Injury Prevention in the Workplace

If you can’t find five minutes to stretch each day,
then your lifestyle isn’t flexible enough

by Stuart Andrews

For the last 20 years my partner and I have been coming up with new and innovative ways to educate people on how to successfully treat their injuries and, in more debilitating circumstances, self-manage their injuries where a full recovery was simply not possible.

The vast majority of the injuries that we see on a daily basis could have been prevented or at the very least minimised if the appropriate hands-on knowledge had been implemented prior to the injury occurring. I use the term hands-on because I don’t like to assume that, because someone can intellectualise a movement-based concept, they have ability to put it into practice.

If you play sport you’ll know that to perform a movement-based task you need to establish motor patterns or pathways, and you don’t really understand those patterns until you can perform them repeatedly without overthinking the whole process. This brings me to the point of why implanting the appropriate stretching and activation exercises is so important in managing and preventing injuries.

I was at a meeting some years ago listening to a gentleman who informed me that prevention-based strategies had failed in the work environment that he was overseeing. I asked why the prevention strategies they had implemented had failed and after several minute of conversation I realised that his idea of minimising risk was to remove certain tasks. However, similar sorts of lower back / leg related injuries continued to occur.

To me this highlighted that “removing” particular tasks wasn’t working and maybe something needed to be “added’, which is so often the case. Looking at this problem more closely it became obvious that there was an aging workforce, most of whom could barely reach below their knees. Further investigation revealed that many of them were complaining of having sore legs and aching joints.

I was originally given the task showing this particular workforce how to lift objects correctly / more efficiently. However, putting in place biomechanically efficient movement patterns for a group of middle-aged men who could barely reach their knees is like driving a car with no oil in it – it’s only a matter of time until it seizes up.

Some members of this work force had been relegated to sedentary work in the office because of their discomfort levels associated with performing daily manual handling duties. Not surprisingly their lower back / leg-related symptoms became worse, as sitting with legs bent behind a desk does nothing to help someone who already has short hamstrings.

When I began working with these employees, within a week most of them were able to touch their toes with relative ease. Many of them had never been able to touch their toes before and were grateful for being shown how to do this. The outcomes were immediately measurable both in demonstrated range of movement (ROM) and, most importantly, the perception of moving more freely.

Some individuals remained sceptical about the benefits of performing these ROM exercises, but once their work colleagues were sitting around at various tool box meetings discussing how their golf swing / general mobility had improved they gradually all came on board. The exception was one particular gentleman whose whole topic of conversation was about why he was different to everyone else and was unable to improve any aspects of his perceived physical limitations – hence the above subtitle.

My reason for discussing this workplace scenario is that something as basic as not being able to touch your toes puts you in a general risk category for experiencing lower back discomfort, as the relationship between tight leg muscules and lower back discomfort is well documented.

If your knees hurt, for example, you tend not to want to bend down and use your legs to initiate any lifting-based active. As a result you unwittingly bend more through your back. From a manual handling perspective the link is obvious, because how you lift is governed largely by how the legs and the back interrelate with each other.

Not only does the Lower Limber^® Sequential Stretching and Activation System highlight these imbalances, it importantly highlights the need to be aware of these interrelationships on a daily basis. Factors such as aging, being dehydrated, recovering from illness, just to mention a few, all impact on your ROM.

The Lower Limber^® Sequential Stretching and Activation system makes you aware of your physical limitations while you perform some general stretching exercises that highlight the interrelationships between all the major muscle groups of the legs and how these impact on the spine. This can prevent an injury from occurring by creating self-awareness, which underpins self-management practices.

Recognising a notable increase in your range of movement, along with associated benefits such as a feeling of moving more freely, provides validation that encourages you to maintain your practice. In short, physically measurable results through effective awareness strategies mean fewer injuries and a generally much happier work environment. The emphasis should be on wellbeing, not just injury prevention, and the outcomes of implementing such strategies are immediately transferable to both work and extracurricular activities.

The Lower Limber^® Sequential Stretching and Activation System is literally a hands-on approach to motivating people by implementing positive, experiential movement-based processes that are very time efficient and, most importantly, effective.

Statistically “80 % of Australians will experience back pain in their lives and 10 % will experience significant disability” (The Medical Journal of Australia). From a work environment perspective we learn that “Back injuries account for 1 in 5 injuries or illnesses in the workplace (The Good Body).

These alarming statistics highlight that we are all susceptible to back pain both at work and outside of work. There needs to be a greater emphasis on self-awareness by getting the general population out of the mind-set of avoiding physical tasks for fear of injuring themselves. This is a mind-set that won’t enhance your physical wellbeing. If those 80 per cent of Australians could move towards increasing their functionality by adding in movement rather than losing it, I wonder how many of us would be physically healthier and emotionally happier?