Talking body stressing with Cornerstone Building

The Safety Charter team – Julie Forde, GM and Libi Carr, Project Officer – recently made a visit to Cornerstone Building to talk manual handling and heavy lifting.

The Cornerstone team are currently working on a large project building a church. They are getting ready to build and stand the wall frames and will soon start digging pile holes for foundations. They’re planning ahead and thinking about how they can look after themselves through this next period of work.

Being on the end of a spade is hard physical work. The lifting and twisting involved in digging holes increases the risk of body stressing and strain injuries to backs, shoulders, necks and knees.

We talked about belly breathing to encourage oxygen to the muscles, so they can work better and discovered Harry, the youngest on site uses belly breathing techniques for relaxation to get to sleep when he’s had a full-on day. “I didn’t know it was a thing,” Harry said, “my dad showed me how to do it.”

The site was a perfect spot to test the paper dart technique of bending and lifting. With one minute to build the perfect paper dart and splitting into two teams, we tested bending and lifting using correct muscle engagement techniques to retrieve the paper dart.

Thank you Cornerstone Building – your team were loads of fun!

You can check out our Safety Charter toolbox talk on Body Stressing. For more of the Safety Charter toolbox talks click here.