#AskKen How To Lift Properly
@djbadvlad:
Hey, Ken, here's a question for you. So I'm potty training a 35 pound toddler. I'm picking them up at different times of the night, taking them to the toilet, and nobody really ever taught me how to pick up OD weights before or weights whatsoever. So I'm hoping you could share some tips and tricks on how to avoid injury and to pick pick up properly.
@kensmith:
Hey, Vlad, that's a great question. That's a comment I get quite often. How do you pick something up with core engagement? Right? There's three steps:
You want to keep a little bit of curvature in your spine. We'll call that a mouse house. So you don't want to tip too far forward. You want to tip too far back. You want to be right in the middle where your spine feels neutral.
Next is these fingers are your psoas muscle, which is a muscle that's right along the front of your spine. This one, your thumb, is your transverse abdominus. It's like a tire that goes around your waist. You want to take your psoas and sink it back onto your spine, tight like an Anaconda squeezes its prey. And then push your thumbs away from each other so that your core feels nice and tight and engaged.
Then you use your hips and knees to bend down to pick something up and then come back up with your core engaged.
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