Protecting Your Back: Tips from a Doctor

As musicians, we find ourselves in all sorts of venues. Deciding what equipment to take and where to put it requires time to sort out, but one thing remains constant — the need to avoid straining your back when lugging all that gear around. I’m certain you’ve heard “lift with your legs and not with your back” before, but what does that really mean? I teamed up with Sweetwater’s own professional personal trainer, Jarvis Foster, to bring you a quick guide to protecting your back!
The most common activity where back injuries occur is moving your equipment from a vehicle to the cart, dolly, or whatever you’re using to get the gear into the building. If you’re doing it old-school and just lugging your stuff all the way in, it’s important to start right and end well. Particularly critical is the initial movement of large, heavy, or bulky gear out of your trunk or back seat, and then your strategy for putting that gear back down again once you get it to where you’re headed. Here are some tips:

Plan Ahead. If you’ve got gear in the back seat, be sure you park where you can fully open the car doors. To limit the amount of bending/twisting, try to keep things on one side of the car, or take an extra moment to walk around to the other side if need be (rather than stretching across the seat and pulling gear toward you to get it out the door).
Stretch. Don’t laugh — stretching is really important. You’ve likely been sitting in the car, potentially for hours driving to the venue. Give your muscles a chance to breathe a bit and stretch when you get out of the vehicle. Stand up straight with your feet shoulder-width apart, hands on your hips, and look straight ahead (don’t throw your head back!). Slowly and gently bend backward, hold for about five seconds or so, and return to the starting position, standing upright again. Squeeze your glutes (your “butt” muscles) and angle your hips forward. Squeeze your shoulder blades back and together. Take a deep breath and exhale. Then repeat all of that a few more times for good measure. It takes less than a minute but will make a big difference.
Get Help. It might take a few more trips, but that’s a small sacrifice compared with throwing out your back and regretting your attempt to show off your super-human strength.
Build a Bridge. In order to shift stress off your back when reaching forward for something (the motion is called “trunk flexion”), set one hand down on a stable nearby surface as you extend a leg a bit behind you for balance. The key is to not have both feet even with each other. Building a bridge supports and braces your upper body and subsequently reduces the load placed on your lower back. Once you then lift, the closer you can keep the load to your body, the better.
Watch Your Body Mechanics. In particular, minimize twisting while carrying a load. Move your feet so that your body is facing what you’re lifting, THEN try to have the location where you are setting the gear perpendicular (at 90 degrees or even less than 90 degrees) to where you’re starting in order to minimize the amount of rotation required to complete the transfer. Keep the load as close to your body as possible for better leverage.

See? It’s really not that hard — but it DOES require some thought and planning. Force yourself to take an extra few seconds to stretch, to think about your lifting mechanics, and to plan what you can do to reduce twisting, and you’ll find that over time, it will become habit, and your back will definitely thank you!
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