Spring Is Here — And So Are Back Injuries
Every year around this time, I start seeing a predictable pattern. The weather breaks, people head outside, and within a few weeks the calls start coming in. Raking, mulching, hauling bags of soil, kneeling in garden beds, lifting landscaping stones — all of it adds up fast, especially for a body that spent the last four months largely sedentary.
Spring yard work is one of the most underestimated physical demands of the year. Here's what I see most often, and what you can do about it.
The Most Common Spring Back Injuries
Lumbar Muscle Strain
This is the big one. Repetitive bending, lifting, and twisting — especially without proper bracing — overloads the lumbar musculature and surrounding soft tissue. The pain usually hits 24–48 hours after the activity, which catches people off guard. You felt fine Saturday afternoon. Sunday morning you can barely get out of bed.
The mechanism is almost always the same: too much volume, too fast, on a body that wasn't prepared for it.
Disc Irritation
Prolonged forward flexion — think crouching over a garden bed for an hour — places sustained compressive and shear load on the lumbar discs. For most people this resolves quickly. For those with pre-existing disc issues, spring yard work can be the straw that tips a manageable condition into an acute flare.
The key variable here is IAP — intra-abdominal pressure. When your deep core isn't braced properly, the disc absorbs load it was never designed to carry alone.
SI Joint Dysfunction
The sacroiliac joint takes a beating during asymmetrical loading — carrying a bag of mulch on one side, stepping up onto a retaining wall, kneeling and rising repeatedly from uneven ground. SI joint irritation presents as a sharp, localized pain just off the midline of the low back, often with a catch or clicking sensation on movement.
Thoracic and Rib Cage Stiffness
Less talked about but extremely common. Raking, in particular, involves repetitive rotation through the thoracic spine — and most people have almost no thoracic mobility to spare after winter. The result is stiffness, aching, and occasionally sharp pain that wraps around the rib cage with deep breathing.
Why Spring Makes It Worse
The issue isn't the yard work itself. It's the mismatch between demand and preparation.
Over winter, most people significantly reduce their physical output. Range of motion decreases, deep core activation patterns get rusty, and tissue tolerance drops. Then spring arrives and in a single weekend they're asking their body to perform hours of loaded, repetitive movement in end-range positions.
The body doesn't adapt that quickly. Tissue tolerance builds over weeks, not days. The weekend warrior pattern — sedentary Monday through Friday, then four hours of landscaping on Saturday — is exactly the setup for injury.
What to Do Before You Head Outside
A few minutes of preparation goes a long way.
Brace before you lift. Take a breath into your belly, create tension through your core as if you're about to take a punch, and maintain that brace through the lift. This isn't holding your breath — it's creating controlled intra-abdominal pressure. It's the single most protective thing you can do for your lumbar spine under load.
Hip hinge, don't round. When you're picking up a bag of mulch, a landscaping stone, or anything off the ground — hinge at the hips, keep the spine neutral, and drive through the legs. Rounding the lumbar spine under load is how discs get irritated.
Take breaks before you feel like you need one. By the time your back is talking to you, you've already done the damage. Set a timer. Every 30–40 minutes, stand up, walk around, extend through the thoracic spine, and reset.
Vary your position. Don't spend two hours in the same posture. Alternate between kneeling, squatting, standing, and walking. Position variation distributes load across different tissues and prevents any single structure from being overloaded.
When to Get It Checked
Most mild strains resolve within a few days with rest, movement, and ice or heat applied to the area. But there are signs that warrant a professional evaluation sooner rather than later.
Get checked if you have pain that radiates down one or both legs, numbness or tingling in the legs or feet, pain that worsens with coughing or sneezing, difficulty standing fully upright, or symptoms that are not improving after 72 hours of conservative care.
These patterns can indicate disc involvement, nerve compression, or something else that deserves a proper orthopedic and neurological workup — not just rest and hope.
The good news is that most spring back injuries are preventable. A little preparation, some awareness of how you're moving, and a willingness to pace yourself goes a long way.
If you're already dealing with something that showed up after a weekend in the yard — reach out. That's exactly what the Initial Consult is for.
— Dr. Ray Michael Ray, DC, LAc · Functional Chiropractic Physician