7 Yard Chores You Should Stop Doing After 60 (and What to Do Instead)

Nobody wants to be told what they can't do anymore. So this isn't that. It's a list of the chores that hurt the most people every fall, and the smarter way to get each one done yourself.

Every October, physical therapists and emergency rooms see the same wave: people in their sixties and seventies who did a perfectly normal yard chore the way they've always done it, and paid for it for weeks. 9: source crédible : citation réelle CPSC / AARP / kiné, ou reformuler en généralité

Falls from ladders. Backs thrown out by raking. Shoulders torn on a pull-cord.

The chores aren't going away. The way you do them can. Here are the seven to rethink.

1. Climbing a ladder to clear the gutters

The one that sends the most people to the ER, and the one everybody keeps doing. A ladder on soft fall ground, wet leaves, one hand full, the math is bad.

Instead: clear the gutter line from the ground. There are extension tools that reach the first-floor gutter with your feet planted. More on that in #5.

2. Raking for two hours on a Saturday

Raking is a twisting motion, repeated a thousand times, with your back bent. It's the classic autumn back injury, and it's usually not one bad move, it's the accumulation.

Instead: don't rake. Move the leaves with air, standing up straight, and let gravity and the curb do the rest.

3. Yanking a pull-cord on a gas engine

Ask anyone who's torn a rotator cuff at 65 how it happened. A surprising number will say "starting the mower" or "starting the blower." Ten hard pulls on a cold engine is a shoulder injury waiting for a day.

Instead: anything with a trigger. Battery tools have caught up; the good ones now move as much air as the small gas engines did.

4. Hauling wet leaf bags to the curb

A full bag of wet leaves is 30–40 pounds of awkward. Lifted from the ground, carried with your arms out, twelve times.

Instead: stop bagging. Blow the leaves into a bed as mulch, or to the curb line in a long pile the city truck can take. No lifting.

5. Doing all four of the above with four different tools

Here's the part I didn't expect to write. I went looking for the ladder-free gutter solution for my husband, and found one tool that quietly took over the first four chores on this list.

It's a small cordless blower called a KLAAST, 3.6 pounds with the battery, trigger start, and three heads that snap on the front. The one that matters for this list is the Storm tube: 50 cm long, and you can stack three of them to reach 150 cm. My husband clears the gutter line now with both feet on the ground. The ladder hasn't left the garage since.

It moves 375 CFM of air (enough to sweep the driveway in a few minutes without a rake) and it's 78 dB on the normal setting, a low hum rather than a scream. He runs it early on Sundays without a complaint from next door.

Two more heads come in the box, and they're what make #6 and #7 go away too.

6. Drying the car with towels in the sun

Reaching across a hood, twisting at the waist, dragging a towel, over and over, fast, before the water spots. It's the same repeated-twist motion as raking, just at chest height.

Instead: blow the water off. The KLAAST's Blade head has a soft rubber lip and rotates 360°, so you angle the air instead of your wrist. Whole car, standing upright, no towel.

7. Sweeping out the garage with a broom

Bent over, breathing dust, pushing a broom through corners it can't reach.

Instead: the narrow Jet head. Sawdust off the bench, dust out of the corners and the AC unit, standing up, in a couple of minutes.

The point isn't the tool

The point is that "I'll just do it the way I always have" is how most of these injuries start. The tool only matters because it removes the ladder, the rake, the pull-cord and the bending, which, if you look back at the list, is most of it.

We got ours direct from the company. 30-day money-back, which is the only reason my husband agreed to try it. It's now the thing he shows the neighbors.

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The kit with all three heads is the one that covers the whole list.

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