I live in the northeast and it is beginning to snow often here. So I wanted to give a crash course of safe pain-free snow shoveling. I made one video ways back but wanted to update that video because I see things differently and there is more to talk about.  This video will cover what to do during the shoveling cycle. But to truly have a pain-free experience you have to prep properly and cool down after you shovel. Those will be covered in another video. For today we are working with the three must do during shoveling, so you don’t break your back.

When you know you have to shovel snow many things happen in your head like, “Damn this is going to suck or hope I don’t hurt myself this time”. This type of worry I hear all the time. The way you make that easier is conditioning your body to live in the northeast. which includes shoveling snow. This is easy for me to say but challenging to execute. You must have many areas of your body functional and ready to work at any given moment. This takes time to develop because we stopped developing moment to moment muscle necessity, That is the true problem at hand. Let’s call it muscle alertness.

MUSCLE ALERTNESS

Is needed at all times of our lives but because we are living more of a convenient lifestyle our bodies have made it gone into power save mode. and does not keep all muscles available. We will talk about this more throughout the year but to get this to change you need to routinely active muscles that keep other muscle active naturally. Today we will work on steps to safeguard your body while shoveling.

The three steps needed to make sure you are safe is:

1.) Feet placement and weight load distribution.  

2.) Hand placement and knowledge of which type of shovel you have.

3.) Core activation but blowing air out of your body as the trigger not you doing this manually. 

Each one of these is important in their own right so think of each one as a skill to be learned. More so when you are looking at developing this skill notice the parts of your body stopping you, then begin Targeting those areas with your self-care. Using Foam Rolling, Trigger Point Self-care, and Stretching as your tool of choice to target and release those areas. This is how you begin to make progress on actual issues you have in your everyday life.