Back in November 2023, at TCI EXPO in St. Louis, Missouri, I gave a presentation titled “The One Thing to Rule Them All.” The premise of the presentation was based upon finding one thing we can focus on in our day-to-day work to help with our longevity in the industry, to make sound decisions on the job site and to prevent accidents, incidents and injuries. Work positioning, in my opinion, is that thing.
I devote a lot of time to work positioning in my personal climbing, and also with the folks I work with. I try to help others get into as perfect a spot as possible to do their job. Our arboreal world demands we get comfortable with being uncomfortable, so our focus needs to shift on how we can push back and create the best positioning we can.
Why it is important
I’m willing to bet you’ve been in a situation like this.
A cut needs to be made on a limb over a precious garden with the most unique garden gnomes from all over the world. It’s just the one limb, so you’ll run out there real quickly. Sure, your tie-in is less than ideal, and it’ll be a weird rope angle, but the limb can’t be that heavy.
You start moving out and realize it’s actually farther out the limb than you thought, which means your rope angle gets flatter with each step. You finally reach the spot where you need to cut, gripping the limb with your feet, knees, legs, belly, arms and maybe even bracing with your head, but you made it. But you didn’t bring anything to rig the limb with, and it wouldn’t make it down anyway with all the brush underneath you. You’re tired from struggling to get out there. So you opt to cut and throw it.
But once you cut it free, it’s way heavier than you thought. You start to panic a little. Now you’re stuck in a spot, your strength is failing and you don’t want to drop it, but you can’t move, and you get tunnel vision.
Sound familiar?
I’m sure it does, as I know, despite all my efforts, I still find myself in some version of this from time to time. It’s a constant battle to optimize how we stand, squat, sit, whatever and still find a way to make the cuts we need to make. It’s beautiful, but work positioning is something that requires our full attention and allows for a long career with fewer injuries and fewer broken fences.
Innovations and advancements
Our industry has progressed at a rapid rate over the last decade. Innovators such as Kevin Bingham, Jamie Merritt and Morgan Thompson have developed climbing devices that allow folks to access and work off of a stationary line in a way we could never do before. We’ve seen innovation and elaboration with ascender usage, specifically knee ascenders. Folks like Bryan Brock and Drew Dunavant opened our eyes on how to use the tail of our rope in creative ways to find perfect positioning and total control of how we move ourselves through the crown of a tree.
Harness technology has improved significantly. Manufacturers have pushed one another to innovate and try to drive comfort and performance to another level. Ropes have changed, personal protective equipment (PPE) has become lighter and more streamlined. Moving-rope systems have continued to progress, with pulley-incorporated friction savers, and mechanical climbing devices have made
pulling rope more pleasant than ever.
Handsaws are sharper and stay sharper than ever before, meaning we can dance around in the treetops without the added weight of a chain saw. Speaking of chain saws – what about battery saws?! Battery-powered chain saws reduce the wear and tear on the body. They eliminate pulling a starter cord and drastically reduce noise. All this stuff is awesome and has helped preserve our bodies and energy in profound ways. What a time to be alive!
Positioning is still an issue
With all that stuff, with all the new technology, with all the advancements that arborists could have only dreamt of 50 years ago, we still run into the same types of issues and the same types of accidents. Electrocution, struck-bys, falls and chain-saw cuts. I firmly believe work positioning is still the thing to focus on.
I say this because, if our positioning is poor, then we are straining our bodies more. If we’re straining our bodies more, we have less energy. If we have less energy, we rush. When we rush, we make bad decisions. When that happens, it tends to catch up to us – and not in a positive way, unfortunately. Simply put, if you’re comfortable, you’ll make better decisions.
For example, it’s not often you’ll see me body thrust into a tall tree these days. Usually that’s spurred by either a poor throw-line day or I’m teaching a new climber how to body thrust. For long ascents, I deploy some sort of an SRS system or, believe it or not, foot locking, engaging the large muscles in the legs as opposed to the small ones in the arms. The idea is to use the options available to conserve as much energy as possible in the initial ascent, in order to increase comfort and fun while doing the work I climbed all that way up to do.
My hope is that you, the reader, have that sentence stir something in you. To try to figure out how to blend all this technology together and harness the power of everything we have available. That should be a fun problem to solve, trying to master the art of moving through these trees. Striving to figure out how to find maximum comfort in a world that wants to offer us nothing comfortable at all.
Finding the balance point
What we’re searching for is, while gravity pulls down with a chain saw and all that gear hanging off our hips, our ropes and bodies should be finding the balance point that perfectly opposes it. The comfort that is gained with a high tie-in point, as great a rope angle we can generate and with our lanyard placed just right. Chasing that feeling. One of total control and the feeling that we are in the exact position, in the exact time, doing the exact thing we’re supposed to do. Using this to stand on small branches that blow the minds of folks who aren’t arborists. “How’d they get the rope up there, and how do they stand on that small branch?!”
Here’s a pro tip I learned from my good friend Derrick Martin regarding lanyard placement. When you’re climbing and get to where you start to feel unsure/unstable or want to make a cut, look at where you naturally want to put your hands. When trying to gain that stability in a spot, more than likely where you place your hand to brace yourself is precisely where you should place your lanyard. You innately know where you need to grab to keep yourself in place and find balance. That short rope we call a work-positioning lanyard is just that. A tool we deploy to give us the most optimal control, stability and freedom of movement when we are walking to the tips of branches or standing on spars.
Muscle memory
It’s simple, I know, and not necessarily a revolutionary way of thinking, but that’s what this craft takes. Repeating tasks over and over until it’s a part of our muscle memory to operate the way we should. Yes, that also means we can very easily develop poor habits, lazy habits – ones most often borne from lack of knowledge and/or production pressure while looking for shortcuts. In my experience, those “shortcuts” also lead to other accidents and injuries down the road, all of which could have been avoided by going to work on good practices.
Choose best practices daily
A bad practice, one-hand chain-saw use, comes to mind immediately. Trigger warning, and I know the hackles are going to go up here. But our bodies weren’t designed to handle that load – for many a year – without causing some sort of damage to the elbow, wrist and shoulder from muscle strain alone. We have a lot of small muscles and tendons that simply can’t sustain that load for decades. Looking at it in the way our industry and safety pros tend to look at it, there’s all the data of the countless injuries that come from accidentally cutting ourselves with said chain saw while operating it with one hand.
In many situations, opting for that “shortcut” results in a lot of pain, panic and time out of the tree. When I started in this industry, I used one hand on a chain saw. I don’t now. I choose to be better – for myself and for my family. Using two hands on the saw, along with all the other best practices of tree climbing, are chosen daily.
It’s the concept of prioritizing work positioning, pushing myself to see if I could be just as fast with two hands (yes, even in storm work and a bucket) by engaging my brain instead of relying on a body that wants to break down as I grow older. Simply focusing on getting comfortable, limiting reaching and being in a good position grants climbers the ability to use two hands on a saw and still be fast.
The spar
Getting back to climbing, removals are great at displaying where positioning is crucial as well, specifically when on the spar. While we’re in the crown, it’s tree work as usual. Overhead tie-in points to help access, position and set rigging when necessary. But then we get to experience one of the most special aspects to our line of work – the spar!
Standing on that spar is special. The exposure that it generates. The rigging required. The awkward cutting positions. The shanks digging into the arch of your foot from being supported by these tiny swords that allow us to stand where we couldn’t have before.
Yes, I’m talking about spikes, and if you’re not wearing spikes while removing a tree, you should be. Those spikes allow you to not strain the body unnecessarily, trying to lean back on ropes (putting extra strain on the back and core) and relying on stubs (which like to grab branches, ropes, you, etc.). But mostly spikes make it so you can stand in the exact spot you need to be in to keep away from the energy you’re releasing back to the ground. Whether it be by rope or by air, the saw will cut, the tree will shake and if you’re not stable, you’ll do a version of the cupid shuffle that looks worse than when you’re dancing at a wedding.
Summary
These are a few, very specific examples of some things I prioritize in my own day-to-day climbing, and with the group of folks I work with day in and day out. I prioritize these things when I’m conducting training, starting with work positioning and placing an emphasis on best practices. At the end of the day, if we’re comfortable and we have more energy in the tank, we will make better decisions. We’ll break fewer things. We’ll get hurt less.
Taking a few extra seconds to reduce the strain on our bodies and be in an ideal position translates in a powerful way as we, the makers of sawdust, age in this industry. Get comfy and enjoy the ride. Lean into the process and choose to do things better today. It starts there, and then it involves continuing to choose that path every day to be the best you can be. I’m sure you’ll thank yourself later.
Jeff Inman Jr., CTSP, is an ISA Certified Arborist, is ISA Tree Risk Assessment Qualified and is an ISA Tree Worker Climber Specialist. He is risk manager with Truetimber Arborists Inc., an accredited, 20-year TCIA member company based in Richmond, Virginia, and Truetimber Academy director.
This article was based on his presentation on the same topic during TCI EXPO ’23 in St. Louis, Missouri. To watch a video recording created for that presentation, go to TCI Magazine online at tcimag.tcia.org. Under the Resources tab, click Video.
