(quirky music)
♪ Bob and Brad ♪
♪ The two most famous ♪
♪ Physical therapists ♪
♪ On the internet ♪
Hi, folks, I'm Bob Schrupp, physical therapist!
- Brad Heineck, physical therapist.
- And we are the most famous
physical therapists on the internet.
- In our opinion, of course, Bob.
- We got a lot of requests for this one, Brad.
- Yes.
- Stop destroying your back when gardening.
And we're gonna show you 12 golden tips.
- There ya go, and it's that-- - For your golden years.
- that time-a year, gardening people
are really getting into it.
- At the end of the program, by the way,
we're gonna show you my wife's favorite
product for using in the garden.
And she actually uses it around the house, too.
She loves this thing.
- Maybe she'll come on and get in the video.
- Yeah, give her endorsement, ah.
(Brad laughs) By the way, if you're new to our channel,
please take a second to subscribe to us.
We provide videos how to stay healthy,
fit, pain-free and we upload every day.
Also. Go to bobandbrad.com,
'cause we're always giving something away.
What it is right now, I don't know, but check...
- It's a wall anchor?
Okay, a wall anchor-- - Oh!
- Exercise unit. - Say no more.
- Yeah, you can also find it on Facebook,
It'll be pinned to the top of the page.
Go to twitter, Instagram or TikTok
if you wanna short version of our program.
Let's get started, Brad, we got twelve of 'em.
First one-- - That's a dozen.
- Yeah, first one.
Don't do any gardening early in the morning.
(Brad groans)
Wait one to two hours from sleeping.
'Cause what happens is, during the night,
your body, the discs that are
between vertebrae of your back,
they fill up with fluid, so your back is more vulnerable
to injury for the first hour or so, maybe two hours,
when you're getting up.
So don't jump put of bed and jump right into the garden.
- Right-- - Walk around a little bit.
If you walk around for like a half hour,
you can start gardening then,
because the water compresses out, right?
- And that's just a natural cycle of the discs--
- Right-- - they bring in fluid--
It keeps them healthy. - Yep.
At night they bring in fluid,
and throughout the day, the body weight compresses it--
- They imbibe fluid.
Imbibition, yes-- - Yeah, there we go.
the technical term.
- All right, number two.
Because a lot of what you do for gardening
is gonna involve having your back somewhat flexed forward,
- Sure.
- We recommend that you do some press-ups
or reverse backbends, or maybe even the Hallelujah Stretch
before you do any gardening, and maybe throughout,
while you're doing it-- - Right.
- Let me show you what I mean,
you wanna hold onto that, Brad?
- What am I gonna do with this shovel?
- Just get outta the way. (chuckling)
So these are some of the press-ups
you could do prior to gardening,
and I do anytime before I'm gonna do some heavy work, Brad,
I do some of these press-ups like this.
So I get my hands beneath my shoulders,
I'm arching the back in the opposite direction
of what I'm gonna be using it for when I do the lifting.
- This is, you know if you happen
to be a elderly person or if you know
you have spinal stenosis, or you have spondylolisthesis,
like myself, that you're not going to do.
And there's probably about 20% of the people out there,
I'm just kinda givin-- - Yeah that's not gonna--
- a ballpark figure. - be comfortable.
You could go slightly into extension,
- Yeah, but-- - 'cause you do
a little bit of that, don't you?
- I do-- - Brad's got spondy--
- Right, I do, but I won't do repeated ones.
- Right, okay.
- But I work it gently.
- Your flexion may also be occurring in the mid-back.
If that's the case, then-- - Oh yeah.
- What works really well is to take a ball
that you get from any big box store,
and this one's a little bit flatter, kinda--
- You could get it-- - works out better--
- from the neighbor kids.
- Sure you could steal it from them. (Brad chuckles)
Brad always says that gently.
- We can always steal from the neighbors.
- But you could just do a couple
of Hallelujah Stretches over the back.
Again, because we wanna avoid
that you're not gonna be rounded out,
but you probably are going to round your back out.
- It's pretty hard to garden and not get flexed over.
And you get involved with your work,
you're not gonna be thinking about your back.
You're thinking about those weeds!
- Yeah, and every so often, what I want you to do
is go ahead and do some press-backs like this.
And when you're in the garden,
like the pregnant ladies a lot of time,
you see them doing these naturally.
- Well yeah, I , yeah.
- Yeah, to help take some-- - I don't know if they're--
- of it off the back. - gardening that much, though.
Yeah, all right, number three.
As much as possible, you wanna
keep your back in what we call the locked-in position.
You got the Booyah Stik, Brad?
- Yeah, a good posture position.
- Yeah, you wanna show it?
- Sure!
- Okay.
- So we want the shoulders back,
the arch in the low back, and if you use
a stick like this, we use the Booyah Stik,
and it touches right here at your belt line,
or below at the sacrum,
between your shoulder blades and your head.
- So it's got three points of contact,
= Touch, touch, touch.
- Obviously you're not gonna use this
when you go out gardening,
(Brad laughs)
but the idea is to visually think about this,
that there's this stick there, and that it's in place
so whenever you do something,
whether it's bending down to pick something up,
you're keeping that same posture.
This really helped my wife when I was trying
to tell her how to bend forward and stuff.
I said, "Picture the stick there,
"and that you're having to keep everything in alignment."
And she goes, you know, it just really helped her--
- Right. - stay out of trouble.
- That's why as part of your exercise program,
do, you know, 10 of these a day,
and it helps that muscle memory,
and so your body realizes how you should bend
when you're bending while you work.
- Right, so when you do bend,
you're gonna bend with the back straight,
and also avoid prolonged bending as much as possible.
You know, if you're bent like this for any length of time,
you're putting an amazing amount of stress on the back.
- Sure.
- So as much as you can, keep straight like this.
So going up to number five, actually,
whenever possible, take pressure
off your back by leaning on something.
- Sure.
- Maybe you're gonna have a wheelbarrow,
maybe you're gonna have a shovel.
- [Brad] Yeah! Yeah!
You see a lot of the road guys
working leaning on their shovels, right?
(both laugh) Just giving you guys a hard time.
- Yeah, don't-- = Don't get us--
- give us some feedback,
we'll have people pounding on the door.
- But maybe you got a wheelbarrow or something.
But whenever you can lean on something.
It's gonna take a lot of stress off your back.
- Right.
- I actually even have people that,
to take pressure off the back,
I have, put their elbows--
- I was just gonna-- - on their knees.
- see up that old elbow-on-the-knee trick,
works really nice. - Yeah.
See I can keep my back straight,
but the elbow's on the knee, and you can actually
even pull a weed like this.
- Yeah, just though, the single elbow.
(Brad chuckles)
- Right, now ideally what you're gonna wanna do
is actually kneel down on some of those things,
'cause by kneeling, you're not having
to bend over the back as much as it normally takes.
So you may kneel down doing more like a lunge,
- Right, right. - going down like this,
versus putting down two knees, so.
- And I think a big thing is, is that
you're just not stuck in one of these positions
for a long period of time, you're gonna
maybe switch knees--
- Yeah, yep, movement-- - get up, do your stretch,
- And that's number seven. - go back down.
Again, remember to do some of the backbends,
I'd say every 20-30 minutes.
Again, if you fall into that category,
you can do these, and after doing a heavy lift,
I always do, every time I lift something really heavy,
I stand up and I do one of these.
- And you might wanna do it before.
- Exactly. - It's a good habit,
for you to do it. - Before and after.
- Yeah, it's wonderful - Can I have the shovel?
- [Brad] Oh yeah, now you want the shovel, ha?
Here, be careful with it, though.
- Yeah, be careful.
♪ Da-da-da-da, da-da ♪
Remember that?
- Oh, yeah, is that from-- - Don't say it, don't tell--
- "The Beverly Hillbillies"--
- No it's not, let them tell, they'll tell you what it is.
- Okay, yeah.
- By the way, I must have stole this from a neighbor,
(both laugh)
- Bob!
- Oh my God!
It's got somebody else's name on there.
- Yeah, well, whatever.
- So when you shovel, one thing that helps a lot,
is to tighten your core. - Yes.
- Like let's say right when you're about to pull
and lift something, tighten your core as much as possible.
What you you wanna do, is you don't wanna go down like this,
you actually wanna bend your hips,
that's why a wide base really works.
- Exactly.
- So you wanna remember, get into this pattern
of going down like this.
- You should face this way, you've got
a really nice demonstration of keeping your back arched.
Could you, move this elbow out of the way,
there you go, that right there is the key part of--
- I can also go like this, as much as possible,
when you're shoveling, don't bend and twist.
- [Brad] Nah.
So I don't go like this and like this,
I wanna go like this and throw it straight ahead.
- But that isn't gonna happen all the time.
But yeah, do the-- - Not all the time, but--
- do the best you can.
- Do the best you can, we realize some of this
is gonna be very difficult to do.
- Yeah.
- We're giving you guidelines, so hopefully
you're gonna try to do the best you can.
Same with raking or hoeing,
you wanna make sure you're keeping the back straight.
You're bending down, you're keeping the legs wide apart
and you're using the body as much as possible,
as opposed to going back and forth with the back.
- Yeah, so try, what you wanna do is reach
way out with it to get that long-distance reach.
- Moving the legs as much as possible really helps a lot.
- It'll be like you're dancing out there.
- Yep, you're dancing with the rake or dancing with the hoe.
- The neighbors may talk, but that's all right.
- That's a woman you used to date, wasn't it, a hoe?
- Oh Bob this is a family show!
- Oh that's right, this is a family show, sorry.
- That was, you're gonna get hollered at for that.
Number ten!
You wanna do (Brad laughs) incremental build-up.
You don't wanna start off,
and this is the one, I betcha, Brad,
nobody's gonna listen to me on this one.
Everyone's gonna go out, it's gonna be a nice day,
and they're gonna put in like,
six hours of work-- - Oh.
- the first day, and they're gonna be so sore the next day
- Right. (exhales deeply)
- And they're gonna be sunburned, and they're gonna be nyeh.
- Well there might be a few people, like say if my wife
wanted me to do it, 'cause I'm not a gardener,
garden for an hour, sit in the chair--
- And then say Bob and Brad-- - for an hour. (Brad laughs)
- Said I'm not supposed go out there--
- Exactly. - and do the lawn.
But my sister, we actually just did a video
on her knee pain, and she couldn't figure out
why she was getting knee pain again,
and she had put in a full weekend of gardening.
- Outdoor, yeah.
- And then the next weekend, she listened to me,
and she actually didn't do anything,
and her knee pain went away.
- Oh.
- So she realized that that did fire it up.
She's probably gonna get you a gift.
- Naw, I don't think so.
(both chuckle)
Anyway, incremental build-up.
You know, work into it, the muscle's gotta adapt to it,
they gotta get accustomed to working out.
It's basically you're working out to some extent.
- Oh, right, it's like an athlete.
- This one, I apologize, but we don't have example
to show you-- - Ohh.
- but there is a thing called a reacher.
So this is a device that has a little handle on the end.
- Yep.
- You squeeze it and it actually has little prongs
that can pick things up.
- If you've been in the hospital,
with a hip or a knee replacement,
then you almost certainly know what a reacher is,
they're very common.
- You can almost pick a quarter off the floor with them,
remember that-- - Oh, yeah.
- they really work pretty well.
They are inexpensive, they are only like 12 bucks,
we'll put a link below.
- Normally we'd have one, but because of the virus thing
- going on, we had to -- - Yeah.
- shift up our equipment. - We're not at our facility.
So, what's nice about those, if you're gonna pick twigs
off the ground and stuff like that, use the reacher.
You don't have to bend all the way over.
- Yeah.
- Every time you bend over your back,
even if you're lifting something very light,
still putting stress on your back.
- Sure, yeah.
- So you know like, we got a long gravel driveway--
- Oh, yeah.
- At our cabin and I take a reacher there,
or I'll take a stick and just flip
the sticks off the road that way, you know.
'cause I don't wanna bend over for each twig.
- Right, I thought you were, 'cause you don't have a dog,
maybe you're flippin' the dog--
- Flipping the dog? - doo.
- The dog doo. - Oh, I see, no, no, no.
- Yeah, that's an issue, too, you know.
- All right, and number 11, get help with the hard stuff.
- Oh, right, yeah.
- Don't be a hero here, if something's heavy,
get some help with it.
If it's too hard for you like putting a wheel
in your wheelbarrow, have someone else do it.
Get Brad to do it, call him up.
- Yeah, actually I got my nephew
doing that stuff for me now.
- Oh, do you really?
- Yeah, that one's working out pretty good.
- I got Mike lifting, our camera man, lifting our stuff.
(Brad laughing)
All right, this is the favorite thing my wife likes.
It's both a bench and a kneeler.
- How does it work, Bob, I don't get it.
- So, you can put it down and you can sit on it.
- Oh, I see, yeah.
- And you can do some of your gardening that way.
- It's padded.
- Right, but where she really likes it, Brad,
is for the kneeling part of it.
She uses this all the time around the house
for like painting. - Oh, sure
- In fact, this isn't hers, I just got her another one,
because she uses one-- - She broke it?
- No, she uses it-- - You broke it. (Brad laughs)
- as a cabinet, I said I'd get her another one.
But she has paint all over it,
because she's always painting. - Well show how it works.
- Yeah, so, you just put it down,
I'm gonna put it down over here.
And these handles are there-- - Yeah, that is nice.
- so you can kneel down nice.
Now if you have pain right on your knee,
you might wanna stay more on the shin part of it.
You might wanna be right here,
and in fact, if you had a knee replacement,
that's what we teach people,
is to kneel-down off the knee, and more onto the shin.
But this is so nice, 'cause you can actually do dips,
you know, I mean.
(both laugh)
It'll help you stand up, and as you get older,
you'll find out that's one of the problems, isn't it, Brad?
- Yeah, and it's got a nice cushion on both sides.
You know, almost an inch thick.
- Yeah, we actually, we were having some work done here,
by a contractor, and my wife goes, "Try this once."
And he's like, "Oh, gosh."
- Maybe he's gonna get one.
- Yeah, so yeah, it's steady for sitting on,
just a nice device, and it folds up,
- Yeah, conveniently.
- Yeah, how does it fold up again?
Like that, yeah.
- Squeeze that--
- Yeah, squeeze that. - Oh, look at that.
Look at that, then you can--
- And there you go with it. - put it in your car.
- Yep. - Yep.
- So it works out nice,
Yeah, it is nice, what do they call it?
- I think it was like a garden kneeler,
garden something, garden bench.
- Just google garden-- - There's a bunch of them.
- kneeler bench, yeah, they're all over.
- We'll put a link below. - Yeah, so.
- All right, thanks, everybody for watching,
let's hear your comments.
- Be careful while you're gardening.
(Bob chuckles)
(quirky notes)