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Soreness after pushing activities
I notice that activities that involve pushing something…such as pushing a lawn mower or a shopping cart…there seems to be a special type of ouchie that results from those pushing activities.
This kind of makes sense when I think of the mechanical position of the body and where the stress is getting focused. I’m not trying to tell you I’m a physicist.
Thinking about pushing mechanics
It’s just if you think about the position of the arms and how the legs are pushing a load with force going from the thighs through the waist into the hands…and the feet are the anchors and the hands are the end points…you can kind of (in a common sense way) see how the force focus is winding up in the waist/lumbar region.
Did I reason that out completely wrong?
Even if I did…the thing that can’t be disputed is that I have a qualitatively different (and worse) sort of soreness after pushing a grocery cart or lawn mower. Before the surgery, it was pushing a grocery cart that had me dropped down to my knees in the aisle…but, that’s another story.
About mowing after spinal fusion
A note about mowing lawns post fusion surgery: I am relaying MY EXPERIENCE…again, not a doctor… MY EXPERIENCE … The first thing for me to emphasize is that I didn’t do any mowing for a good ten months after the surgery. That’s the starting point warning. I gave things a chance to settle down pretty good. But, there’s more to, in my opinion, mowing safely after my surgery…
I did not want to use the standard gas-powered mower with a pull start that I used for my entire life. I didn’t like the idea of the pulling action to start it…and, I didn’t like the idea of pushing it. The idea of this scared me. I thought about getting a rider mower. I thought about a lot of possibilities.
What I ended up doing
So, I got a battery-powered EGO mower, and that’s worked very well for me. I still get that special/distinct type of soreness (maybe they call this DOMS?) after mowing the entire lawn. But, it’s not the type of pain that scares me. It’s the type that I know just means that the muscles and nerves got rattle a little bit.
You start it by pressing a button. And, you can make it propel itself forward with a thumb control. In real-life application, it’s really more like I’m walking alongside an independently moving thing than I’m actually pushing something.
This is one of the smart decisions I made after surgery. After seeing how well the mower worked, I got an EGO string trimmer because it also started with a button, was light, and made me feel like I could use it safely.
I have no association with this EGO company. I’m just honestly telling my story here because it might be helpful to somebody recovering from back surgery.