Is Safety Bad for Our Health?
My dad was old-school and something he said from time to time was, “safety third, if you want to get anything done.” If you think about it, it’s true. If it really was about “Safety First”, there wouldn’t be a welding bay to hang that sign in.
There would be no crab fishing, skyscrapers, bridges, or rocket launches. We wouldn’t have sailed across the Atlantic to build a new country. We wouldn’t have sailed at all. How crazy is it to build a structure out of wood, jump in, and leave the safety of land?
If it was all about safety, we humans wouldn’t exist today.
Yes, be safety conscious in the endeavor, but it’s the endeavor first. Probably second is finances, because money moves everything. But in reality, safety is at least third.
Unfortunately, in our efforts to make everything safer, we’re becoming weaker and that’s a problem, which brings me to brachiation and sarcopenia.
Wait … what?
Sarcopenia is a musculoskeletal disease in which muscle mass, strength, and performance are significantly compromised. Age is a factor, but most likely because we become less physically active as we age. It’s not so much age as strength and movement.
Sarcopenia is directly correlated with a decrease in longevity. According to a study by the National Library of Medicine, “weak grip strength is a key component of sarcopenia and is associated with subsequent disability and mortality.”
It can lead to other adverse health conditions, such as falls, fractures, functional decline, sarcopenic obesity, poor quality of life and cognitive impairment which all contribute to mortality.
A dynamometer is a tool to measure grip strength. The subject would grip the tool in one hand and squeeze as hard as they could. A dial would measure the amount of force in pounds. Grip strength is a highly reliable indicator of sarcopenia. The lower the grip strength, the more susceptible to the effects of sarcopenia.
Brachiating is the act of swinging from one object to another using our arms, like a monkey swings from branch to branch.
Many playground equipment manufacturers still produce overhead climbing elements, such as monkey bars, overhead ladders, and so on. However, when it comes to commercial playground design, there seems to be an overcompensation towards safety. We’ve greatly reduced the implementation of these brachiating elements and it’s having adverse effects.
Safety is actually hurting our health and longevity.
Humans and monkeys (apes) share a common anatomical ball-in-socket shoulder design and brachiating helps develop and maintain shoulder joint mobility, improves the balance of muscle tension around the shoulder girdle, and increases the strength and coordination of the shoulder muscles. As you can correlate, it increases overall grip strength.
Brachiating has so many other important benefits, such as it increases endurance, flexibility, and hand-eye coordination.
It develops kinesthetic awareness (moving our bodies through space without bumping into things or other people). Many structures in the body have nerve receptors that act as conduits for information that are sent to the brain. For instance, the ear sends explicit information to the brain regarding the head's orientation to gravity, acceleration, deceleration, and direction of movement. The brain also receives information from the eyes, muscles, ligaments, joints, etc. – which are required to allow your body to move smoothly, stay balanced, maintain posture, and react to the immediate environment.
Brachiating develops motor skills, such as depth perception and visual comprehension of distance as well as fine motor skills, important for writing, painting, and driving.
It relieves tension in the back and shoulders, improves depth perception and stimulates both sides of the brain for greater integration and learning, as well as problem-solving.
The list of brachiating benefits goes on, but the macro takeaway seems to be that if we want to enhance our overall health and longevity, we need to design playgrounds with these overhead elements.
Safety third means being safety conscious within the endeavor: focus, awareness, observation, engagement, and strategic risk-taking.
Let’s get out and play. It’s really good for us.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash