The Right Tool Makes Exercise a Joy!

If you love to garden, grow your own food, paint your yard
with color, or cultivate specialty plants for the bees, it is
probably fair to say that at some point both the work and
the exercise required forced you to stop earlier than you
wished. If you are a professional gardener or landscaper,
stopping is not a luxury, and you press on with arms, back,
and various muscles aching. The gardening limitation is not
your desire, it is your tools.

As a fervent gardener, when a catastrophic hand accident
caused the loss of some fingers, fingers used to grip and
manage tools, it became clear to me that finding a solution
which allowed me to continue my passion was mandatory.
There have been many prototypes and incarnations of this
tool along the way – if you have read the website you are
familiar with the journey. I call it the Earth Lifter Tool, or
ELT. It was first designed to lift potatoes with one hand.
However, as time moved ahead, I also found the ELT has
many more practical and important applications.

Historically man used his hand as a shovel, and the fingers
were the forks, until craftsmen began carving, curving, and
finally forging these shapes into actual tools. Arms and
hands that previously acted as a shovel or a fork evolved
into tools that were lengthened for leverage, a pretty cool
concept. The problem of course is that the entire body is
enlisted in the use of these tools, and using them requires
twisting, bending, lifting against gravity and resistance,
causing your spine to become the fulcrum. It is the first
(main?) reason you stop gardening for the day, or grab a
couple pain pills.

Since necessity has to do with invention, I
discovered through the prototypes that a two-handed tool
could be used with one hand by creating a built-in fulcrum to
safeguard the spine, as well as shifting the weight
restrictions. This was an early realization, and sent me
immediately into Archimedean Physics and Pythagorean
Geometry.

The ELT turns out to be an extremely sane tool for physical
and anatomical reasons, as well as the psychological reasons
which accompany body comfort. The bend on the back of the
tool creates the fulcrum which allows this new class of fork
to accomplish many tasks. The bend allows us to maintain
the proper anatomical orientation of our spine, front to back.
Bending properly is important for exercising our muscles,
and we all require motion to remain healthy. Movement
with resistance is how we evolved to ensure longevity. We
will discuss proper, varied whole foods in another blog.

As I mentioned above, the ELT can be used with one hand,
as the fulcrum carries the weight and gives the user greater
leverage. For many folks who are disabled on one side,
arthritic, elderly (did you say knees?), folks with a fragile
disc, they will be able to resume their love of gardening
again. Many will start a garden because of ELT’s sod busting
uses. Hobby farmers can come out of retirement. Harvesting
will be twice as fast with one-third the effort.

ELT is a multi-purpose and multi-season tool. You can pull
up grass, remove rocks, till the soil, mix the amendments,
pull up weeds and create the space where you can plant. A
few months later, the ELT can LIFT your potatoes and root
crops, lift your beautiful bulb tubers, and pull out stalks and
stumps. Year after year you have the garden you desire
while you invest, only once, in a tool that will become your
lifetime food and exercise machine.