Cynthia Flores will visit 18 states this year teaching farmers how to work without getting hurt.
She wants them to see themselves as athletes, and over the past four years, her unique “Labor-Movement” workshops helping them do so have taken off.
The Freeport resident spent 20 years as a vegetable farmer in western Maine and trained as a strength athlete, becoming a personal trainer certified in functional fitness. She started teaching on Maine farms in 2020 and now travels coast to coast offering free grant-funded workshops.
Simple adjustments to how you approach physical movement can reduce neck, shoulder, back and knee pain. By making these changes, farmers and homesteaders can preserve their most important tools: their bodies.
Flores’ workshops, and educational materials on her website and Instagram, reframe farmers as “athletes in overalls” who need all the things athletes do — nutrition, hydration, rest and stress management.
“That helps people change the way they view themselves and what they’re willing to do,” she said.
Flores teaches that physical stress is a combination of how often and how long an action is done. Using different patterns of movement reduces stress. When spending a few hours transplanting seedlings, for example, one could cycle between bending, kneeling, half-kneeling and squatting before any one position starts to hurt.
A consistent principle is keeping an aligned spine, which uses larger groups of muscles, and engaging your core. When bending at the waist, preserve your back by “hinging,” or keeping your spine straight and moving at 90 degrees.
Squeezing your glutes reduces the weight load on your back and opens your hips.
When picking up something heavy from the ground, like a harvest tote, a farmer might approach with feet close together and lift with just using arms.
As an athlete, you would place your feet widely and “pack” your shoulders, or move them down and back to use the strength of your body. When you lift, push your own weight against the ground.
Squatting will be made easier by keeping your feet wide and pushing your knees outward slightly, rather than keeping them underneath you.
Lauren Bruns, who grows flowers and rakes blueberries at Gray- and Dresden-based Lost & Found Farm, said she uses information from the workshops every day and shares it with others.
“I rely 100 percent on my body for my business to operate,” she said, meaning it’s vital for repetitive movement to be sustainable.
Work processes can be adjusted, too. For example, when looking down to work with seedling trays in the greenhouse, your neck and back muscles are supporting up to 60 pounds of weight from your head.
Raising the table height, standing with your legs wider to make yourself shorter, sitting on a high stool or tilting trays are all options to vary or minimize that strain.
Even with adjustments like these, different people may be suited for certain positions on the farm based on their strengths, Flores said.
Labor-Movement is unique for teaching these principles in person, which Flores said contributes to its success and expansion out of New England. This year she’ll teach from Maine to Washington state.
Other resources are online, without someone there to see the participants and advise them.
“People might intellectually understand the content, but to experience for themselves feels different,” she said.
Flores hopes to find a way to expand Labor-Movement and keep it running so it outlives her. Online feedback and social media comments praise the workshops for making farming much less painful and more personally sustainable.
“My hope is that people are curious about how their body works and that they understand their capacity and that their capacity is not the same as everyone else’s,” Flores said. “Everyone has a high value regardless of how many totes they can pick up.”
