A box sits on the floor, and you pick it up in a sensible manner to distribute the load. Your leg and back muscles carry the majority of the weight. Your arms are close to your body, and your wrists are in a neutral position. Everything is just working as it should.
But when we turn to go up the stairs, we have to take the box up with us. And as we start to go up the stairs in a narrow Victorian staircase, our elbows are forced into our sides to try and get past the wall. So the load is transferred from our shoulders down to our forearms, and as we go up the stairs, our wrists are forced into an awkward position to try and hold the box. And as we turn around the quarter-landing, we have to twist our top leg around to avoid knocking into the banister. This all transfers the load to small, weak muscles which will very quickly become fatigued. This is the basis of the HSE’s guidance on how posture affects the risk of manual handling injury on awkward postures and their effect on the body: it’s not just that an unusual posture makes an activity unpleasant, it actually greatly increases the amount of stress on the muscles of the body that are undertaking the activity. And in the case of our Cheltenham box, the posture required to carry it up the stairs is so unusual that it results in the load being greatly increased. If you want Removals Cheltenham, express-removals.co.uk/removal-companies-near-me/removals-cheltenham is a good place to start.
The staircases in Cheltenham’s Regency and Victorian houses are often very narrow, very steep and on quarter landings – the worst possible time to have to go around a turn with a heavy load and be unable to reposition your hands to a more upright posture.
Work within removals in Cheltenham can often involve similar issues. Experienced removals staff within the town can normally work around such problems by planning the removals in a particular sequence before the van is unloaded. In this way, the removals staff can work out the best way of carrying items, the best angle of approach and where to put a load down on a half-landing rather than carrying it all the way up the stairs.