Gardening is very healthy, both physically and mentally. In addition to providing exercise, gardening delivers health benefits in the fresh foods you eat and in the calming presence of flowers in your environment. Gardening Tips to Avoid Injury and Discomfort
To get the most out of gardening’s health benefits, it’s a good idea to do a bit of stretching to help avoid injury or irritating existing conditions while out in the garden. Here are some tips to stay healthy:
Stretch those muscles
Heading out into the garden is just like going for a jog or visiting the gym. Before you grab all your gardening tools, practice some full-body stretches to warm up your muscles. Target your arms, legs and back, because the muscles in these areas will be put to good use while you’re planting, weeding and watering. And before you finish for the day, do some more stretching to help loosen any muscles that tightened during your gardening work.
Banish bending Gardening Tips to Avoid Injury and Discomfort
Many Americans suffer from chronic back pain, which can put a damper on the gardening experience. Consider installing raised garden beds, which allow you to garden without have to bend over. And container gardens can be placed on tables or deck railings to make it easy to reach plants.
Hand and wrist protection a must
Weeding, hoeing, raking, shoveling – the repetitive motions of gardening can lead to hand and wrist pain, and worsen existing conditions such as arthritis. Taking steps to minimize irritation and discomfort while you work can help ensure your gardening tasks don’t create aches or worsen pain. Consider wearing an arthritis glove, like the Imak-made glove commended by the Arthritis Foundation, to provide mild compression and warmth while you work. Because the gloves are made of cotton material with an open-fingertip design, they won’t make your hands hot or hinder movement. Designed by an orthopedic surgeon, the arthritis gloves are also fully washable, so you don’t have to worry about getting a little dirt on them as you go about your gardening tasks. An added bonus – wearing any kind of glove can help you avoid another common gardening injury: blisters.
Keep skin protected
Because gardening keeps a person outdoors a lot during the warm, summer months, it’s important to protect your skin from insect bites and sunburn. While most insect bites are just an irritation, sunburn can cause serious, long-term skin damage. Use insect repellent and sunscreen that blocks both UVA and UVB rays. Also wear a wide-brimmed, lightweight hat and sunglasses to protect your eyes and keep the sun off your head.
Lift carefully
Between the heavy bags of soil, the many tools needed, or full baskets of vegetables being carried into the kitchen for processing, lifting is a common labor when gardening. Remember to lift from a squatting position, with your back straight, so that your legs do the work, not your back. When kneeling down, use gardening knee pads or even just a rolled up towel to cushion your joints from the hard, damp ground. Remember to minimize twisting motions that can inure your back and joints.
Enjoy the healthful benefits of gardening this summer. Follow these simple precautions to keep safe and injury-free so you can play in your garden until the snow falls.
 

Finding a Good Hobby

When you are raising a family and involved in a demanding career, if someone asks you what your hobby is, you probably would answer “Who has time for a hobby?” That is why retirement years are the perfect opportunity to get involved in a time consuming hobby and be able to throw yourself into it with gusto.
The purpose of a hobby is to allow you to explore an interest and even build an expertise in an facet of life that you follow for the sheer joy of learning and engaging in that activity. You have no interest in making your living at that hobby and for most of us that do build up a hobby life, to earn money at it would ruin the fun of it. You want to be able to go after that hobby at your own pace and “do it your way” without the nuisance of a boss or someone telling you that you are doing it wrong.
Many hobbies are recreational activities. Golf, bowling, pool or playing poker are such hobbies. And each of these are the kind of pastimes that require dedication to get good at them. And once you have your expertise up, you get a real gratification from competing in that sport and demonstrating that your years of devotion and the time you put into that hobby were wroth the effort.
There is just a certain satisfaction to becoming so completely lost in a hobby that time disappears and before you know it, a day can go by and you didn’t even know it. That kind of mental absorption keeps your mind sharp and functioning which is good for your health in many ways. And many hobbies are just that time consuming and just that fascinating.
If you have a flair for the technical and mechanical, Ham Radio is a hobby that seems to become a passion for those who become enthusiasts. The joy of Ham Radio is being able to communicate around the world through this private network that anyone can join. And Ham Radio operators have at times proven valuable in communications during time of national crisis when perhaps other forms of communications were not available.
To find that perfect hobby, look within at areas of fascination that you never got a chance to express and explore. If you cannot get enough of history, the civil war or the renaissance, reenactment and renaissance fairs give you the chance to all but travel back in time and enjoy the feel of being part of that era in history. If theater is your passion, dozens of local theater groups will take all the time you can give even if you don’t have an acting bone in your body. And enjoying even a simple level of involvement in the theater like putting together posters or painting sets can be just as exciting as getting out in front of an audience.
The key is to find something you love and find others who love it too. This is the great thing about hobbies. There is almost always someone out there who is just as fascinated by this field of interest and probably a whole society who are just as able to see a day or a weekend disappear becoming absorbed in their hobby. So throwing yourself into your passion also opens doors of social interaction with others who may not be senior citizens and that is refreshing.
The benefits of getting involved in a time consuming hobby are many. You do need to use some common sense and balance so you take care of your health and spend time with family and friends. But that leaves plenty of time to be obsessed with your hobby and have all the fun that this kind of pastime can bring to you.