For decades, manual handling training meant one thing: bend your knees, keep your back straight, lift with your legs.
You would run a session, tick the box, file the attendance sheet and most businesses walked away assuming they were covered, both legally and on the floor.
They weren’t. And now the WHS Act and Regulators have said so out loud.
In September 2025, WorkSafe Queensland published a plain-spoken fact sheet, “How to lift” training to your workers. The message from this document is evident on the first line: you might think it’s the law. It’s not.
What the WHS Act and Regulations actually require
There’s a distinction hiding inside most people’s assumptions. WHS legislation does require training for manual task risks. It just isn’t the lifting-technique training you’re probably running.
What the law requires is hazardous manual task (HMT) training. To count, it has to cover the risk management process, the specific risks in each job and task, the controls and equipment your business has put in place, how to use that equipment safely, and how workers report a problem or the early signs of a developing injury.
“How to lift” training covers none of that. WorkSafe QLD is blunt about where it stands: it is not a complete WHS control measure, it does not in itself reduce injuries, and it fails to meet the legal requirements for controlling the causes of manual task injuries. The joint WHS Regulators’ Position Statement says the same thing across every state. This isn’t a Queensland quirk it’s a National Requirement.
Why teaching technique was never going to work
Here’s the part that should change how you think about your training budget.
A worker can have textbook form and still wreck their back. Lifting technique does little about the things that actually cause strains and sprains: the force and weight being moved, the damage that builds up from repeating the same movement thousands of times, vibration from tools and not quite right machinery, and the awkward or sustained postures forced on people by how a workspace is laid out. Add the psychosocial load on top, high job demands, time pressure, not enough support, and you have the real recipe for a musculoskeletal injury.
Telling someone to bend their knees alone doesn’t shift any of those. You can run that session every year and watch your injury numbers go up or sit exactly where they were, because you’ve trained the person and left the system untouched.
What good training actually looks like
This is where most “manual handling training” on the market falls short, and where the Backsafe System was built to do the opposite.
Compliant, effective training starts before anyone steps into a training room. It starts with a proper broadbased manual handling training that takes into account existing moving habits of the workforce and then builds new healthier habits. It includes a risk assessment: a proper audit of the physical demands of the tasks your people actually perform, so you know which jobs are hurting them and why. From there it identifies controls that remove or reduce the risk at its source, then trains your workers on the equipment, aids and creates safe systems of work you’ve put in place, not on a one-size-fits-all posture.
It also takes psychosocial hazards seriously, because stress and musculoskeletal injury are linked, and any program that pretends otherwise is working with half the picture.
Line that up against WorkSafe’s five “must do’s”, consult your workers, identify and assess the hazards, control them, review regularly, and train people on your actual systems, and something becomes obvious.
Real manual handling training isn’t a lifting lesson.
It’s also a risk management program that happens to include training.
Backsafe does all of this, and has for 35 years
We didn’t reshape our approach when the current position statement was made. It’s how we’ve worked for over three decades.
Our risk assessment audit training allows you to properly address the real demands of your workplace and bring to the surface the gaps before anyone else gets hurt.
Our training addresses both the physical and the psychosocial drivers of injury, and it does it in a way people actually remember, which is the entire point of our edutainment approach. Dry, forgettable sessions don’t change behaviour. Engaged people do.
And because one session doesn’t build a safety culture, we train your team to carry it. Our Train the Trainer and Manual Handling Champions programs put credible, capable coaches inside your business, so safe work gets reinforced every day rather than once a year on a calendar reminder.
The result is training that clears compliance instead of scraping under it. It also pays for itself, through lower workers’ compensation costs, fewer injuries, and a workforce that understands the “why” behind every task.
The takeaway
If your manual handling training still ends with “lift with your legs”, you don’t have control. You have a liability dressed up as one. The regulators have made that plain, and your injury statistics have been making it plain for years.
The fix isn’t a better lifting demo only. It’s a program that assesses your real risks, controls them, and builds the in-house capability to keep them identified and controlled in real time.
