Injured by House Cleaning

The Ask a House Cleaner Show and Podcast with Angela Brown

Have you been injured by cleaning? Here are some prevention tips the professionals use. In ten minutes a day, you can have a stronger core.

Have you been injured by cleaning? Here are some prevention tips the professionals use. In ten minutes a day, you can have a stronger core. And you can have stronger abs, hips, clearer head, better balance, and more. Your muscles will thank you.

Listen: Injured by House Cleaning

Watch: Injured by House Cleaning

Hey there, I’m Angela Brown, and this is Ask a House Cleaner. This is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question, and I get to help you find an answer. You can find this and 400 other answered questions in this series on our YouTube channel.

Injured By House Cleaning

Injured by house cleaning. Is that even a possibility? Can you get injured by house cleaning? The answer is yes. Now, I want to back up for just a second. And I want to go back to the COVID pandemic. We are now almost a year into the COVID pandemic. When everything in the house cleaning business slowed down for a lot of house cleaners and they took some time off.

Then when they started coming back, they were a little bit out of shape because they had not been working out as much as they had every day before the pandemic. So, now house cleaners are getting injured in record numbers and they want to know, is this possible? And what do I do differently?

So a couple of things that we have to take a look at, is when you are starting out in the house cleaning business, and you’re brand new, you usually don’t start out going a full eight-hour day, because our bodies are not ready for that.

House Cleaners Can Get Worn Out Easily

We’ve gone from maybe a desk job to now cleaning houses, which is physical movement, it’s bending, it’s stretching, it’s lifting things, it’s vacuuming, it’s a lot of movement. And then suddenly house cleaners are like, “Wow, I’m so tired. I’m so worn out.”

And then, because they don’t stretch and warm up first, then they end up pulling a shoulder muscle, or they end up tweaking out their back, or their hips, or their knees. And so the question is, what do we do about the house cleaning injuries? Well, the best medicine for house cleaning injuries is prevention.

So, as you’re building up to a full schedule, what happens is you start getting stronger and stronger and your muscles start being able to take more with every day of practice.

You Have to Warm Up for a Marathon

Now, if we stop for a second and we think of an athlete, now I’ve run 29 marathons myself and I can tell you by running marathons that you don’t start out and go run a three-and-a-half-hour race, right? You have to warm up, you have to stretch.

You have to make sure that you’re limber and you’re ready to go before you even start running, otherwise, you’re going to pull a ligament, or a muscle, or a tendon, or something like that, right? So, you have to kind of warm-up and stretch and get ready to go.

It’s the same with house cleaning because, for many house cleaners, they work from sunup until sundown, and there are a lot of solo house cleaners that do this, they work two, three houses a day.

Your Body Takes a Beating While House Cleaning

What happens is you need to stretch and warm-up, because what happens when you go to clean a house, whatever your dominant arm is, it’s going to take a beating. You’re going to be doing a lot of wiping, a lot of cleaning glass, a lot of moving with the vacuum.

There’s a lot of movement, that’s going to take a hit from your shoulder, okay? Just your shoulder alone. And then you have to look at your wrists. You have to look at your back, because there’s a lot of moving, bending over bathtubs, reaching over sinks.

There’s a lot of bending, moving, stretching, reaching things and so your body is going to get a good workout, but you don’t start out going to clean for six or eight hours a day. You don’t start doing that. That’s not a good move.

Start Out Every Day With Some Stretches

So, my recommendation is to start out every single day with some stretches and these don’t have to be fancy stretches, but if you’re just standing flat-footed, you can go up on your toes, stretch out your calf muscles, and you can do some squats that will stretch out your quads and your butt area and your back and your abs.

And also for your core, this is important for your core, that you have a strong core for house cleaning. That’s important. And for the core, what I recommend is one of those little mini-trampolines.

Now I’ve personally had four mini trampolines that have been taken from employees over the years because they are so amazing. And they do such a great job of realigning your spine.

I Use the Mini Trampoline Every Day

Now, I have one right now that you cannot take because it’s the only one I have left. And I use it every single day. I actually have it right now between the bathroom and my office desk. So if I’m going back to my office desk after I’ve used the bathroom, of course, because you don’t want to jump if you have to use the bathroom, I’ll just give you a fair warning.

But if you are on your way back before you get back to your office, before you get to whatever the sedentary moment of your life is, jump for a few minutes. And the reason being is it shakes everything back into place. Jumping on the mini-tramp realigns your spine, it resets your lymphatic system.

It jumpstarts your blood flow again, it removes the dead oxygen that’s just sitting there from you having sat for a few minutes. It just gets everything going again and now you’re ready to keep going.

Start Out the Day With Some Exercise to Prepare Your Body

So, my recommendation is to start out the day, just a few jumps. And at the end of the day, put your mini-tramp in front of the television. And if you are watching TV before you sit down before you get comfortable, spend 10 or 15 minutes and jump, and you don’t have to jump high, your feet don’t have to come off the mini-tramp. It’s kind of a motion that re-aligns your entire body and it realigns your spine, and gets everything back into place.

So if you’ve had a day where you’re out cleaning houses and you come home and you feel like, ” Oh, my neck is tweaked, or my shoulders are tweaked, my back is tweaked.” This will reset everything.

And after three decades in the business, it’s better for me than any chiropractor appointment I’ve ever had. It’s better for me than any medication or anything that I’ve ever taken for aches and pains and what have you. It resets everything.

Put Exercise Into Your Daily Routine

And so it’s become a part of my daily routine now for three decades. I use my little mini-tramp every single day without fail, it’s a part of my routine because staying in shape and staying core fit is imperative to the cleaning industry. So if you are having stress and aches and muscle joint pains, I recommend getting some stretch bands.

They’re not expensive, but you can even use them in your car, for small stretches. You can do it above your head. You can wrap them around and then do them for one arm or the other arm. There are lots of stretches you can do that will help strengthen your body so that when you get up on to the job that your body is not falling apart, or that since you just jumped in and you didn’t warm up, that your body then likes, “Oh, something just snapped. I just heard a snap.”

And then your back or your neck goes out and you’re like, “Oh, I can’t move, eh uh.” And then you’re in a lot of pain.

A Lot of Cleaners Have Fallen Out of Their Routines

Right now, more than ever house cleaners have fallen out of the routine as they’re going back full force into the workforce, cleaning houses. This is the most important time that we stop and we realize that the prep work we do like a regular athlete would do.

The prep work is so important to maintaining the longevity of your shoulders, your neck, your back, your knees, your hips, your butt, your entire body because you’re using all of those muscles when you clean houses. So, I want you to stop before you clean.

I want you to stretch and limber up and do a few exercises so that you’re not starting out and working all day cold, because like I said, you would not do that as an athlete. We are in a similar situation.

Prevent Injuries While House Cleaning

If you’re cleaning for six or eight hours a day where you’re using all those same muscles and all that same energy. So, give yourself the freedom and the latitude and the respect of stretching and warming up before you start cleaning. And I promise you, it will prevent and reset a lot of your injuries back to feeling fantastic once again.