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Fighting Back Against Lower Back Pain With Ergonomic Shoveling Hacks | 5
Tactical Ecology · 28 октября 2026 г. · 52 мин
After many small and sometime bigger back injuries over a long career as a touring musician and landscaper, after digging the first two 30 foot diameter ponds out in the desert, and doing all kinds of swales and other hand-dug projects, I pretty much felt like I’d destroyed my back. I could barely stand straight up, couldn’t barely lift anything without agonizing pain, and had to accept that even in my early 40s, my back was finished. It was difficult to accept, I fought it as best as I could, but every time I pushed it, it just got worse. It didn’t seem there would be any hope of recovery so I just had to adapt strategies for survival that didn’t involve much use of my back. One such innovation was what I called the shovel fist, it was a half size shovel attached to my arm so I could grip a metal bar with a fist and move the shovel as if I was the Wolverine, but instead of blades coming out of my knuckles, it was a shovel. This worked very well and I was able to dig the third pond this way. It was very slow going and tedious but I was able to make it work. I wasn’t thrilled about it, but I was glad to be able to continue the mission, even in a semi-debilitated state. I had resigned myself to being stuck this way forever, I just found a way to accept it, live with the chronic pain, and keep doing as much as I could on the land. The tragic irony for me was that I spent the better years of my life working for other people on their properties, they got my best efforts, and now that I finally have a small piece of dirt to call my own, within a year of owning it, my back finally gives up the ghost. What a damn shame. It seemed it would have taken a miracle to be able to do anything with my back again. But since fate seems to not be without a sense of humor, a back saving miracle did occur, however it was blessing disguised as yet another curse. My efforts to take extreme dietary measures to recover from a life threatening injury to my legs in the summer of 2023 resulted in an interesting and very auspicious side-effect. My dietary strategies, which are explained elsewhere, not only worked to heal from the acute injury, they also worked miracles for my back and pretty much every other mild and severe ailments I’d accumulated over a life time. About the same time as I was able to start walking again, I noticed that I could lift things, that the total depletion of my backs abilities wasn’t any kind of permanent tissue or mechanical type injury. I just needed the right phyto-nutrient building materials for my body to naturally rebuild and renovate a lot of damaged parts of my system. I still have to be very careful and stay very aware of type of work and the duration of work I’m doing, it’s all about taking breaks and pacing myself, but I can use a full size shovel again, I can dig ponds again, and now I recently finished the fifth pond. My aching back got me through the first two standing up with a full size shovel, the third one in the middle forced me to the ground to use the half size shovel fist method, and the most recent two ponds I was able to dig from on my feet again with a full size shovel. My method with the full size shovel had to change though since I still do feel pain, it’s just not the same, fall to the grown and scream pain. It’s more like, you know when you’re stretched out to far, or have being going for two long, you can’t ignore it. So the main adaptations I’ve made to use the full size shovel again have been the following: minimize the pinching of sideways movements of the spine, find as many fulcrums of the wrists and arms to transfer the load other than the back, pace myself and take many breaks, alternate from one side to the other switch hand and foot positions from one shovel load to the next, and use momentum to ergonomically pivot and use economy of motion to let natural forces of physics do more of the work. Hence the way of the pivoting shovel as seen here. I wouldn’t recommend this method to others,