Chiropractic care aligns the spine to allow for good joint function and mobility, stability, muscle balance, and overall body function which prepares the body for strenuous exercise and outdoor activities.
The uneven ground and loose rocks on hiking trails can cause sprained ankles, trips and falls. How can chiropractic care help the body develop good balance and flexibility to face these obstacles without injury?
Dr. Luke Stringer: Yeah, great question, Liz. And it’s all built around how well your body can deal with stimulus. Stimulus is basically walking on loose rocks and uneven ground, things of that nature. So, within the body you have little things called mechanoreceptors, essentially they pick up on movement. So, for example, our patient base is typically corporate America and we’re really sedentary in our lifestyle, that typically means that we’re not moving much. So, if we’re not moving much the mechanoreceptors within joints that pick up on sensory stimulation don’t work as well.
So, when you come to see a chiropractor, your spine and the joints, so it could be hip, knee, foot and ankle, essentially get adjusted. When you’re getting adjusted it stimulates mechanoreceptors in the spine and the joints and activates them, so this allows you to develop that sensory response to dealing with walking on an uneven trail. And the better you are at dealing with stimulus, the better you are at kind of staying on your feet, mitigating trips and falls.
Also too, if you go to a chiropractic office, every chiropractor practices differently. Talking about how we practice, we’re involving specific stability exercises of the lower extremity as part of our care plans. For the majority of people, for example, the number one cause of disability is lower back pain. So, in treating the lower back, you’re not just physically treating the lower back, you’re treating it with adjustments, soft tissue therapy, traction, but you’re also supplementing that with a lot of rehab. That involves diaphragmatic breathing. The diaphragm’s important to control pelvic floor and core. Your core is going to be involved in balance, so it’s not just coming from your ankle, it’s going to be coming from those core muscles. As you go through a program that we deliver, you’re working on those foundational muscles in the core and your obliques so when you’re out walking you’re going to have more stability in your trunk. It’s going to give you more stability down into the lower extremity. The more stable you are through being able to deal with the stimulus and the ability to physically stabilize your body, the more it is going to allow you to exercise, if that’s hiking, trail running, mountaineering with obviously a reduced risk of injury.
Hiking sometimes involves some steep climbs. Can chiropractic care help improve the strength and agility required to tackle some tough hikes?
Dr. Luke Stringer: Yeah, I think it absolutely can. It’s all going to be based around what the patient wants and needs. So, we have many a patient who comes into the clinic and their goal is to be athletically able. “Get out of pain so I can go on hikes and bike rides and enjoy the summer.” So, it all depends on a case-by-case basis. If you break down strength, what is strength? Well, you need cardiovascular strength. Cardiovascular strength is going to allow you to have the aerobic capacity to hike up steep hills, and elevation. But then what controls your breathing is your diaphragm and what controls your diaphragm is the third, fourth, fifth nerve in your neck. So obviously if you’ve got poor neck health and you’ve got poor diaphragmatic control, then you’re not going to be able to handle a really arduous aerobic hike up a steep hill elevation compared to someone who has better neck health and better diaphragmatic control.
Chiropractors can specifically help with that. And in regard to agility, back into our last question, agility is part of our ability to move and balance and be nimble. Well, when we’re in pain and we have dysfunction in lower back and the pelvis, that can trickle down into what we call the kinetic chain, that’s the hip, knee, foot and ankle. And if you’re not functioning well there, limited range of motion, inactive muscle balance, then those things are going to be a lot harder.
So again, every chiropractor is different. In our clinic, we call it the 360 Degrees of Wellness in regard to our approach. We want to get your spine in alignment. We want it to move well, we want the tissue to be healthy, we want the muscles to be balanced and then obviously be fit and able. So yeah, someone who’s under chiropractic care, I would like to think is going to have the ability to perform at a high level that someone isn’t, particularly when you’re talking about that arduous type of exercise.
Setting up a campsite involves a lot of lifting, twisting, and using different muscles you don’t use every day. How can a chiropractor help prepare the body for these types of movements to avoid pain and injury?
Dr. Luke Stringer: Yeah, great question. So, it’s all about your mechanics really, right? If we’re bending and we’re lifting and we’re twisting, how are we doing it? So, we educate our patients as they come through the office on how they should be sitting at work, how they should be standing at work, and then essentially how they should be functioning in the gym. So that’s proper mechanics of how to bend and lift without causing injury. Again, every chiropractor is different. However, for example, if you’re bending and lifting and twisting, the consequence of that can be low back pain. You’re shoveling snow or, like you said, you’re out at a campsite. So obviously you need the low back and the pelvis to be healthy, so it’s healthy or it’s the spine that moves well. It needs to have full range of motion, it’s a prerequisite for a healthy joint, so get the spine adjusted. It needs to be loaded well, that comes from the alignment.
You can get the spine in alignment through corrective traction. That’s going to allow good weight distribution. We obviously need healthy muscle balance or health, so it allows things to move freely. So that’s why we’re going to be doing a lot of soft tissue therapy within the office, breaking down muscle adhesion which is like glue in a muscle. And then lastly, we need to move with stability. So, then you need hamstrings that are engaged, glutes that are engaged, core muscles that are engaged, and then obviously following that up with good mechanics, bending at the knee, not from the hip. When you’re bending, it’s a hinge, not a hip.
So yeah, if you’re going through a correct care plan in our office, we’re going to be addressing all those key points. And if you follow through on your treatment plan and then all the education advice that we give you as you go through the program, there’s absolutely no reason why you should be breaking down when you’re out laying down at your campsite.
Sleeping in a tent is quite different than in your own bed. So how can chiropractic care help prepare you for a decent night’s sleep in a tent?
Dr. Luke Stringer: Yeah, great question. I think sleep comes from us being able to tap into what we call the parasympathetic nervous system. So that’s when we go to sleep and it’s kind of called rest and digest. So, eyes enter rapid eye movement, and the body just gets to regenerate.
When you are chronically stressed, so stress manifests in three forms, right? It can be traumas or car accidents, or microtraumas like being pinned to your desk. It can be stress in your environment so work deadlines, or family grievances. And then it’s modern-day America, the average patient is overly medicated with possibly poor dietary habits. This puts us in a stressed state, which is the sympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system is our flight or fight response, like you’re getting rear-ended on the freeway. When we’re trying to sleep, we need to be able to enter the parasympathetic nervous system to get that deep sleep and rest and regenerate. So obviously sleeping under the stars in the wildlife’s going to help just put you in that kind of place.
The spine, if it’s in alignment, it’s moving well, it’s not under stress from poor posture or poor joint mechanics, it’s going to allow us to sleep better. And then again, leaning into our patient education. It’s a really, really common question we get asked, Liz, is, “How should I sleep? How do I sleep?” So, we take our patients through how to sleep, “Don’t sleep on your front, put your back in extension, it creates rotation in the neck. Let’s sleep on the side or on your back. If you’re sleeping on your side or your back, this is how we sleep. Good neck posture, good low back posture.” We educate all our patients on that. That’s a key piece too, obviously when we’re done with treatment, keeping them out of our office. So, we continue to be proactive. So, anyone who’s under chiropractic care, I’d say a good number who ask their chiropractor, “How do I sleep?” Well, you’ve been educated in how to sleep, then that should follow through on how you sleep in the tent. So, you should be able to get a good night’s rest.
What is a typical chiropractic care treatment plan like for someone who wants to improve their spine health in order to be active and pain-free in outdoor adventures?
Dr. Luke Stringer: Yeah, great question. And the beauty of chiropractic is, it’s essentially an art form. I’d say a negative effect, per se, would be how it’s practiced, and take that in regard to how you could see five different chiropractors and each chiropractor would have a different approach to healthcare. It’s all come back to the premise of being holistic. No drugs, no surgery, an inside-out approach, we’re not putting things in a body to fix them inside. We’re fixing the internal dysfunction to get where we need to get to. So that’s the kind of mantra of chiropractic, but then how you practice, you can practice however you like. So, each chiropractor is different.
However, in our practice, that’s exactly what I want to achieve is essentially objective long-term results, which comes from a healthy spine. Your spine houses your nervous system and your nervous system controls everything in the body like feeling and function.
So, what do we need? We need good joint function, joints that move well. When the joint moves, it allows us to create stimulation of discs. The discs stay nice and healthy and hydrated. It fires up those mechanoreceptors so the joints can pick up on movement. We need a spine that’s in alignment. So, if you’re out of alignment, we need to get it in alignment. That comes through our chiropractic biophysics protocol where we’re tractioning the spine. It’s going to create objectivity and long-term results. And then obviously we need healthy muscle tissue. So, we have postural changes, a previous injury can create weak and flexible muscle tissue. So, in our programs, we’re addressing that with myofascial work. And also too, to be pain-free outdoors, well, you need a spine that moves well and that’s in alignment with healthy muscles, which can allow you to do that. Then you need balanced muscle strength.
So again, you’re going through orthopedic exams and neurological exams and movement assessments to figure out where the dysfunction’s coming from. Then obviously from there, you can rehab those muscle groups that aren’t doing their job due to compensation injury, corporate posture, for example.
Again, we’re built to move. When we don’t move, big muscles switch off. So then when we go from 9:00 to 5:00, Monday to Friday, and then we get outside and go hiking and moving, if things aren’t engaging and activating properly, then that’s going to create dysfunction, which essentially over time is going to break us down. So, our approach is a four-pronged approach, and we get great results, and we can offer objective improvements. So, any of the above is going to help. If you do them all together, that’s the best results.
If you are interested in speaking with Dr. Luke Stringer visit www.southloopchiropractor.com or call (312) 987-4878 to schedule an appointment.
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