On The Move - How to Protect Yourself as you Prepare to Change Homes in Oregon
Spring arrives and with it comes a tendency for spring cleaning and better weather for house hunting, apartment shopping, and moving. It is a happy day when our Oregon Chiropractic team meets a new patient looking to continue their regular biomechanical maintenance with us, after arriving from another city, another state, or even another country. It's not quite as happy a day when your very act of moving has led to a new injury or an exacerbation of an old one.
How to Protect Yourself As You Prepare to Change Homes in Oregon
Outside of a small handful of jobs, we don't normally engage in the kind of repetitive and sometimes heavy physical tasks that are involved in packing up your house or apartment, loading up moving trucks, and then the tedious unpacking ritual. It involves a lot of bending, lifting, and carrying. Sometimes the sheer volume of activities can worsen your condition, but it's often the case that bending and twisting to grab a paperclip you dropped after a long day of work that produces the kind of sudden, unguarded movement that can cause instant pain and disability.
If you're a generally healthy individual with no major history of injury, you usually assume that you're ready to take on a project like this without too much difficulty. If you have kept up with your exercise and stretching routine, your main focus should be attending to your ergonomics and ensuring you don't become complacent. Doing those two things and knowing your limitations should be able to see you through. If you have not been diligent in your home care and gym activities, you're more at risk of biting off more than you can chew. In addition to the aforementioned precautions, you would do well to use a brace for extra support as long as you never fail to use your own muscles underneath. It would also be a good idea to start with packing up lighter items like extra bottles of shampoo, shower curtains, and towels you keep stored in the bathroom, instead of trying to pack up the kitchen full of heavy pots and pans and appliances, and then seeing how your body responds. If it can handle the bathroom and knickknack packing just fine, you can move on to slightly heavier objects.
If you have a history of injury to almost any area, since the active packing will require you to be of sound body throughout, it's good to visit your trusted health professional to gauge how well your body can handle the loads. You may need a bit of care to proverbially knock off the rust and make sure your foundation is in the best possible condition to sustain these unusual challenges. Once given the greenlight by your musculoskeletal-minded practitioner, you will still want to take all of the previous precautions mentioned, add additional breaks, and add the use of some home devices to your packing regimen. Home devices may include, but are not limited to: 15 minutes of ice pack used to the most troubled area, Biofreeze or other similar cream for sore muscles, a rolled up towel or neck pillow under a sore neck after all of that neck flexion and shoulder activity, wrist braces in the presence of carpal tunnel, and/or kinesiotape for extra support or to maintain proper firing of your biomechanical chain.
If an assessment of your current condition is what you require, please give Corazon Chiropractic Clinic a call and we will find someone close to you that can provide an honest evaluation. If an injury from packing duties is currently interfering with your life, let us help give you a roadmap to find your way back to health. It's important that today's packing injuries don't become tomorrow's disability, danger to your job performance, or chronic pain.
