Before Davy Snowdon began teaching others how to lift properly on the ramp, he was learning firsthand how to safely lift even heavier objects up and over his head.
Snowdon, founder of Pristine Condition, Oxforshire, UK, spent years as an Olympic weightlifter before going on to serve as a strength and conditioning coach to all 32 teams that represented Great Britain at the Summer Games in Barcelona in 1992 and Atlanta in 1996. Additionally, he was appointed national coach to Great Britain’s women’s weightlifting team in 1992, taking them to the title of “Champions of Europe.”
Snowdon recognized that the anatomical skills and expertise he gained for his sport and coaching others to master Olympic lifts were a perfect match to teach workers how to improve manual handling techniques. His knowledge of anatomy, kinetics and exercise physiology has enabled him to apply these basic principle to essential areas of safety and wellbeing for ramp workers as well as across many other different work settings.
“Using Olympic weightlifting techniques for manual handling, our clients have seen significant benefits,” Snowdon says. “Some companies we’ve worked with have achieved unprecedented results – in some cases, a 100 percent reduction in the number of recorded manual handling incidents, accidents and claims.
ASIG
We first learned about Snowdon and his company several years ago in a cover story on a safety program put into place by the ground service provider, ASIG (“ASIG’s ZIPP,” February 2012).
At that time, D. Bradley Keith, ASIG’s director of health, safety, environmental and training, highlighted an interesting fact: three-quarters of ramp accidents at ASIG sites are so-called "soft tissue" injuries. These are the assorted sprains and strains to muscles due to strenuous activity. While certainly painful, these injuries are far from the life-threatening events that make the news after an accident on the ramp. However, they remain one of the most frequent types of work-related industries across any industry that requires workers to routines lift manually.
Technically, what Keith was describing are musculoskeletal disorders – injuries or pain in the body's joints, ligaments, muscles, nerves, tendons and structures that support the limbs, neck and back The most common results of MSDs are the inflammatory conditions that cause pain and impair normal activities.
To stop such common injuries, ASIG was just in the early stages of trying out Snowdon’s program at its Atlanta and Heathrow sites.
Pristine assesses the tasks ground crews perform daily and produces customized videos along with jobsite training and online material that employees can watch and learn from rather than just read a stack of books and sit in a classroom.
“Reducing handling injuries is quite simply about changing people’s habits,” Snowdon explains, “exchanging a bad one for a good one.” His company predicates much of its success to three drivers:
- Individual buy-in to the change.
- Monitoring that change.
- Management support to maintain the change.
“The harsh reality is that initiatives fail when any of those three is deficient,” he adds. Also, when it comes to manual handling training, conventional wisdom also overlooks one simple fact.
“The body doesn’t tell you every time you get it wrong,” Snowdon explains, “only when you’ve got it wrong too often – but that’s when it’s too late.
Snowdon says to consider that statement in the context of the extreme manual handling tasks of Olympic weightlifting. Here’s where you’ll see athletes lifting a maximum amount of weight off the ground in a single lift.
TECHNIQUE, NOT WEIGHT
“Injury is a huge fear for any athlete and weightlifters are no exception,” Snowdon says. “Yet even when a competitor fails a lift, they don’t get injured. Why? Olympic Weightlifting has evolved, with athletes striving for anatomical technical perfection, minimizing the pressure they place on their body. As a result, even though they’re moving weights far beyond so-called ‘safe’ guidelines, weightlifters are rarely injured trying.”
That’s proof to Snowdon that avoiding injury is primarily not about weight, but about technique.
Teaching that technique is where Pristine Condition’s “bespoke” videos make the the difference. Readers can see some excerpts of the videos, typically all filmed at the customer’s jobsite, at the company’s website, www.pristinecondition.com.
“Conventional manual handling training is too generic,” Snowdon explains, “using unrealistic scenarios of lifting empty cardboard boxes from perfectly flat floors onto precisely positioned, waist-high tables. Your employees’ workplace isn’t like that, so don’t be surprised when they don’t buy into that message.”
To get employee buy-in, Snowdon says consultants need to deliver practical training, using lifting principles that everybody will buy into because they genuinely believe it reduces their chances of being injured. Those principles need to be easy to follow and applicable to any handling scenario.
“Crucially though, training needs to be delivered in an engaging way, so it’s remembered positively,” he adds. “For example, is ‘Death by PowerPoint’ really promoting engagement?
After the employees on the frontline buy into the Pristine approach, the company also follows up throughout the organization’s management to keep the positive changes moving forward.
“With poor handling technique, supervisors are less confident about what actually is right, even if they instinctively know something is wrong,” Snowdon says. “Simplicity is the watchword. Lifting principles are either right or wrong with no grey areas.”
Combining the training with regular safety audits and Snowdon believes any company can greatly improve safety and productivity.
“The top asset in any organization should be the staff who work there,” Snowdon says. “Health and wellbeing is of the highest importance. What could any company do without staff? It goes without saying, the more you improve the health and wellbeing of the staff, the more you improve the health and wellbeing of the company.”
