How to Prevent Tendonitis & Other Tree Planting Injuries

Tree planting is a physically demanding profession that puts a lot of strain on your body. No matter how good you are, overworking yourself is easy to do, making injuries quite common. The most common way to get hurt while tree planting injuries is repetitive strain injuries, such as tendinitis or carpal tunnel, which are caused by overusing the same muscles by repeating the same movements every day. Because we work on uneven ground that can be difficult to navigate, ankle injuries, such as rolls and sprains, can also be quite comon. Of course, broken limbs do occur, however, for the most part, they’re much less common and are harder to reliably prevent through training.

Regardless of whether you’re a rookie or a veteran on the block, injuries come for anyone who doesn’t take active steps to prevent them. Because planters make their money based on their productivity, even a small case of tendinitis can significantly reduce your earnings over the course of a season, if left untreated. Remaining injury-free all summer is crucial to maximizing your wages, and with 2024’s Spring plant around the corner, Leader Silviculture has outlined some tips for remaining healthy all year long. We’ve broken our tips down into things that you can do in the preseason to ensure you go to work in good shape, and ways you can minimize the risk of injury every day during the tree planting season.

Pre-season Tree-Planting Prep

The better shape you’re in before you start working, the more you’ll be able to make over the season. Luckily, there are several things you can start doing now to prevent injuries and make sure you’re in good shape when the tree-planting season starts. Here are a few things to consider:

Mobility Training

Things that bend, don’t break. That’s why having a great range of motion is essential to staying healthy during the tree planting season. Incorporating mobility training into your weekly routine, whether it be casual stretches or more formal yoga classes, is a great way to improve your flexibility, core strength, balance, and posture while planting. There are also some great training resources from Selkirk’s Fit to Plant Program and FPInnovations, which provide exercises that are specific to a tree planter’s workflow. We recommend you start with some of them, however, there is no such thing as bad stretching, so if you find yourself going beyond any one training regimen, that’s totally fine.

Strength & Conditioning Training

Endurance is a huge part of tree planting hour after hour, day after day. The key to building endurance is with cardio-based conditioning training and strength building exercises that focus on repetitions more than weight. A great place to start with our blog on at home training tips, which outlines some tree planting exercises that you can make more difficult as you progress, making them perfect for everyone, regardless of their skill level.

If you don’t like any of our exercises, you can always do your own. We recommend leg, back, and forearm exercises, because those are the muscles you’ll use much. If possible, we also recommend you do body-weight/callisthenic exercises, instead of ones that isolate specific muscle groups. Although isolated weight training can be very helpful for some things, it’s been found that they don’t do as good of a job at strengthening your stabilizing muscles, which can leave them prone to overexertion. Callisthenics and body-weight exercises, on the other hand, do a great job of targetting the main muscle groups alongside the stabilizer muscles, making them ideal for tree planters.

Coordination Exercises

A rolled ankle could end your day quickly, and the environments planters work in are full of roots, rocks, brush, holes, and other obstacles that will hurt you badly if you’re not careful. Ensuring that you’re comfortable moving around on the block is a key component to training that is often overlooked. The best way to train coordination is by spending as much time in the forest as possible. Hiking is a great way to start learning to trust your feet while on the block. Once you’ve gotten fairly comfortable, you can graduate to trail running, if you’d like, which doubles as a great conditioning exercise as well.

The key, especially with running, is to be very careful not to go too hard too fast. The worst thing you can do is end your season before it begins by getting too cocky and rolling your ankle on a trail run you weren’t ready for. Walk before you run (literally), and don’t overdo it.

During the Planting Season

Once the season starts, you’ll learn quickly how well you really prepared. Still, there are a few tips that you can use that will help you prevent injuries throughout the planting season. Here are our tips:

Start Slow and Ramp Up

No matter how well you trained, your first couple weeks of tree planting won’t be your best, with one exception. One surefire way to make your first few weeks your most productive is by overdoing it early on, getting injured, and never 100% recovering for the rest of the season.

Your body takes time to build its strength back and adjust to the tree planting routine. Spend your first week or two at 80% output, then ramp up to full output. Spend the first chunk of the season working on your form and rhythm, both of which will help you in the long run. Soon enough, your body will acclimatize and you’ll be able to go full out without a second thought. The same principles apply every day - Make sure to give yourself time every morning to warm up. Your body will thank you in the afternoon.

Use Proper Tree Planting Technique

Adopting the proper technique with optimal ergonomics is crucial for reducing repetitive strain. It also helps increase productivity in the long term as well. Luckily, we already have a blog on planting ergonomics, which we recommend you familiarize yourself with before hitting the block.

Take Regular Breaks

Nobody likes taking breaks, and we understand why. That said, taking a quick break every once in a while for some water and a bite to eat is crucial for long-term stamina and health. They don’t have to be long, but they do need to happen. If you find yourself getting into the zone throughout the day and forgetting to break, set an alarm on your phone to remind yourself. You’ll thank yourself later - we promise!

Build an Effective Recovery Routine

After a day of work, your body’s job is to recover so you’ll be able to do it all again tomorrow. There are three key components to great recovery: Nutrition, Stretching, and Sleep. Eating the right foods means you’re replenishing your body with the nutrients its used throughout the day. Stretching allows your body to stay limber and stay strong over time. Sleep is arguably the most crucial because it’s when your body actually repairs and replenishes your overworked tissue. We already have a blog on after-work recovery tips, which you can read here.

Listen to Your Body

If you ignore every tip except one, we hope that this is the one you listen to. Always listen to your body, and if something hurts, make sure you give yourself enough time to heal properly. It can be tempting to ignore injuries to try to maximize your days, however, even if you make more money that day, you risk making the injury worse and ruining your productivity in the long term, or even ending your season altogether.