The first big dump of snow in Winnipeg produces a reliable pattern. For a few days afterward, clinics across the city see a wave of people with low back pain, almost all of it from shovelling. The usual explanation is that they lifted wrong: bent at the waist, twisted, and so on. That is part of the story. But it misses the bigger reason, and the bigger reason is the one you can do the most about.
Why shovelling is hard on backs
Think about what a heavy shovelling session is. A full shovel of wet snow can weigh five to seven kilograms or more. Clearing a typical driveway and sidewalk might mean two or three hundred lifts, each one a bent-over, slightly rotated lift-and-throw, often done quickly, in the cold, by someone who has not done anything resembling that movement since last March.
That is not a small task. It is a high-volume, repetitive loading session performed by tissues that have not been prepared for it. Surveillance data from US emergency departments found that soft-tissue injuries, most often to the low back, were the most common shovelling-related injury, and that acute musculoskeletal exertion was the most common mechanism.1 The problem is rarely one bad lift. It is two hundred lifts on a body that has been doing twenty.
This is the training-injury paradox in miniature. Gabbett's work shows that injury risk climbs when load jumps sharply relative to what you have been doing, and that people who are consistently active tolerate those jumps far better.2 There are no bad exercises, only too much too soon. Shovelling is just an exercise you did not plan.
Reframing the advice
Most shovelling tips are about technique: bend the knees, push rather than lift, do not twist. These are reasonable, and we will come back to them. But the emphasis on perfect technique can send the wrong message, which is that bending and lifting are dangerous and your spine is fragile. It is not. The spine is built to flex, load and rotate, and people without back pain do all three constantly. The hurt-versus-harm distinction matters here: a sore back after shovelling is usually an overloaded back, not an injured one.
If you think of shovelling as a workload rather than a hazard, the strategy changes. You stop trying to make every lift perfect and start trying to make the total session tolerable.
A load-management approach
Break it up. Clear in two or three shorter sessions rather than one long push. Shovel during the snowfall rather than after it, when the snow is lighter and there is less of it. Fifteen minutes in the morning and fifteen in the evening is a very different load from forty-five minutes straight.
Keep the shovel light. Take half-loads. Push snow where you can rather than lifting it. Use a lightweight shovel with a modest blade; the giant scoop that clears more per pass also loads more per lift.
Warm up. Five minutes of walking, some hip hinges with hands on hips, a few squats and some trunk rotations before you start. Cold tissue tolerates load worse than warm tissue, and the first ten lifts of the morning are when a lot of people feel the pinch.
Move the way you would in a gym. Hinge at the hips, keep the load close to your body, and shift your feet to face where you are throwing rather than twisting through your trunk with a full shovel at arm's length. This is less about avoiding danger and more about efficiency: good positions let the hips and legs do the work the back would otherwise do alone.
Build capacity in advance. The real fix is a body that can handle two hundred lifts without complaint, and that comes from doing some lifting all year. Hip hinges, deadlifts with a kettlebell or backpack, squats and carries twice a week through the fall mean the first snowfall is a familiar task rather than a shock. Exercise is the only intervention with consistent evidence for preventing low back pain episodes; back belts, insoles and education on their own do not do it.3
A note on your heart
Shovelling heavy snow in the cold places a surprisingly large demand on the cardiovascular system, with heart rate and blood pressure responses comparable to vigorous exercise.4 If you are older, sedentary, or have heart disease or risk factors for it, treat shovelling as the hard workout it is: pace yourself, take breaks, and stop if you feel chest pressure, unusual breathlessness, light-headedness or pain spreading to your arm or jaw. Those symptoms need emergency care, not a lighter shovel.
If your back does flare
Most shovelling-related back pain settles within days to a couple of weeks. Keep moving: walk, change positions often, and avoid lying down for long stretches. Heat can help you move. Gentle, repeated bending and hinging as pain allows tends to speed things along rather than slow them down. If the pain is not improving after a week or two, is spreading down the leg, or you are unsure how to get moving again, an assessment can help; our approach to back pain is built around getting you loading again rather than resting indefinitely. Any change in bladder or bowel function, numbness around the groin, or progressive leg weakness needs same-day medical care.
The snow is coming regardless. A body that has been lifting all autumn will meet it far better than one that has not.
References
- Watson DS, Shields BJ, Smith GA. Snow shovel-related injuries and medical emergencies treated in US EDs, 1990 to 2006. Am J Emerg Med. 2011;29(1):11-17.
- Gabbett TJ. The training-injury prevention paradox: should athletes be training smarter and harder? Br J Sports Med. 2016;50(5):273-280.
- Steffens D, Maher CG, Pereira LSM, et al. Prevention of low back pain: a systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA Intern Med. 2016;176(2):199-208.
- Franklin BA, Hogan P, Bonzheim K, et al. Cardiac demands of heavy snow shoveling. JAMA. 1995;273(11):880-882.