Injury Prevention in the Workplace

If you can’t find five minutes to stretch each day, then your lifestyle isn’t flexible enough

Often it is assumed that lower back pain is primarily associated with manual handling based activities and not those individuals who primarily perform sedentary based activities. This is only part of the equation.

Sam’s Story

Lower Limber® helped Sam get from not even being able to walk to doing 180 kilo leg presses. Hear his story.

“Studies have shown non-specific low back pain (LBP) is one of the most common and expensive disorders affecting people in industrialised nations. It is estimated to affect 15-44 per cent of the general population in one year”

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The Lower Limber® Sequential Stretching and Activation System makes you aware of your physical limitations while you perform some general stretching exercises. It does this by highlighting the interrelationships between all the major muscle groups of the legs and how these impact on the spine. This can prevent an injury from occurring by creating self-awareness, which underpins self-management practices.

How does the Lower Limber® system help you identify, prevent and manage yourself in the workplace? To get the full story read this letter from its creators.

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Shevonne, L4/5 disc bulge, avoided surgery thanks to Lower Limber®
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Back Pain From Sitting at Desk

What Can You Do About Back Pain From Sitting at a Desk?

If you’re experiencing back pain from sitting at a desk, you aren’t alone. In fact, this might be one of the most common physical complaints expressed by office workers and other sedentary employees. After all, we were not built just for sitting, and long periods spent at the desk — say, for a 9 to 5 office job — can take a serious toll on our well-being. Globally, back pain is one of the most common physical complaints and a leading cause of disability. Although there are lifestyle changes you can make to alleviate this pain, it doesn’t change the fact that you might otherwise need a career shift to make a real difference.

At Lower Limber, we don’t think such compromises are acceptable — not when taking matters into your own hands with back flexibility stretches could help to equip your body for enduring the workday more effectively. Although exercise is not a cure for pain, it can strengthen the body’s muscles. To help everyone, from athletes to the aged to the bored knowledge worker, we created a system of easy-to-use stretching bands. Let’s explore why stretching is important and how our product can help.

What You Should Know When Your Back Hurts From Sitting At a Desk

Why does your back hurt so much when all you’ve done is sit at your desk and fiddle with spreadsheets all day? That’s a question many office workers ask themselves — and those who work from home might have started wondering about it, too. Here are the important things to know about this troublesome pain.

  • The cause really is just sitting. Spending so much in a sedentary position increases the amount of pressure placed on your spine.
  • Some people choose to rectify the issue by taking more frequent breaks or switching to a standing desk. For many people, however, these aren’t options that are available at work. That doesn’t mean you have to suffer, though.
  • Like many physical ailments, one possible way to experience temporary or prolonged relief is to exercise more. By moving the body and spending less time sitting, you can create positive benefits for yourself.

The Potential Benefits of Engaging in Flexibility Activities

When you’re always feeling stiff and sore, loosening up the muscles and working on your flexibility can contribute to possibly reducing the discomfort you feel. Although you should always consult with your doctor, there are some basic flexibility activities you can undertake on your own. Why try them?

  • Flexibility training through stretching with static tools such as the Lower Limber system could help you to develop better habits relating to posture by becoming more mindful of your body. This could contribute to a lessening of back pain.
  • Reduce the risk of developing injuries. Flexibility work is good for the body, not just in terms of possibly reducing pain but also in keeping the body better. For athletes, that often means better endurance.
  • Stretching is an excellent way to take a breather and move around, which on its own is already a positive step.

What Sets Lower Limber Apart Regarding Flexibility Tools?

When you decide that it would be a smart idea to invest in tools that will help you work on your flexibility, why should your first choice be the Lower Limber tools? When you consider what we’ve done to make our product stand out, we hope you’ll see why:

  • It’s easy to use and simple to master, with a system designed for “everybody.” Young and old alike can enjoy using the Lower Limber system.
  • The unique design works by letting your limbs and spine “communicate” through complementary movements. Learn more about how our band stretching works.
  • We’ve planned out dozens of different stretches for you to try, with a colour-coded system that helps you pick the series of activities most aligned with your body’s requirements.

Our Tips for Effective Stretching

Once you’ve purchased the Lower Limber system, how can you make the most effective use of its properties? We’ve got a few tips to help you get started as you explore the best way to use the system for your particular concerns.

  • Always start with a gentle warm-up. Don’t jump straight to the most intense stretches. Build your body up and let it respond to the exercise you’re doing first.
  • Stretch often. The easiest way to get the most value out of Lower Limber is to start making it a part of your everyday routine. Because it takes only a few minutes to stretch out, it can be just like brushing your teeth — just another part of the day.
  • Follow our in-depth guides on back stretches for flexibility, including helpful illustrations to show you how to position your body for optimum stretching.

About Lower Limber

Lower Limber is an Australian-owned business dedicated to the manufacturing and selling our Sequential Stretching and Activation System. Designed to aid everyone, from those trying to avoid injuries during athletic training to the elderly who want to maintain their mobility, Lower Limber offers an excellent and cost-effective way to engage in effective stretching virtually anywhere and anytime. Combined with appropriate lifestyle changes and other physical activity, it could help you to strengthen your body and minimise injury risks.

Explore some testimonials about the system, or contact us for help with questions you may have.

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Sam's Story

Lower Limber helped Sam get from not even being able to walk to doing 180 kilo leg presses. Hear his story.

Letter from the Creators:
Injury Prevention in the Workplace

If you can’t find five minutes to stretch each day,
then your lifestyle isn’t flexible enough

by Stuart Andrews

Stuart & Bronwyn

For the last 20 years my partner and I have been coming up with new and innovative ways to educate people on how to successfully treat their injuries and, in more debilitating circumstances, self-manage their injuries where a full recovery was simply not possible.

The vast majority of the injuries that we see on a daily basis could have been prevented or at the very least minimised if the appropriate hands-on knowledge had been implemented prior to the injury occurring. I use the term hands-on because I don’t like to assume that, because someone can intellectualise a movement-based concept, they have ability to put it into practice.

If you play sport you’ll know that to perform a movement-based task you need to establish motor patterns or pathways, and you don’t really understand those patterns until you can perform them repeatedly without overthinking the whole process. This brings me to the point of why implanting the appropriate stretching and activation exercises is so important in managing and preventing injuries.

I was at a meeting some years ago listening to a gentleman who informed me that prevention-based strategies had failed in the work environment that he was overseeing. I asked why the prevention strategies they had implemented had failed and after several minute of conversation I realised that his idea of minimising risk was to remove certain tasks. However, similar sorts of lower back / leg related injuries continued to occur.

To me this highlighted that “removing” particular tasks wasn’t working and maybe something needed to be “added’, which is so often the case. Looking at this problem more closely it became obvious that there was an aging workforce, most of whom could barely reach below their knees. Further investigation revealed that many of them were complaining of having sore legs and aching joints.

I was originally given the task showing this particular workforce how to lift objects correctly / more efficiently. However, putting in place biomechanically efficient movement patterns for a group of middle-aged men who could barely reach their knees is like driving a car with no oil in it – it’s only a matter of time until it seizes up.

Some members of this work force had been relegated to sedentary work in the office because of their discomfort levels associated with performing daily manual handling duties. Not surprisingly their lower back / leg-related symptoms became worse, as sitting with legs bent behind a desk does nothing to help someone who already has short hamstrings.

When I began working with these employees, within a week most of them were able to touch their toes with relative ease. Many of them had never been able to touch their toes before and were grateful for being shown how to do this. The outcomes were immediately measurable both in demonstrated range of movement (ROM) and, most importantly, the perception of moving more freely.

Some individuals remained sceptical about the benefits of performing these ROM exercises, but once their work colleagues were sitting around at various tool box meetings discussing how their golf swing / general mobility had improved they gradually all came on board. The exception was one particular gentleman whose whole topic of conversation was about why he was different to everyone else and was unable to improve any aspects of his perceived physical limitations – hence the above subtitle.

My reason for discussing this workplace scenario is that something as basic as not being able to touch your toes puts you in a general risk category for experiencing lower back discomfort, as the relationship between tight leg muscules and lower back discomfort is well documented.

If your knees hurt, for example, you tend not to want to bend down and use your legs to initiate any lifting-based active. As a result you unwittingly bend more through your back. From a manual handling perspective the link is obvious, because how you lift is governed largely by how the legs and the back interrelate with each other.

Not only does the Lower Limber® Sequential Stretching and Activation System highlight these imbalances, it importantly highlights the need to be aware of these interrelationships on a daily basis. Factors such as aging, being dehydrated, recovering from illness, just to mention a few, all impact on your ROM.

The Lower Limber® Sequential Stretching and Activation system makes you aware of your physical limitations while you perform some general stretching exercises that highlight the interrelationships between all the major muscle groups of the legs and how these impact on the spine. This can prevent an injury from occurring by creating self-awareness, which underpins self-management practices.

Recognising a notable increase in your range of movement, along with associated benefits such as a feeling of moving more freely, provides validation that encourages you to maintain your practice. In short, physically measurable results through effective awareness strategies mean fewer injuries and a generally much happier work environment. The emphasis should be on wellbeing, not just injury prevention, and the outcomes of implementing such strategies are immediately transferable to both work and extracurricular activities.

The Lower Limber® Sequential Stretching and Activation System is literally a hands-on approach to motivating people by implementing positive, experiential movement-based processes that are very time efficient and, most importantly, effective.

Statistically “80 % of Australians will experience back pain in their lives and 10 % will experience significant disability” (The Medical Journal of Australia). From a work environment perspective we learn that “Back injuries account for 1 in 5 injuries or illnesses in the workplace (The Good Body).

These alarming statistics highlight that we are all susceptible to back pain both at work and outside of work. There needs to be a greater emphasis on self-awareness by getting the general population out of the mind-set of avoiding physical tasks for fear of injuring themselves. This is a mind-set that won’t enhance your physical wellbeing. If those 80 per cent of Australians could move towards increasing their functionality by adding in movement rather than losing it, I wonder how many of us would be physically healthier and emotionally happier?