Back Pain from Housecleaning? Here’s Why Chores Hurt Your Back

Dr. Amy Konvalin tells us what’s normal and what’s avoidable:

Cleaning up those movement mistakes

Cleaning-related lower back pain is common. because housework involves repeated bending, twisting, reaching, and lifting, which can aggravate your lower back, especially when your body is not accustomed to that level (and kind) of activity. Which means this’ll often flare up when you do a “deep clean” of your house in some way that’s outside the norm of what you usually do.

The important thing, therefore, is to build endurance gradually: in other words, reduce the amount of stress placed on your lower back at once, allow recovery, and progressively improve your tolerance for those specific movements by gradually increasing the duration.

For this reason, it can be a good idea to spread out the workload over time—we recommend the Sweepy app for this, which allows you to break down all your household cleaning responsibilities and have them scheduled into manageable daily to-dos; the app can discriminate between easy and hard tasks, can adjust how often things need to be done (e.g. some things need to be done daily, some every few months, some at various intervals between those), and so will assign daily tasks in such a way that 1) the overall effort needed per day is not too high 2) you’re not just cleaning the same sink every day and neglecting some other part of your house. Note: this paragraph sounds like an ad but we have no financial relationship with Sweepy; this writer simply has used it herself for years and finds it very useful 🙂

Back to Dr. Konvalin, it’s worth nothing that she emphasizes that recurring tension or pain during housework should not simply be ignored. To this end, she recommends addressing the problem early rather than repeatedly pushing through pain.

You can (and should) also take breaks where it feels sensible (and if you’re not sure, then it’s sensible), and go easy again when you return to the task.

For more on all of this, enjoy:

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Want to learn more?

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Take care!