Why is lifting items “with your back” dangerous? Why can’t back muscles be strengthened?
In: 17
Lifting “with your back” means putting effort on your spine that is not up/down it. See, your spine is very strong with *compressive* forces, or forces that try to make it shorter. This is what gravity does all day to a spine that is upright, and it is what it was ‘designed’ to be good at. But once you add force to the spine in a different direction (such as leaning over and adding weight perpendicular to it, or twisting and adding weight to that twisting), you are straining the spine in a way that it is *not* strong against. And because the spine is so strong one way but weak this new way, your mind and the rest of your body are unprepared for this new weakness and you are more likely to try something you aren’t actually strong enough for.
Combined with how many sensitive nerves are in the spine (things that modern medicine can’t fix quite right), it is really easy to injure your spine (and the muscles/joints around it) in ways that will hurt for the rest of your life whenever you use your back in a way that is not simply compressive. So “lift with your legs” is an instruction to adjust your lifting strategy so that the spine stays vertical, and simply strengthening the muscles doesn’t strengthen the bones/ligaments enough to make it any safer.
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