Shovel Fist Ergonomic Back Injury Preventing Digging Tool

After not just "throwing my back out" as the cliche goes, but rather developing worse and worse, debilitating, agonizing, chronic, non-stop lower back pain, I finally had a reconing with the bad ergonomics of standard shovels. It's been so many years that the shovel has been my daily bread and butter tool. While I've worked in the corporate world, in offices, as a digital nomad, among many other lighter duty trades, the staple has over time mostly been working for myself or as part of a crew of contractors doing permaculture landscape design and installation. Therefore, the amount of mileage put on my lower back has been excessive. Furthermore, being in a touring bands, and loading equipment in the most dangerous and awkward of logistical situations has made it all the worse.

That common experience well all hear about, and some of us end up complaining about having ourselves, that of "throwing out your back", used to happen only very rarely when the greatest load would be leveraged against the weakest muscles and vertebrae of the back, at the furthest outstretched point of grip or handling from the core of the body. This happened routinely while loading music gear up and down stairs, trying not to crush your fans, or fall down and roll to yourself into the hospital. While landscaping, digging dirt, moving gravel, mulch, sand, etc, is more of a cumulative stress on the back, tasks like planting a 2 foot box tree, moving decorative boulders, and ramming in posts would instantly throw your back out.

In my experience, this painful and sometimes totally crippling event can only happen so many times before it's not just heavy objects that cause it to recur. Also, it's not just heavy objects moved in awkward ways that preclude a more balanced posture and integration of other muscle groups and joint fulcrums, what eventually starts to happen is that any weight, at any angle, at any distance from the core of the body triggers the crushing pain, that drops you to the ground almost screaming.

After getting to point where literally every tiny movement, whether carrying or picking up any object heavy or light triggered a massive wave of pain through various parts of the whole body, I had enough. Though, paradoxically, I had only barely started to dig the first ponds on my first land project site. It broke my heart and soul to think that I spent all of my good back years building amazing epic permaculture projects on other people and institutions' properties, only to eventually, by the time I could afford my own land, be virtually crippled. What a tragic irony of being a landless peasant, without deep ethnic roots, always having the rug pulled, always starting over from scratch. Finally, I had my first long awaited blank canvas to do the craft as I'd always dreamed, and sadly, I'm lame.

I fought it as long as I could, just saying, you have to go into beast mode, and fight through the pain no matter what. You have to get as much done before you can't do anything at all, you can't stop half way because your survival in the desert depends more than anything on digging these ponds to catch rain water.

I fought and fought, and dug and dug through so much pain, I ended up hunched over like an old man for months and months. I tried to rehabilitate by just taking long walks, but eve they were torturous. I had to finally stop after the first pond and a half were dug out.

Somewhat randomly I remembered though, that at times I'd naturally want to kneel in the sand and dig with the shovel by holding it the middle of the handle, thus giving me more control, though less leverage and distance. But for certain tasks, this was far more ideal, and in fact the only way achieve the desired result. So I iterated upon this, and started to discover, after researching back injuries due to shovel use, that they tool design may have been a great failure of engineering. The majority of websites I found on the topic covered injuries caused by snow shovels, some of which have even adapted their designs to be more ergonomic and back friendly. That was the ah-ha moment for me, it's the snow shovel industry, where people are exposing the fundamental design flaws. The stakes are often higher due to secondary injuries such as losing balance and slipping and falling on ice, or the fact that everyone young and old has to shovel snow to get past their foot path or driveway cleared, and their not all likely to be expert construction workers or landscapers how are battled hardened for shovel work. The fact that these consumers and these manufacturers and meeting in the middle of this dialog about mitigating these patterns of injury, sheds light on the unquestioned status quo dominant paradigm of shoveling standing up, not just of snow, but of all kinds of materials.

I immediately dug deeper, no pun intended, into the research on the patterns of injury, and after looking at several diagrams showing the impact of lifting objects far from the core of the body, it became painfully clear. With a long lever gaining all of it's mechanical advantage at the expense one of the weakest most delicate and injury prone fulcrums of the body, the lower back, I was shocked and felt betrayed by my tradition of working the land. How could we so foolishly and careless sacrifice the backs of mostly young men, so that they end up living limited, painful, debilitated lives as they age. Just because you're young and can get away with all kinds of worst practices of work habits, doesn't mean this issue should be overlooked in my humble opinion.

I'm going on a crusade to fight for consumer rights around this issue. I'm not trying to mandate warning labels on shovels, however, I will lead by example in my own life, on my own land. I have no other choice, but to move forward and continue digging my survival rainwater catchment ponds, in a new way.

I've adapted what I learned from the much better ergonomics of shoveling with a shorter length shovel, from a kneeling position by using an actual smaller sized shovel, about the size of an army entrentching tool. I had one in my tool collection, and I started to think about Ash from the Evil Dead movies and how he attached a chain saw to the elbow of his severed arm. There was something fun and crafty about making a shovel fist arm accessory attachment inspired by his innovation. Of course, it's not intended for use as a weapon, but rather a more appropriately scaled human earth moving piece of small equipment.

I looked at various designs of similar products on the market custom made for people with disabilities and those with age related joint issues, such wrist and arm strapped trowels are well established the market of prefabricated gardening tools. I'd eventually like to have a metal works shop where I could make more elegant designs, but to start with, the prototype of a do-it-yourself "shovel-fist" tool, is the one featured in the picture here. I hacked up an old metal chair leg as a lateral cross bar to close my fist around. I ran that through 2x6 boards on either side with a 1 inch hole drilled for the bar to go through. I then drill through the metal bar, fastened nuts and bots to keep it securely in place, then attached the handle contraption to the wood handle of the half sized shovel. Finally, I took some old, ripped up fabrics and tied an somewhat adjustable strap at the back. The result was a firm grip allowing me to dig powerfully and masterfully and almost any angle, and have the back strap support on the upper for arm, maintain the proper flush positioning of the shovel handle against the top of my forearm.

The best part is that it's easy to quickly swap from right are to left arm and back, thus balancing the load and workout and really achieving a much more even distribution stress. From a fitness, exercise, workout, and even body-building perspective. I feel like this is an important personal gaming changer and breakthrough. Suddenly like never before, I'm developing the upper body strength and physique that defied my best efforts in the gym over many years. I would attribute this not only to the great diversity of angles of movements and activation of various muscle groups, but more so to the fact that the will and intention of the action is all in the spirit of survival. This has become a form of functional outdoor fitness, where time flies and I can get into the zone because. I'm on a mission towards a goal. Whether the goal is half a revolution around the pond diameter, a full revolution, or more depending on which step down of the 4 circle step design I'm in, I'm not going to quit before I make it to the mark.

Thankfully the sand is very forgiving on the knees, this pattern of work would not be so perfectly fitting for the rehabilitation of my back, if I were on more hard-pan dirt soil. However, there are knee pads designed for flooring installers that are more thickly padded than typical sporting or construction knee pads, I'd definitely dust those off if I weren't kneeling for long periods digging in the sand.

The last main thing to say about this life changing, backs saving new lease on life, is how and why it works the legs. Because the shovel head is half size, and the handle is half length, the normal customary pattern of digging up a shovel full and walking or tossing it into a pile away from the hole, ditch or other feature you're digging is not tenable, another method had to be devised.

Luckily I had on hand, three small galvanized metal pails, they're actually branded as beer ice cooler pails. The irony was not lost on me that two of them were of the Corona brand, one of my favorite beers. They are the perfect companion to the smaller shovel loads, and the perfect continuation of the logic that more lighter loads carried closer to the body, are always safer and more sustainable than the opposite. The other beneficial side-effect, is that by working from the kneeling position, loading the small pails, with the small shovel means that everytime they are filled, they must be picked up and moved to the deposit point. So I find myself lifting my own body weight many many times, without any additional load, and this alone has done more than ever to strengthen my legs. I will then bend with the knees, not the back to grab a pail handle, lift it close to the core of the body, walk it over to the deposit point, and dump it like a backhoe bucket. It's tedious and slow going, doubtless in pairs working as a team, this process would be exponentially more efficient as two people could rotate from the standing and kneeling tasks.

Now that I work for myself, on my own land, there will be no one to question my use of a much more ergonomic, yet less time efficient way to move the earth by hand and hand tool. I'd be fired by a boss or a client immediately if they ever caught me working in this way, at this pace, however that's sadly revealing about the state of the hyper efficient grind economics of manual labor. Doing things safely and sustainably would cut into the bottom line, therefore, we pile our least desirable and most injurious agricultural and industrial repetitive tasks on the most desperate, grind them into a plump and extract from the next generation in line.

I will never again ask anyone to dig with a full size shovel, unless it's an emergency. a very light task, a very quick task, or where there are many people who can rotate through the task so as to drastically reduce the compounding stress.