Hi, welcome to MelioGuide.
I'm Margaret Martin, and today on Daily Activities, we're going talk about something
that unfortunately continues all summer long, and that's weeding.
And if you're like many of my clients, and you have that love of gardening
and you think, today is my weeding day and go out and weed the entire
garden, and it's usually not a good idea.
So the very first thing is to break your weeding up into
tangible bits.
So you're going out and doing maybe 20 minutes to half an
hour of weeding at a time.
Now, with the weeding, what you want to be doing is, other than with your
weeding tools that you might need, is have a couple of other tools.
One of them is some sort of pad that you can kneel
on, and a stick of some sort that's strong and sturdy that you can use
as a support, and we'll talk about how to use this stick in a moment.
So first of all, without any of the tools at all, if you are happy with
your squats and have happy knees, then by all means you can do squatting
and saving your back or supporting your back by bringing your forearm down
onto your thigh, so in this sort of short stop position.
You can leverage from this position to do some weeding that's
not so aggressive or that is not too demanding in terms of a pull.
If you are needing to tackle a deeper root system, then you are going to have to
get two legs behind the item that you are going to do, and really get in
close and use much more of the power pushing up with your legs.
Now, I do want to cover the use of the stick, because if you have light
weeds that you go around doing, you might want to do repeated hinging from
your hip, and so this is really appreciated, especially by my clients that
don't really like getting down into deep squats repeatedly, some arthritis
in the knees.
Just maybe not quite as fit as they'd like to be.
So this comes from the world of golf, what they call
it, the golfers lift, so we're going to use it as a gardener's lift.
So you'll always want to use the stick in the opposite side from the leg that
you're going to be leveraging off of.
So if I was going to continue the work here on this overgrowth, I
would hold the stick, far enough apart that I feel stable, so that when I
go up, I can continually just offset the bend and use the weight from the
opposite hand.
Now if you're doing this and you're moving along the garden and you're
coming down and working through different areas, I would encourage you to
do half of it with the leverage off of the right foot, and then certainly
switch part way through, and do half of it with the leverage off of the
left foot.
And so you're getting a good balance happening through your
session of weeding.
Now with this whole clutter that I have to clean up
here, this should be something I would most likely get down on my knees for
some time to do, and so getting in here and then allowing you to work from
your knees or sitting back for those of you who are not comfortable sitting
back, getting another pad in behind your butt is really helpful.
Or sitting on a low stool is also another option.
And so that allows you to spend time in through this whole area, or your whole area
of garden that you have to work through.
So that pretty well covers whether you're doing a short stop hold, you're
doing the golfer's lift, which is now stealing into the
gardener's lift or coming down and working in a better ergonomic position.
Trying to always keep in mind saving your back, balancing the weeding from
the right arm and left arm, so that you're getting an even workout through
your body.
And remember to break it up even through the day or through the
week.
So that's about it for the weeding part of gardening, and I wish you
a happy summer.