Cooler days of Autumn can be a busy time for gardeners as this is the best time for planting bulbs, trees and shrubs and tackling the annual pruning. The temptation is great to do too much too quickly and make what should be a rewarding and health-giving experience into a chore - or worse.

While gardening can be great exercise for muscles and joints, it is a double-edged sword, as repetitive gardening tasks can cause joint problems, or increase existing inflammation and pain.

Gardening enhances bone health
You would be forgiven for thinking, with gardening being such a popular pursuit, that its impact on our health would have been well and truly studied, but this is not so. In fact, research is scanty and there is not a lot of evidence to actually prove that gardening is good for you, even if we may believe it to be true. However, one UK study found that gardening, along with other moderately intensive exercise such as walking and climbing stairs, benefits bone health and reduces fractures among the elderly¹. Furthermore, a small study on older women at the University of Arkansas found weight training and gardening to be equally associated with good bone density, outstripping all other forms of exercise studied².

Gardening injuries
Overdoing the gardening can lead to muscle or joint injury - all gardeners will have had some experience of this - even if it is just waking up with stiff joints the next day. A large survey in the USA studied the number of injuries (mostly minor) caused by popular exercises³. Although injury incidence from gardening was low, as so many people garden, it was estimated that over two million Americans sustain injuries due to gardening every month, with younger people being the most likely victims. Back injuries from gardening are particularly common, especially among men, as was found in a Canadian survey of over 11,000 people⁴.

Gardening tips
Gardening provides an opportunity for healthy outdoor exercise in pleasant surroundings and it’s important to enjoy it and not just to make it hard work. Gardening can be so easily overdone when there are lots of jobs piling up and this is when risk from injuries is greatest. I have to admit to looking for short cuts at busy times of the year. I grow many medicinal plants and I like to track down herbs with ornamental characteristics so that they can be admired for their beauty in a garden setting. But medicinal plants can be rampant in growth - many are weeds of course - and cause endless demands for staking to stop them looking untidy. Last year I experimented with a tip I had read in the Garden magazine - cutting perennial plants in half just before flowering. This takes courage, but I was rewarded with later flowering and shorter, self-supporting stems and now this technique is a regular feature of my gardening. However, a word of warning: a minority of plants do not take kindly to this treatment - you will have to do your own experimentation!

Many older people find more time for gardening in their retirement, but this stage of life is when joints are more susceptible to arthritis. Overdoing things in the garden can exacerbate arthritic symptoms of inflammation, swelling and pain. However, there are ways of tackling gardening tasks which will help you to get all the benefits of gardening - staying mobile, gently exercising arthritic joints and building muscle strength - while at the same time not subjecting joints to too much stress. Don’t try and achieve the impossible! It’s much better to do  ‘a little and often’ than undertake long sessions of unaccustomed exercise. And warm up before you begin - this can help to loosen your joints and prevent injury. Also, avoid prolonged repetitive activity by doing different jobs to exercise different muscle sets. Further tips on the best ways to garden if you have arthritis, including garden design and the best way to handle tools, can be found on several websites⁵,⁶ .

Keeping joints pain-free and supple
Aspects of a healthy diet that are particularly pertinent to joint health are eating plenty of fruit and vegetables and oily fish and drinking adequate amounts of fluids. These dietary items prevent the accumulation of toxic products of metabolism in the body and dampen the body’s inflammatory response. An additional supplement of omega 3 fatty acids may also be helpful in the long term.

Recent joint injuries often respond to bromelain supplements, as our research at the University of Reading has shown⁷. However, if there is moderate to severe joint pain caused by arthritis, then I would suggest glucosamine with chondroitin. It was for such conditions that this combined supplement was found to be most effective in the large GAIT study - the most comprehensive clinical trial on this supplement to date⁸. A very effective herbal remedy for back pain is devil’s claw - this is a very anti-inflammatory herb that is grown by sustainable cultivation in Namibia. Extracts of devil’s claw have been shown to reduce the muscle spasm usually associated with back problems⁹.

References

1. Cooper et al. BMJ 1988; 297: 1443.
2. Turner et al. J Women Aging 2002; 14:139.
3. Powell et al. Med Sci Sports Exerc 1998; 30:1246.
4. Kopec et al. Spine 2004; 29: 70.
5. www.arthritis.org/resources/home_life/gardening.asp
6. www.arc.org.uk/arthinfo/patpubs/6014/6014.asp
7. Walker et al.  Phytomedicine 2002; 9: 681.
8. Clegg et al.  N Engl J Med. 2006; 354:795
9. Göbel et al.  Schmerz. 2001; 15: 10.

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