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What is More Mundane Than Neck Pain
Respect your neck
Your neck is an amazing structure. Take time to appreciate its functionality and absolute necessity and you will realize how important it is to protect. The neck is the main support for your head, and it plays a vital role in supplying blood to your brain from the heart. Without proper blood flow, the brain cannot perform its essential functions including sleep, heart rate, breathing and coordination. The two carotid arteries, which supply most of the blood flow for brain functioning, are located in canals within the neck vertebrae.
Exercising FOR and WITH a Common Back Injury
How to account for a sports-induced back injury
Along with nutrition, exercise is a great way to rehabilitate a low-grade back injury. It is advisable to construct an exercise regime under the guidance of a medical professional: we help you create individualized plans based on the level of your pain and stage of recovery. It is not enough to focus solely on core strengthening, as many people will have you believe. This is a piece of the puzzle, but we also want to correct muscular imbalances and lengthen restrictive muscles, setting you up for a pain-free future.
Why Movement Matters More Than Ever
Have we forgotten the importance of movement?
Once upon a time, our bodies were called upon to move for even the smallest activities. But now, it is so easy to choose not to move: most tasks can be performed from the comfort of the armchair and more jobs than ever are being performed remotely, a computer the only tool you need to contribute productivity. If you are excited about the prospect of a brave new technological world, it is worth taking a moment to remember how important it is to move.
Understanding Your Back Better
The spine is a wonderfully complicated structure
Full of bones, ligaments, tendons and joints; following three distinct curves and segments; conduit for the central nervous system; there is simply no more influential structure in your body than the spine. And yet so many of us take our spinal health for granted. We move through our busy lives barely giving a thought to the stresses that our spine is force to interpret on a millisecond basis. And with our lifestyles becoming more inactive by the day, these pressures are growing in intensity.
From Stress to Muscle Ache and Back Again
The horrible cycle of stress
Say you had a particularly stressful day at work. You may find on the commute home that you all of a sudden become aware that your entire body is wracked by stiffness. From your neck through your shoulders and down into your lower back, almost all of the muscles that support your spine have tightened as a natural response to mental stress. This increase in tension begins to pull your spine out of alignment, causing nerve impingement and muscle spasm. What you do next defines the stress cycle.
An Effective At-Home Response for Back Spasms
When back spasms strike…
An unexpected episode of back spasming can be as crippling as it is shocking. Muscle spasms are an emergency response by your body- as it perceives imminent injury, the muscles suddenly and involuntarily contract. This is the first clue to solving back spasms and the underlying condition: your body has perceived the injury, meaning that this problem has been slowly building up over time. Muscle spasms are therefore a natural response to a set of conditions that are threatening your spine. But in the heat of the moment, it doesn’t help to worry about the underlying conditions. You need to respond to the pain!
Golf: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly for Spinal Health
When it comes to spinal health, you can find golf on both ends of the spectrum
For some, it promotes relaxation; for others, a single round can cause extreme frustration. And the sport is just as polarizing for our spinal health. To begin with, it is a good way to get active; it gets us moving, promotes better circulation, and gently tones the muscles. But the golf swing requires you to generate an enormous amount of power through torsion of the hips and force from the shoulders. You spend a lot of time bending down to tee up, retrieve your ball or pick up your bag. All of these motions are potentially hazardous for the spine. They leave you vulnerable to muscle strains and sprains, repetitive stress syndrome and spinal injuries.
Posture Sets the Tone For a Healthier Life
A PSA: your poor posture is killing you!
From a chiropractor’s perspective, this is not hyperbole. Clinical studies are linking poor posture with a growing host of health maladies. Let’s start with the ones we’ve been telling people for decades here at our office in Fremont:
- Poor posture= poor mobility of spinal joints
- Poor mobility of spinal joints= degeneration and pain
- Poor posture= muscle tension
- Systemic tension pulls your body out of alignment
- Poor posture increases the amount of downward pressure on your spine, causing nerve compression
- It reduces lung capacity
In summation, poor posture can lead to long term health problems that will drag down your well-being and leave you at the mercy of degenerative conditions.
Hypermobility Causes Pain Too
The dominant trend is lack of mobility
With sedentary lifestyles becoming more and more common, the corresponding lessening of mobility in the populace is not surprising. But about 10% of the population suffer from the exact opposite problem- hypermobility, also known as double-jointedness. People with this condition have ligamentous laxity which can be useful for someone whose job requires a greater degree of flexibility, like a dancer or a baseball pitcher. But there are significant drawbacks to hypermobility in that your joints are essentially less stable. When this lack of stability contributes to pain, we call it hypermobility syndrome. And this pain can become chronic. So what is our solution for hypermobility syndrome?
Relief from Sciatica with Pregnancy Chiropractic
Why do pregnancy and sciatica go hand in hand?
The formula is quite simple really. A pregnant woman’s body is a mosaic of growing and shifting weight, which in turn moves her center of gravity forward. By decentralizing the weight of the body, forces are not evenly distributed on the spine. As her abdominal muscles become stretched in the front, core stabilizing muscles are often weak and unable to cope with the added weight bearing down on the spine. As pregnancy hormones conspire to loosen ligaments in the pelvis, you then have to contend with imbalance in the pelvis which further destabilizes the spine at its very base. In such an environment, sciatica is an easy conclusion- an unbalanced, unsupported spine is liable to put pressure on the surrounding nerves. When the pressurized nerve happens to be the sciatica nerve (the largest in the body), you may experience the classic symptoms of sciatica which can add a lot of anxiety into the mix.