How to Combat Injury Risk in an Ageing Workforce
We’ve got an ageing workforce that are more prone to injury. It’s a common line, or some version of it, that I hear from safety leaders all the time. It’s…
Decades ago, it was decided how we’d teach manual handling in workplaces. They meant well, but what they built, and what the industry has been selling ever since, was never going to work. Not because trainers were incompetent, or workers weren’t listening, because the model itself was wrong.
And when it failed, the industry didn’t look at the model, it looked at the people – said training doesn’t work, said workers don’t listen! That conclusion gave businesses permission to stop trying and it has caused real harm.
So how did an entire industry get this so wrong?
Walk into any physically demanding workplace and you’ll find two groups: those who get injured and those who don’t. Same job, same demands, completely different outcomes.
Traditional training ignored the second group entirely. “Keep your back straight, bend your knees” has no foundation in how the body actually moves. My best guess is that someone watched injured workers bending through the spine and concluded the opposite must be correct – keep it vertical. But study uninjured workers, or people who’ve never been told how to move, and you see the same pattern – when people hinge at the hips, with balance, the back stays naturally aligned. The problem isn’t the spine, it’s a loading pattern repeated thousands of times a day.
Elite sport worked this out decades ago. You don’t coach a javelin thrower by studying people who drop the javelin, you study the record holder and build from the expert model. Manual handling training never did this. It built rules to avoid injury and never checked them against how capable, pain-free people actually move.
The standard session is slides, spine diagrams, a video of someone lifting perfectly in perfect conditions, then a tick in a box. That would work if movement were a knowledge problem. It isn’t.
Motor learning relies on physical experience, repetition, and feedback, not explanation. Skills are built through the motor cortex, basal ganglia, and cerebellum, and with practice, control shifts from conscious effort to automatic pattern. We already know this – you don’t learn to drive by reading the road code, and you don’t master chopsticks by studying hand anatomy. We can teach people physical skills everywhere else in life. The manual handling industry just never taught it as one; it taught it as information, and information doesn’t fire under pressure – habits do.
Even if the content and the method had been right, one session was never going to produce lasting change. Every sports coach knows you can’t coach a player once and expect them to perform under pressure. You teach it, drill it, watch it break down in a real game, and coach it again, until the movement is in the body, not the head.
Manual handling training delivered one session and expected the habit to stick. No reinforcement, no shared coaching language for supervisors, no repetition built into daily work. When workers went back to old patterns, the industry called it non-compliance.
They listened. They just weren’t given a process that could actually change how they move.
When the model failed, the industry didn’t examine the model. It decided manual handling training doesn’t work, and that education in this space is pointless. That conclusion has done more damage than the original bad training ever did, because it’s wrong.
People build complex physical skills constantly, in sport, trades, surgery, music. What failed wasn’t the workers’ capacity to learn. It was the method: wrong content, wrong learning approach, no habit-change strategy, and blame handed to the individual when it inevitably didn’t stick.
The businesses I work with who’ve cut manual handling injuries by 60, 70, and 80 percent didn’t get there by abandoning movement training. They studied the uninjured workers in their own teams, built skill through felt experience rather than theory, gave supervisors coaching language they could use on the floor, and treated safe movement as a habit to be built, not a rule to be remembered.
The training session isn’t the destination. It’s the first phase of play. The industry got it wrong for thirty years. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done. It means it has to be done differently.
Want to see what that looks like in practice? The free report covers why traditional training fails, what the research actually says, and what sustained injury reduction looks like in real NZ workplaces. Read it here.
Or find out how your current approach stacks up. Take the 3-minute quiz for an honest picture.