Relaxing your spine to achieve better mobility

Mobility in the spinal joints is one of the most important factors in spinal health. But so many of us let our mobility decrease day by day until it reaches a point of causing serious damage. One way you can overcome this degenerative cycle is to practice mobilizing your back on a daily basis- even 5 minutes a day can give your back a serious boost in the fight to preserve mobility and integrity. Relaxation is the key: always approach these stretches with a calm attitude and breathe deeply throughout, to relieve tension in the musculature. 

Our move of the week: seated lower and middle back mobilization

1. Sit with your legs extended straight in front of you on a carpeted floor 
2. Bring one foot up and cross it over the other leg, coming to rest on the side of the knee. 
3. Now cross your opposite arm over your raised knee, letting your elbow rest on the knee and your forearm on the shin if possible.
4. Push your arm against the raised leg and turn your body to look over your shoulder on the side of the raised knee.
5. Hold 10-20 seconds.
6. Repeat on the other side

Taking spinal mobility seriously in Sacramento

If you are interested in finding out about more small ways to keep your spine in a state of health and balance, give our office in Sacramento a call to schedule an appointment today. We are standing by to help you take a more holistic and preventive approach to caring for your spine. 

Tight hips offer a clear blueprint for lower back pain

Most people are loath to look at their hips as the source of their back pain. But if you sit a lot, you should consider this: tight hip flexors are a signal contributor to lower back pain. This group of five muscles connects the femur to pelvis and provides a crucial connection between the upper and lower body. While they help initiate movements and stabilize the transfer of forces, they can also be implicated in causing dysfunction and back pain.  Here’s how:

• The seated position involves an over-contraction of the hip flexors.
• As they remain tight, they lose their flexibility and train themselves to stay this way. 
• Lost flexibility creates a pull on the pelvis which leads to Anterior Pelvic Tilt. 
• APT and tight hip flexors make good posture hard to come by, and can change the curvature of your spine.  

With a lack of support from the hip flexors and an imbalanced, unstable pelvis, your spine’s very foundation is at risk. 

But we have an action plan to help you overcome these risk factors. If we identify that you are suffering from tight hips, APT, or both, we enact an action plan with the following goals:

• Reversing APT retraining the pelvis into a neutral posture. We use pelvic tilt and bridge exercises to retrain your pelvis into a more supportive position. 
• We focus on regular conditioning of the hip flexors to keep them open and pliable rather than contracted and inflexible. 
• We restore alignment and stability in the vertebral segment of the lower back. 

Once we have your pelvis, hips and lower back realigned and in a state of balance, we can focus on developing the muscles that matter for core and pelvic stability. Your hip flexors bear a large percentage of the burden for keeping both your hips and lower back strong and balanced. It’s time to stop ignoring their role in your spinal health! Give our office in Sacramento a call to schedule an appointment today. 

Your body shape determines how you carry your weight

Most women fit into four primary body shapes:

• Apple: triangle downwards, with weight accumulation primarily in the lower abdomen
• Pear: triangle upwards, weight accumulation primarily in the hips and thighs
• Banana: straight/rectangular, weight accumulation in the butt and abdomen
• Hourglass: triangles opposing and facing inwards, fat stored in the backs of the arms and inner thighs

These generalized shapes refer to your skeletal structure, and they are important because they determine where weight, from both muscle and fat, will be distributed throughout your body. Understanding your body shape is essential to understanding the way you carry your weight which has important implications in back pain. 

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A healthy weight makes for a healthy spine

Determining, and setting a course to maintain, your target weight should be a health priority for all adults. If you look at it from a spinal perspective, keeping off the extra pounds is essential. Every pound over your target weight represents an unsupportable burden for your spine; these pounds increases the compressive factor on your spine, and contribute to spinal degeneration that results in conditions like herniated discs and sciatica. Of course, the easiest way to maintain your target weight is through a strategic combination of nutrition and exercise, but chiropractic adds an augment to this system. How can chiropractic make maintaining a healthy weight easier? Read on to find out. 

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Overuse injuries are, by their very nature, nasty

The causes of overuse injuries are insidious- you spend so much subconscious time performing the same activity and you simply can’t feel the micro-traumas that occuring until they one day reach a breaking point. Today, some of the most common overuse injuries occur in the workplace which has led to the alternative term: work-related musculoskeletal disorders. 

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The most important risk factors for chronic sitters

Modern life is a seated affair: we sit to commute, to work, to relax and, increasingly, to recreate. We pass time seated flicking through our phones, eating meals with our friends and binge-watching Netflix series. The primary seated activities of reading, or simply watching television, have taken a back seat to the proliferation of devices that now occupy our hands and minds. What is the problem, you ask? Sitting is the worst position for the human spine- it places exponentially more downward pressure on your vertebrae than standing or lying down. And very few of us are conscious about our posture while we sit, meaning that the ill-effect is amplified that much more. There should be no equivocation: as a society, we are feeling the effects of all this sitting earlier and harder than ever before. So what should we do about all this sitting? 

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Healthy spinal curvature is essential

In a normal, healthy spine, there are three primary curves- one kyphotic curve in the thoracic segment; two lordotic curves in the cervical and lumbar segments. There is a further kyphotic curve in the sacral segment, but overall, the curves fit together to form a large S-shape. This curvature is absolutely vital for maintaining strength, structure and mobility in the upper body. The curves combine to:

• Maintain balance and flexibility
• Cushion and absorb stress
• Distribute forces across the upper body in a healthy manner

What’s more, healthy curves ensure that your central nervous system is able to communicate unhindered. Spinal curvature disorders develop in response to a number of factors, and can start as soon as early childhood. So what are the main types of spinal curvature disorders and how do they come about?

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Our daily habits, rather than acute actions, are what set us up for pain

Many people are able to point to a time when they, “threw their back out,” or “cricked their neck,“ blaming a specific action like lifting or an excessive motion in sport on their injury. But the injury might not have happened in the first place if we had not already been practicing bad spinal health habits. These habits, highlighted below, are often subconscious, and form part of a chronic problem that contributes to back pain and leaves us vulnerable to injury. Read on to find out what habits we need to be aware of if we want to avoid back pain. 

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Movement in an office setting

Your office presents your body with more challenges than you know. A stiff neck or tension headache is just the tip of the iceberg for many office workers at the end of the day. The nature of office work is such that your body never has time to catch up with how little movement it does- we sink into a pattern of sedentation that becomes the new norm. This presents a particular challenge to our spine- as supportive tissues tighten and muscles atrophy from lack of use, your spine loses it’s main network of support. Tight tendons create a pull on the spine that results in vertebral misalignment and contributes to spinal degeneration. How do we break ourselves out of this cycle?

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