Literally, I mean digging. Nothing scientific about it, but you can work smarter. With some simple tips you can dig much easier.
When your digging you can and often will enter in various issues and with simple fixes you can easily dig quite big wholes/trenches. (Remember your history lesson about WW1?)
How big of a hole?
Good question it depends 20m3 of dry sand isn't that hard in some days without having to move it far away for a fit guy. Digging becomes 2/3 times as hard if you have to move away the dirt.
if you're mainly digging grass/clay/rocks then 5m3 could be the max. Hiring an excavator is often a good plan if you want to do it by hand then get at least motorized transport of the soil.
I've dug at least hundreds maybe thousands+ cubic meters in my life by hand, but mostly sand what's 4x easier than almost every other type of soil.
Finally, I'm all for equality, but digging is brutal for the arms, shoulders, and lower back exactly the muscle groups that tend to be weaker in women. I highly recommend women not to dig more than 30-60 minutes in a day and see how the body handles it the next day. it's easy to get serious back injuries from this. There is a reason why mainly soldiers and prisoners and the poor were digging by hand in history.
The most common issues are one of the below:
Tough Grass
Grass is tough you have to cut the grass, not digg the grass. If you got a tractor with a frontloader scrape off the first 20cm of grass it will save you a lot of effort by hand. if not you got to use a spade. A spade is basically a much stronger and importantly a sharper shovel. Push it in with your legg not your arms are when it's in you hang backwards pulling out the grass. Trying to force this with you arms exhaust you within 30 minutes.
Clay
Clay is a bitch, it's heavy, it sticks and you again have to use the spade. Try to avoid digging more than 2m3 of clay by hand. dig clay like butter thin slices...
The only exception is dried out clay that easily breaks because of high sand content this isn't the worst to dig away.
Rocks in Soil
Break the soil with a spade and dig it away with a shovel. If it's really rocky you got to use a pickaxe and diggin will be very slow. It's not as heavy as clay, but it's slower. A light pickaxe is often better than a heavy pickaxe. When it's all broken up you can move it out with a shovel.
** High water level**
A high water level requires a pump or good timing. In many places the water level changes 1 or 2 meters per season. It's obviously the time to dig when the water level is much lower. Don't try to dig standing in the water just wait or use a pump.
Skill
Dig calmly without being out of breath. The best is to copy the old digging style of American prisoners singing during the dig. Singing forces you to slow down because when your out of breath you can't sing. Even though they are smashing rocks but digging has the same idea.
Biggest project I've dug took me half a year. Sometimes I wasn't digging for days or weeks. I needed soil and needed sand and a pond would be a nice benefit. This has been at least 500 m3
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