Physical Preparation for AV

Introduction

Nobody warns you about the bodies. You arrive for your first load-in expecting to learn about signal and instead spend eleven hours moving heavy awkward objects up ramps, down stairs and into a truck, and the next morning you discover muscles you did not know you had.

Then you meet the people who have been doing it for twenty years. Some of them move like athletes. Some of them cannot lift their arms above their shoulders any more, and have a story about the night it happened. The difference between those two groups is not luck, and it is not strength. It is a set of habits, most of which take no extra time at all once they are automatic.

This book is about those habits: how the work loads a body, what the published guidance actually says about safe lifting, how to prepare for a physical career, how to eat, drink and sleep across a show day, and how to tell the difference between ordinary soreness and an injury you must not work through.

What This Book Is Not

This is not medical advice, and it cannot be. It has not examined you, it does not know your history, and it is not a physiotherapist, a doctor or an occupational health professional.

What it can do is set out what the published standards say, what the work demands, and what experienced crew do about it -- and be clear about the point where the answer stops being "work smarter" and starts being "go and get seen by somebody qualified". That point comes up several times in this book, and every time, the advice is the same: go.

• Pain that is sharp, sudden, or in a joint rather than a muscle.
• Numbness, pins and needles, or weakness in an arm or leg.
• Pain that wakes you up, or that is worse the next morning.
• Any back pain with loss of bladder or bowel control -- this is an emergency, go to hospital.
• Anything that is not steadily improving after a few days.

How to Use This Book

Read the first three chapters before your next load-in; they are the ones that prevent the injury that ends careers. The rest can be read in any order. Each chapter ends with a reference table, a procedure, a failure table written symptom first, a practical exercise and a checklist.

Keep a notebook

Write down what hurt, when, and what you were carrying. A single sore back after a load-out tells you nothing; the same shoulder at the same point of the same kind of call, three times, tells you what to change.

Write down the weights you move regularly. Most crew have no idea what a case they lift forty times a week actually weighs, and the number is what turns "it's heavy" into a decision about whether it is a one-person lift at all.

Write down sleep and what you ate on the long days. The failure on a fourteen-hour call is almost never strength; it is fuel, water and sleep, and those are the three things nobody tracks and everybody blames something else for.

A note on the words

The formal name for this subject is manual handling, and the British acronym you will meet in training is TILE — Task, Individual, Load, Environment — the four things to look at before you lift anything.

The NIOSH revised lifting equation produces a recommended weight limit for a given lift: a starting load of 51 pounds, reduced by how far the object is from your body, how high or low it starts, how far you twist, how often you repeat it, and how well you can grip it. It is not a legal limit and not a test of toughness; it is a way of saying out loud that the same box is a different lift in a different place.

A note on safety

The hazard in this book is cumulative, which is why it gets ignored. Nobody is carried off a job by the lift that injured them — the weight that does the damage is the ten thousandth repetition of a slightly wrong movement, and by the time it announces itself it has been happening for years.

Two rules survive every system. If it is too heavy, it is a two-person lift, and asking for the second person is the professional move rather than the weak one. And the mechanical aid — the cart, the ramp, the tail lift, the hand truck — beats technique every time, because technique gets worse as you get tired and a cart does not.

Where this book sits

This book assumes nothing. It is about the body that does AV work, and it is worth reading before your first load-in rather than after your first injury.

What pairs with this

• AV Fundamentals 101 — what all this equipment actually does
• Touring Fundamentals — the schedule this body has to survive

Where it leads

These are not steps in an order. Take whichever one fits.

• Set & Stage Etiquette — how to behave on the stage your body is now ready for
• Safety Awareness & Rigging Basics — the hazards beyond the ones you lift

The Physical Demands of AV

Before preparing for the work it is worth seeing it clearly: what gets lifted, how often, for how long, and under what conditions. The demand is higher than most people outside the trade imagine, and the people inside it often stop noticing.

AV work is physical — prepare for it healthily.

AV is physical work

A show day is manual work bracketed by technical work. The load-in is two to six hours of moving equipment; the show is standing, walking and concentrating; the load-out is the same work as the load-in, compressed into less time, at the end of a sixteen-hour day, usually at night, often in the rain.

The pattern repeats. On tour it repeats daily for weeks. In a venue it repeats for every event. The cumulative load is what matters: a single heavy lift rarely injures a healthy person, but a thousand slightly careless lifts across a year very often does.

This is why the trade has its characteristic injuries -- lower backs, shoulders, knees, and hearing -- and why they show up in people's thirties and forties rather than their twenties. The damage is accumulated, which also means it is preventable.

Healthy, sustainable preparation

Preparation is not about becoming an athlete. It is about having enough general strength and cardiovascular fitness that a show day is within your capacity rather than at the edge of it, and about habits that keep the load off the vulnerable parts.

The evidence-based target is modest and public: 150 to 300 minutes of moderate aerobic activity a week, or 75 to 150 vigorous, plus muscle-strengthening work on two or more days. That is the same guidance given to office workers, and it is enough. Nobody needs a gym membership to survive a load-in; they need a body that is not starting from zero.

The sustainable part matters more than the intensity. A career in this trade is decades long, and the goal is to arrive at the end of it still able to do the work, or still able to choose to.

The loads you will actually lift

Naming the weights makes the risk concrete. A wheeled rack of amplifiers can be 80 to 150 kg, moved on castors but lifted up a ramp by two people. A line array cabinet is 40 to 60 kg each and comes out of a cart at shoulder height. A subwoofer is often 60 to 100 kg. A drum riser deck, a scaffold plank, a section of truss: all in the 20 to 50 kg range, all awkward.

Awkwardness matters as much as mass. A 20 kg cable coil held close to the body is easier than a 12 kg flat panel held at arm's length, because the load on the spine depends on both the weight and how far from you it sits. This is not opinion; it is the reason the published lifting equation has a horizontal term.

• Amplifier and processing racks: 80-150 kg, on castors.
• Line array cabinets: 40-60 kg each, lifted from carts.
• Subwoofers: 60-100 kg, usually two-person or machine.
• Truss sections: 20-50 kg, long, awkward, two-person.
• Cable coils and multicores: 15-40 kg, dense and floppy.
• Flat panel screens: 15-60 kg, fragile and wide -- always two people.

What a show day asks of a body

The demand is cumulative, which is what makes it preventable.

How to do it

1. Look at the weight marked on the case, if there is one.
2. Decide whether it can be rolled, slid or pushed instead of carried.
3. Decide whether it is a one-person or a two-person item, and say so out loud.
4. Check the route before lifting -- ramps, steps, doorways, cable on the floor.
5. Only then put hands on it.

What goes wrong

Practice it

At your next load-in.

How Backs Get Hurt

Every rule about lifting comes from one piece of mechanics: the further a load sits from your spine, the harder your back has to work to hold it. Understand that and the rules stop being arbitrary.

The mechanism

Your spine is a column with muscles attached close to it. When you hold a weight out in front of you, your back muscles have to generate a much larger force than the weight itself, because they are pulling on a very short lever while the load sits on a long one. The compressive force on the lower spine is many times the weight in your hands.

That is why holding a 10 kg box at arm's length is harder and more dangerous than holding a 20 kg box against your chest, and why every piece of lifting guidance in the world says the same thing first: keep the load close.

Add twisting and it gets worse: rotating under load puts uneven stress across the discs. Add repetition and the tissue does not get time to recover. Add fatigue and your technique degrades exactly when the margins are thinnest.

The six things that make a lift harder

Moving loads by hand has a name in safety guidance -- manual handling -- and it has a published equation behind it. The NIOSH revised lifting equation is a useful way to think even if you never do the arithmetic. It starts from a load constant -- 51 pounds, about 23 kilograms, the most a healthy person should lift in ideal conditions -- and then reduces it for six factors to give a recommended weight limit for that particular lift.

• Horizontal distance: how far the load is from your spine. The single biggest factor.
• Vertical height: where the lift starts. Floor level and above shoulder height are both worse than knuckle height.
• Travel distance: how far the load moves vertically.
• Asymmetry: how much you twist.
• Frequency: how often you lift, and for how long.
• Coupling: how good the grip is -- handles, or a smooth case edge.

Every one of those is something a crew can change. Move the case closer before lifting. Raise it onto a deck first rather than lifting from the floor. Turn your feet instead of twisting. Share the frequency around. Use the handles, or add straps.

How heavy is too heavy

Crews argue about this constantly, and the honest answer is that there is no single number -- which is exactly what the equation says. Twenty-three kilograms is the ideal-conditions maximum, and real conditions are never ideal. A 23 kg case lifted from the floor, at arm's length, with a twist, fifteen times an hour, with no handles, has a safe limit far below its actual weight.

The useful concept is the ratio between what you are lifting and what would be safe in those conditions -- the lifting index. Below one, the lift is within guidance for most healthy workers. Above one, risk rises; above two or three it is high for most people, whatever the crew room says about who is strong.

So the working rule is not "can I lift this?" but "should this be lifted this way?" -- and the answer changes when you bring the load closer, raise its starting height, remove the twist or add a second person.

A ten-second assessment -- task, individual, load, environment

British safety guidance uses a four-part check called TILE -- task, individual, load, environment -- and it fits in the time it takes to walk up to a case.

• Task: what is being done -- lifting, carrying, pushing? Twisting? How far, how often?
• Individual: who is doing it -- their size, strength, training, and whether they are already tired or injured.
• Load: how heavy, how big, how stable, how easy to grip.
• Environment: floor surface, space, lighting, weather, ramps and steps.

Run it every time until it becomes automatic. Most bad lifts fail on environment -- a wet ramp, a dark loading bay, cable across the route -- rather than on the weight in the case.

Bodies differ, and the guidance knows it

The published figures describe what is safe for most healthy working adults under stated conditions. They are not a statement about you specifically, and the assessment used across the trade puts the individual in as one of its four terms for exactly that reason.

Height, reach, build, age, training, pregnancy, a previous injury and simply how much sleep you had all change what is reasonable today. Two people of the same weight can have very different safe limits, and the same person has different limits at 8 a.m. and at midnight.

What follows is practical rather than political: crews should size lifts to the people present rather than to an imagined average, pair people sensibly for long loads, rotate the heaviest work, and treat "this is too much for me right now" as useful information rather than as a confession. A crew that cannot say that is a crew that will carry somebody's injury later.

The six factors, and what a crew can do about each

Every one of them is changeable on site.

Task, individual, load, environment

Ten seconds before you touch anything.

How to do it

1. Bring the load close to your body before taking its weight.
2. Raise it to about knuckle height if it starts on the floor.
3. Clear and light the route; remove cable and obstacles.
4. Decide how you will turn -- feet, never spine.
5. Improve the grip: handles, straps, gloves.
6. If it is still awkward, get a second person or a machine.

What goes wrong

Practice it

With a case you can lift safely and a tape measure.

Safe Technique

Technique is what turns the mechanics of the last chapter into something your hands do without thinking. Most of it is about avoiding the lift altogether, and the rest is about keeping the load close and the spine out of it.

Lift and move correctly to protect your body.

Safe lifting

"Lift with your legs, not your back" is the slogan everyone knows, and on its own it is not enough -- it says nothing about the two things that matter most, which are how close the load is and whether you twist.

The full version is short. Stand close, with your feet apart and one slightly forward for balance. Bend your hips and knees rather than stooping from the waist, and keep your back in its natural curve rather than rounded. Get a firm grip, bring the load against your body, and straighten your legs smoothly without jerking. Look ahead rather than down once you are up. Turn by moving your feet.

Setting down is the half people skip, and a lot of injuries happen there: the same rules apply in reverse, and the temptation to drop the last few inches is where fingers and backs get hurt.

Safe movement and not overdoing it

Movement between lifts matters as much as the lifts. Walking with a load, stepping over cable, backing through a doorway, working on a ramp: these are where feet get trapped and balance gets lost. Keep the route clear, keep your eyes up, and never walk backwards with a load if there is any alternative.

Not overdoing it is a skill rather than a virtue. It means taking the second person, taking the extra trip, taking the dolly, refusing the lift that is obviously too much, and being the person who says "that is a two-person case" in a room where nobody else will.

Push, pull, slide and roll

The safest lift is the one nobody performs. Most AV equipment is in wheeled cases precisely so it does not have to be carried, and the crew's first question should always be whether the thing can roll, slide or be pushed instead.

Pushing is safer than pulling, because you can use your body weight and see where you are going. Push from the chest and hips with the load close, rather than with arms extended. On a ramp, never get below a heavy wheeled case -- if it runs away, it runs over whoever is downhill.

Sliding a heavy item along a deck, or using a skate, a dolly or a hand truck, replaces a lift with a push. Ramps replace stairs. Tail lifts replace ramps. Each substitution takes a minute and removes an entire category of risk.

Team lifting, and calling the lift

Two people lifting without one voice is more dangerous than one person lifting alone, because the load shifts unpredictably onto whoever is not ready. Team lifting needs a caller: one person who says what is about to happen and counts it in.

The caller checks both people are ready, agrees where the load is going, and counts -- "ready, steady, lift" -- with the lift on the last word. The same on the way down. If anything changes mid-lift, the caller says "down" and it goes down, together, now.

Match people sensibly by height where you can, because a long load carried by two people of very different heights tips its weight onto the shorter one. And on a stair or ramp, the person at the lower end carries more; swap ends regularly.

Cases, castors, ramps, stairs and truck decks

Most crew injuries happen around the specific hazards of moving gear rather than during a textbook lift.

• Castors: check they turn before you push; a jammed castor stops the case and not the person.
• Ramps: heavy cases accelerate. Two people, one at each side, never below the load.
• Stairs: the worst place for a heavy carry. Find another route, or use straps and take one step at a time.
• Truck decks and tail lifts: mind the gap and the edge; never ride a tail lift with a load unless it is designed for it.
• Doorways and corners: the pinch points where hands get crushed.
• Wet floors and rain: everything above becomes worse.

Working alone

Much AV work happens alone -- a single technician in a meeting room, an early call before the rest of the crew arrives, a load-out where everyone else has gone. Alone, the margin for a bad lift disappears, because there is nobody to take the other end and nobody to find you if something goes wrong.

The rules shift accordingly. Anything marginal waits for help rather than being attempted. Wheeled routes matter more. Tell somebody where you are and when you expect to finish, especially for out-of-hours work. And if the only way to do a job alone is a lift you would not do in front of a safety officer, the honest answer is that the job needs two people, and saying so is part of the work.

Replace the lift wherever you can

Each substitution removes a whole category of risk.

Calling a team lift

One voice. Everyone moves on the same word.

How to do it

1. Assess: task, individual, load, environment.
2. Decide: roll, slide, push, or lift -- and one person or two.
3. Position: close, feet apart, one foot slightly forward.
4. Grip, bring the load to your body, and lift with hips and knees.
5. Move with your eyes up, turning with your feet.
6. Set down with the same care as the lift, all the way to the floor.

What goes wrong

Practice it

With a colleague and a heavy case, somewhere safe.

The Rest of the Body

Lifting advice concentrates on backs, but this trade also wears out shoulders, necks, knees, hands, feet, eyes and ears. Most of that damage comes from position and repetition rather than from weight.

Overhead work, shoulders and neck

Hanging fixtures, dressing truss, fitting screens and working on ladders all put the arms above the shoulders for long periods. The shoulder is least stable in that position and the neck is extended, and hours of it produce the impingement and rotator-cuff problems that are common in older crew.

Reduce the time rather than the effort: lower the truss to working height where possible, use a platform or a lift so the work is at chest height, break overhead tasks into shorter stretches, and swap with somebody. Where the work must be overhead, keep the load light and close, and take the arms down between tasks rather than holding them up during pauses.

Repetitive work

Coiling a hundred cables, driving a hundred screws, taping a floor for an hour: no single action is heavy, and the total is what injures. Repetitive strain in the forearms, wrists and elbows is common and slow to heal.

The defences are rotation and variety. Swap tasks with somebody every so often. Use a powered driver rather than a hand one where you can. Learn to coil cable properly, which is easier on the wrist as well as better for the cable. And notice the ache early: the first warning of a repetitive injury is discomfort that appears sooner each day.

Hands, feet, eyes and ears

• Hands: gloves for load-in and rigging, off for anything requiring feel. Most crew injuries are to hands.
• Feet: proper boots with toe protection and grip. You will stand for fourteen hours; cheap boots are a false economy.
• Eyes: safety glasses for overhead work and anything that throws debris. Never look into a laser or a bright fixture at close range.
• Ears: filtered plugs from the first soundcheck, not from when it gets loud. Hearing damage is permanent and cumulative.

Knees deserve a mention too: crouching to patch, kneeling on decks and working on the floor all add up, and knee pads cost almost nothing.

Warming up before a load-in

Nobody warms up. The work starts cold at seven in the morning with the heaviest lifting of the day, which is exactly the pattern a sports coach would design to cause injuries.

Five minutes is enough to change it: walk briskly for two or three minutes, swing the arms, do a few squats without weight, roll the shoulders, and take the first few lifts deliberately lighter and slower. That is not a training session; it is raising tissue temperature and waking up the movement patterns before loading them.

The parts that wear out, and why

Position and repetition, more than weight.

How to do it

1. Walk briskly for two or three minutes, or carry light items first.
2. Swing the arms forward and back, then across the body.
3. Do ten slow squats with no weight.
4. Roll the shoulders and turn the neck gently both ways.
5. Take the first two or three lifts deliberately lighter and slower.

What goes wrong

Practice it

Over one show day.

General Fitness

Fitness for this trade is not a physique. It is having enough capacity that a show day sits inside your normal range rather than at its edge -- because everything degrades when you are at your limit, including judgement and technique.

Healthy condition for the work.

Healthy general fitness

The public guidance is clear and modest: adults should do 150 to 300 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity a week, or 75 to 150 minutes of vigorous activity, plus muscle-strengthening work on two or more days covering all the major muscle groups.

For a crew member, the aerobic half is what keeps you working at hour twelve, and the strength half is what protects the joints during the lifting. Neither requires a gym. Brisk walking, cycling, swimming and stairs all count for the first; bodyweight squats, push-ups, rows and carries cover the second.

A useful way to think about it: the work itself is not training. Load-in is heavy, irregular and fatiguing, and it builds very little of the general capacity that makes it safe. The training has to be separate, and gentler than the work.

A healthy approach to fitness

The healthy approach is unglamorous and sustainable: moderate, frequent, and adjusted around the work rather than added on top of a sixteen-hour day. Training hard the morning of a load-in is worse than not training at all.

Avoid the two traps. The first is the crash programme before a tour, which produces soreness and injury rather than capacity. The second is treating the work as the workout, which produces the specific overuse patterns this whole book is about.

Training on a schedule that has no routine

Touring destroys ordinary training plans, so the plan has to be one that survives being interrupted. That means short sessions, equipment-free options, and a rule for what to do on a bad day rather than an all-or-nothing programme.

• Keep it to twenty or thirty minutes so it fits anywhere.
• Use bodyweight movements that need no gym: squats, push-ups, rows on a bar, planks, carries.
• Walk deliberately -- venue to hotel, stairs instead of lifts.
• On a show day, do nothing extra; the day is enough.
• On a travel day, do something short; it is the best chance you get.

Two moderate sessions a week that actually happen beat five planned sessions that do not.

The weekly target

The published guidance for adults, applied to a crew schedule.

How to do it

1. Pick two short strength sessions a week and put them on travel days.
2. Add walking deliberately -- venue to hotel, stairs, the long way round.
3. Keep sessions to twenty or thirty minutes and equipment-free.
4. Do nothing extra on a show day.
5. When a week falls apart, resume; do not try to make it up.

What goes wrong

Practice it

For two weeks.

Fuel, Water, Heat and Cold

A show day runs on whatever you ate at the catering time somebody else chose, and often on nothing at all between then and midnight. Fuel, water and temperature decide how the last hour goes, and the last hour is when people get hurt.

Eating across a show day

Catering happens when the schedule allows, which is rarely when you are hungry. The pattern that causes trouble is a large meal at an odd hour followed by six hours of heavy work with nothing, and then a load-out on an empty tank.

What works is eating something before the load-in even if you do not feel like it, eating at the provided meal even if it is early, and carrying something for the gap -- fruit, nuts, a sandwich. Nothing exotic; just avoiding the long empty stretch.

Riders and catering vary enormously, and in a lot of the trade the only food available at 1 a.m. is whatever a garage sells. Carrying your own is not fussiness; it is the difference between a bad night and a fine one.

Water, and why dehydration sneaks up

Heavy work in a warm venue loses a surprising amount of fluid, and the first symptoms of dehydration are tiredness, headache and poor concentration -- which crews read as a long day rather than as thirst.

Drink through the day rather than in large amounts at breaks. Carry a bottle with your name on it. Watch the colour of your urine, which is the simplest field test there is. And treat caffeine as what it is: useful, and not a substitute for water or sleep. Alcohol after a show is a personal matter, but it is worth knowing that it worsens both dehydration and sleep quality.

Heat, and the illness that kills people

Outdoor shows, roof work in summer and hot venues all bring heat illness, and it is the hazard on this list that kills people every year. The published guidance is deliberately simple: water, rest, shade.

Acclimatisation matters more than fitness. Somebody new to working in heat, or returning after a week away, is at much higher risk, and should build up gradually over several days rather than doing a full day immediately. This is why the first hot show of a festival season causes the casualties.

• Heat exhaustion: heavy sweating, weakness, dizziness, nausea, headache. Stop, move to shade, cool, drink, and tell somebody.
• Heat stroke: confusion, no sweating or very hot dry skin, collapse. This is a medical emergency -- call for help, cool the person immediately, do not wait to see if they improve.

Watch each other, because the person becoming confused is the least able to notice it. A crew that checks on one another during a hot load-out catches this early.

Cold, wet and wind

Cold is a slower problem but a real one: cold muscles injure more easily, cold hands drop things, and standing still in the wind at an outdoor gig for eight hours is genuinely dangerous in a way an hour is not.

Layer rather than wearing one heavy coat, keep a dry layer in your bag, and keep your hands functional -- gloves that allow work, and somewhere warm to put your hands between tasks. Wet plus wind is the combination that produces hypothermia even at moderate temperatures.

Across a show day

The aim is simply to avoid the long empty stretch.

Heat illness

Know the difference. One is a warning; the other is an emergency.

How to do it

1. Find the water and the shade before the work starts.
2. Build up gradually if you or anyone is new or returning to heat.
3. Drink through the day rather than at breaks.
4. Rotate people out of the sun; take breaks before they are needed.
5. Watch your colleagues for confusion or stumbling.
6. Treat any suspected heat stroke as an emergency immediately.

What goes wrong

Practice it

Over one show day.

Sleep and Fatigue

Sleep is the recovery that everything else depends on, and this trade is organised against it: late finishes, early starts, buses, time zones and adrenaline. Fatigue is also the factor most strongly linked to getting hurt.

How much, and why it is hard here

Adults need around seven or more hours a night, and crew routinely get five. The problem is structural rather than personal: a load-out finishes at 1 a.m., adrenaline keeps you awake until three, and the next call is at eight.

You cannot fix the schedule, but you can protect what sleep is available. Wind down rather than going straight from load-out to bed. Keep the sleeping space dark and cool. Treat the two hours before sleep as a different mode -- less screen, less caffeine, less argument about the day.

Sleeping on the road

On a bus you sleep in a moving box with eleven other people. The things that work are unglamorous: earplugs, an eye mask, a consistent bunk routine, and a rule about noise in the corridor that everybody keeps.

In hotels, black out the light, set the room cool, and resist the urge to make the day-room a social room. Naps work -- twenty to thirty minutes is enough to restore alertness without leaving you groggy -- and a nap before a load-out is worth more than an extra coffee.

Fatigue, judgement and injury

Fatigue does not mainly make you weaker; it makes you worse at deciding. Tired people take the shortcut, skip the second person, carry instead of rolling, and misjudge a step. That is why the injuries cluster at the end of the night rather than at the heaviest moment.

Treat tiredness as a hazard with controls, the same as any other. Slow down deliberately in the last hour. Insist on the second person for anything marginal. Say out loud when you are past useful, because the culture will not say it for you.

Protecting sleep on a schedule that fights it

You cannot change the call time. You can change the rest.

How to do it

1. Eat something and drink water before trying to sleep.
2. Give yourself thirty minutes of wind-down rather than going straight to bed.
3. Make the space dark, cool and quiet -- mask, plugs, blackout.
4. If the sleep is short, plan a nap before the next load-out.
5. Tell somebody if you are genuinely too tired to work safely.

What goes wrong

Practice it

Across a run of shows.

Recovery & Sustainability

Recovery is what turns a hard day into training rather than damage. Over a career it is the difference between a body that adapts to the work and one that slowly loses to it.

Care for your body and last in the industry.

Pacing and recovery

Pacing means spending your capacity deliberately across the day rather than emptying it in the first two hours. The people who sprint the load-in are the people struggling at load-out, and the load-out is the more dangerous end.

Recovery between shows is mostly sleep, food and movement. Gentle movement on a day off does more than complete rest -- walking, swimming, easy cycling -- because it keeps things moving without adding load. Stretching helps how you feel, and the honest evidence for it preventing injury is weaker than the industry assumes; do it because it is pleasant and keeps range, not as insurance.

A sustainable career and overall wellbeing

A career in this trade is long, and the bodies that survive it belong to people who made small adjustments early rather than heroic ones late. That means taking the second person at 25 as well as at 45, wearing the plugs from the first year, and treating the first twinge as information.

It also means expecting the work to change. Many people move from the heaviest roles into engineering, design, management or training as they get older -- not because they failed, but because a career has stages. Planning for that is part of physical sustainability.

Wellbeing is broader than muscles. Irregular hours, time away from home and the intensity of show days take a toll that is not physical, and the same rule applies: notice it early, say it out loud, and get proper help rather than waiting for it to become serious.

What recovery actually needs

• Sleep, more than anything else.
• Food and water, especially protein and enough total calories.
• Gentle movement rather than complete stillness on days off.
• Something that is not work, and people who are not crew.
• Days genuinely off, where the phone is not the job.

Recovery, in order of effect

Sleep first. Everything else is secondary.

How to do it

1. Start deliberately slower than you can; the day is long.
2. Take the breaks that exist, even briefly.
3. Eat and drink before the load-out, not after.
4. Slow down as fatigue arrives rather than pushing through it.
5. On the day off, move gently rather than doing nothing at all.

What goes wrong

Practice it

Across one run.

When Something Hurts

This trade has a culture of working through things, and that culture is how a strain becomes a career-ending injury. This chapter is about telling ordinary soreness from a problem, and about the point where the right answer is a professional rather than a colleague.

Soreness or injury?

Ordinary muscle soreness after heavy work is dull, symmetrical, spread over a muscle rather than a point, worst a day or two later, and steadily improving. It is uncomfortable and not alarming.

An injury tends to be different: sharp or sudden, in one place, in a joint rather than a muscle belly, worse rather than better the next morning, or accompanied by swelling, weakness, numbness or pins and needles. Those are the ones to act on rather than absorb.

What to do in the first days

Stop doing the thing that hurt. Keep moving gently within comfort rather than immobilising completely, because early gentle movement is now the usual advice for most soft-tissue injuries. Manage the pain reasonably. Do not test it repeatedly to see whether it still hurts.

And tell somebody. Reporting is not an admission of weakness; it is what makes the injury the production's problem rather than yours alone, and on most shows it is a requirement. An unreported injury is also an uninsured one.

When to see a professional

This book is not medical advice and cannot examine you. Some signs mean stop reading and get seen.

• Sharp pain, a pop or snap at the moment of injury.
• Numbness, pins and needles, or weakness in an arm or leg.
• Pain that wakes you or is worse in the morning.
• Any joint that is swollen, unstable or will not take weight.
• Back pain with loss of bladder or bowel control -- go to hospital now.
• Anything not steadily improving after a few days.

For persistent problems, a physiotherapist is usually the right first professional, and many will see you without a referral. For anything in the list above, that is a doctor or a hospital, today.

Why working through it is a bad trade

The reasoning people use is short-term and understandable: the show, the money, not letting the crew down. The arithmetic is poor. Working through a strain typically turns a fortnight of modified duties into months of trouble, and the compensations you adopt -- favouring one side, changing how you lift -- create second injuries elsewhere.

The crews that handle this well have a norm: say it, adjust the task, and nobody makes it a story. That norm is set by senior people, so if you are senior, set it.

Soreness or injury

The difference is in the character, the location and the direction.

How to do it

1. Stop the task; do not finish the lift.
2. Sit down and assess honestly against the list above.
3. Tell the person running the crew, and make sure it is written down.
4. Keep moving gently within comfort; avoid the aggravating movement.
5. If any red-flag sign is present, get medical help today.
6. Agree modified duties rather than disappearing or pushing on.

What goes wrong

Practice it

Before you need it.

Physical Preparation Mastered

None of this is complicated. It is a set of small habits that, repeated across a career, decide whether the work uses you up or not.

Healthy readiness for sustainable AV work.

Healthy physical readiness

A physically ready crew member has enough general fitness that a show day sits inside their capacity, technique that keeps loads close and spines out of it, the sense to roll rather than carry and to ask for a second person, and the protective equipment on before it is needed.

They eat and drink across the day, protect the sleep the schedule allows, pace the day so something is left for the load-out, and know the difference between soreness and an injury.

Building healthy physical habits

Habits beat intentions, because at 2 a.m. nobody makes good decisions from first principles. Pick two or three and make them automatic before adding more.

• The ten-second check before every lift.
• Plugs in from the first soundcheck.
• Water bottle with your name on it, filled at every break.
• Two short training sessions a week, on non-show days.
• Saying 'that is a two-person case' out loud.

A year of those five costs almost nothing and changes the shape of a career. Add the rest when they are automatic.

The thirty-year view

The crew who are still doing this at fifty are not the ones who were strongest at twenty. They are the ones who protected their hearing early, asked for help without embarrassment, reported the injuries, kept some general fitness, and adjusted the work as they went.

That is available to anyone, and it costs less than the alternative.

Habits worth automating first

Start with these; add the rest once they are automatic.

How to do it

1. Pick one, not five.
2. Attach it to something that already happens -- the first case, the first soundcheck.
3. Do it for two weeks without judging the result.
4. Notice when you skip it, and what the circumstance was.
5. Add the next one only when the first is automatic.

What goes wrong

Practice it

Starting on your next show.

Competencies this book closes

Physical Preparation for AV is mapped to the PHYS_PREP cluster in the Reboot Gap Library. It is the healthy-physical-readiness topic of the Safety & Physical track. (General guidance, not medical/fitness advice.)

Assessment

Hands-on & sign-off

This book encourages healthy, sustainable physical readiness and self-care. The learner understands AV's physical demands, healthy fitness, safe technique, pacing, and recovery. It is general guidance, not medical/fitness advice — consult professionals for your individual situation.

Glossary

What the gear actually looks like

Every device named in this book, in one place. Recognition is the whole point of Chapter 4 — use this page to attach a picture to each name before you meet it on a dock at six in the morning.

Audio

Dynamic microphone

Condenser microphone

Wireless handheld

Radio rack

Mixing console

Stage box / snake

Power amplifier

Main loudspeaker

Subwoofer

Stage monitor wedge

In-ear monitors

DI box

Video

Camera

Video switcher

Scaler / processor

Projector

LED wall panel

Confidence monitor

Lighting & control

Conventional fixture

Moving-head fixture

Lighting console

Dimmer

Show controller

Media server

Networking & infrastructure

Network switch

Patch bay

Equipment rack

Power distribution

Cable tester

A properly coiled cable

Connectors, close up

XLR

TRS / TS ¼-inch

SDI on BNC

HDMI

Cat5e / Cat6 (RJ45)

Fiber optic

DMX (5-pin XLR)

AC power — not signal