going to show you helps manage how much I flex and extend. So we're squatting down and picking up trees. That's reverse directions. These little circles movements I'm going to show you help manage how well you can flex. Now I'm keeping it small here. If you can go deeper, go deeper. And then now I've done the circles. Now I want to do a figure eight, right? So figure eight is vertical. Vertical means up and down like my finger. Watch me. I want to draw with my knees, figure 8. Don't worry if it's confusing. You're like, I know there's no way I can get it. You keep trying and thinking. Eventually you learn the skill of it. Now you want to reverse directions, right? Because I want to go both ways like I do with circles. 10 reps is a general rule of thumb for warming up. But as much as you need. Now I want to take that eight and turn on its side. Now I want an infinity symbol, right? Now I work my knees in an infinity symbol one way and then the other way. And now by doing the circles and the two figure eights, I've essentially warmed up all the tendons and ligaments of my knees. Now I want you to take this funny position with the legs wide, toes in, knees bent. And I want your ear, shoulder, hip lined up. I want one hand in front of your pelvis, one hand behind like that. I want you to do pelvic rocks so you're going to breathe out. Tuck your pelvis. Breathe in, untuck, breathe out. Tuck as much as you can. When you breathe in, you go as much as you can, but not too far if it hurts your back. But I want you to feel that, that motion as you keep your legs in position and torso tall. Then I want you to tuck the pelvis. I want you to hold it. You can tell it's tucked if you reach your hand back and your lower back is flat. Now I want your arms up and I want external rotation, which means the crease of my elbow wants to look at the ceiling with my hands open like they want to touch the walls. And I move just my torso left and right. Now I'm mitigating how much my spine compresses by doing translation because translation doesn't rotate a lot. Now, I don't compress my spine, but I bring a lot of blood and liquid and I warm the spine up and the ribs up so I can move better. Then I want to finish by doing like a seesaw. Now I tilt left and right. I tilt again. I'm tilting from here. My arms ahead, follow my legs. Do nothing. So that little warm up. I encourage you to practice. It is great before gardening. Like I said, do it whenever you want to wake up and do it, go for it, I don't care. Go slow at the beginning, watch that part again and then think and try to do the exact movements because they're thinking and trying to do the exact movements will allow again that body mind connection to happen. So when you go garden, you're smarter, your body's smarter, it can move more effectively. Now what I can't show you here is the total program for your body. What I can do is help you out with that. So I've got three options for that. I've got a private Facebook group where you can join and be more interactive with challenges and master classes and interaction with me in description below you'll find the link. I've got a free download of a four steps to a mobile pain free life so you can live the life you're choosing again in the description below. And I've got a consult with me through calendly. So the link is below. You click on the link, you choose a time and we'll talk. We'll talk about where you are now, where you want to go and where I think you should go. And then only if I see you're a good fit while I offer my services to you. So I hope this is helpful. Go have fun doing manual labor all you want, but make sure that you start to teach factors into consideration so you can keep gardening as long as you want.