Ask the Chiropractor-
Today Coach Mason from our friends at Movement fitness asked me about ankles. Many athletes and other's have ankles that make a popping sound and appear to be loose or sloppy. Is there anything that chiropractic care does that would help? Take a listen. #healthy815 #icachiropractor #palmerproud
www.rockforddc.com
Ask the Chiropractor-
Today Coach Mason from our friends at Movement fitness asked me about ankles. Many athletes and other's have ankles that make a popping sound and appear to be loose or sloppy. Is there anything that chiropractic care does that would help? Take a listen. #healthy815 #icachiropractor #palmerproud
www.rockforddc.com
- Hello, Dr. Brant Hulsebus here, and welcome to another edition of "Ask the Chiropractor.""Ask the Chiropractor," is my little podcast that I do. When someone has a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, I try to answer. I'm a chiropractor here in Rockford, Illinois. I'm a proud graduate of Palmer College of Chiropractic, and I'm happy to be the team chiropractor of the Rockford IceHogs. Let's dive into it. Hello, I'm Dr. Brant Hulsebus. Thank you for joining us for another edition of "Ask the Chiropractor." Today's "Ask the Chiropractor," I was asked a question today, from Coach Mason, where I work out in the mornings over at Movement Fitness. He gets asked a question a lot from young athletes about their ankles. He wanted to know if there's a role chiropractic could play, or how chiropractic might influence this problem with the ankles. So let's talk about ankles. Your ankle is a whole bunch of little bones all held together, packed in tight by a series of ligaments. Now, a lot of you know, I'm the team chiropractic for the Rockford IceHogs, but many years ago, before we had the Rockford Ice, well while we had the Rockford IceHogs, we had a professional basketball team here, part of the old CBA called,"The Rockford Lightning." And I was their chiropractor also. And ankles are a big deal with the basketball players. A couple years later, we got a indoor soccer team called,"The Rockford Rampage." And I used to work with them too. And again, ankles were a big deal. So I got to learn a lot about ankles working with the trainers and these sports teams. So, you have this ankle, all these little bones and ligaments that wrap around it. If you hyper-extend or tweak or ankle, these ligaments get loose. And when these ligaments get loose, it allows the bones to move around, and that's when you hear that cracking noise, and that popping noise in your ankle. And so the secret is, you got to get that ankle packed in tight. Well let's talk about that for a moment. Let's, I'm going to trace it from the ankle, back to how chiropractor can help, and then back to the ankle. So, let's talk about that. So you have this loose ankle. Now why did that ankle get loose? Why that ankle would get susceptible to injury? Well, as chiropractors, we know that if your lower back's out, the nerves from your lower back, and the ankles, it's called a sciatic nerve. I'm sure you've heard of the sciatic nerve. It travels from your L4, L5, your sacrum, sometimes L3, down your leg, through your pir, around your piriformis muscle, down the backside of your leg. And then everything knee down is the sciatic nerve. If your lower back is misaligned, or we call it subluxated, the nerve integrity go into your ankle isn't what it's supposed to be, and that can make your ankles susceptible to injury. That's how chiropractic would be involved neurologically. Chiropractic can also be involved in biomechanically, or biophysics wise, meaning that, let's say you get your upper lower back, like your L1 or L2 misaligned. Well that's going to create a, the L1, L2 two either move left or right. And the front side of the L1, L2, there's a muscle called the psoas, P-S-O-A-S. And what that muscle does is it splits, and goes inside the front side now, so like underneath your small intestines, and it splits, and it goes into each one of your femurs or your leg bones. So, if this was to rotate left or right, it's going to take one of those psoas muscles, and really pull on it. And that's going to actually lift your leg up, and create this twist in your pelvis. And when your leg gets lifted up, not only does it come up, but your toes will start to laterally, or twist outward. Kind of like half of a duck walk, right? You've seen people walk with your toes out. Like my friend in high school, his mother used to tell him to stop walking like Daffy Duck. So what happens is that to will deviate outwards. And now what you do is every time you strike on that ankle, you're not using the way it was designed to be used. The biomechanics is off. And so every time that ankle comes down and strikes the ground, it's taking more force or more abuse than it should. And so with that misalignment, you're just giving a little extra stress. And over time, it's not, it's not one step, or two steps, or three steps that does this, it's the repetitive over, over, and over. Especially with an athlete, when you're going at faster speeds, and you're being more competitive, and you're planting, you're twisting, you're starting off with it biomechanically being altered. So what do we do as chiropractors now? I told you how the different areas we can see how the injury might occur. Now let's talk about what we would do for that if you came to my office. Well we would take an X-ray of your lower back. The question I would ask if you have an ankle problem, do you have a sciatic nerve issue? Is your L3, four, five even misaligned? If it's not, then this probably not caused from that. The second thing we would do, is we would look at your L1, L2. How do they look if they look? Do they look misaligned? And if they are misaligned, do we see that pelvic rotation going right along with it, that would start to change the biomechanics? And sometimes in the worst cases, we see both things going on. We see a complete twist in the lumbar spine, where we have sciatica involvement, plus we have the hips misaligned, altering the biomechanics going down the leg into the ankle, adding the extra stress down there, and it creates a really bad storm. This is also why a lot of people have sprained their ankle, done the rehab to make it better, and they keep spraining it over and over again, because there was a higher up, the body, up to the spine, up to the hips, force or stress to it that all this makes it easily to reinjure over and over again. So as your chiropractor, the first thing we would do, is just start to adjust your spine. We work with you to get your spine stronger, and stronger, and stronger. At the same time, we talk to you about how to support your ankle. And these are things that you know, every athletic trainer or physical therapists know. You're going to want to wear hight-top shoes, give the ankle lots of support, really try to pack those bones in there. And we'd work with you on your walking, and your gait, and stuff like that. We really try to attack it. Once we know it's better, once we know that you're holding your adjustment, you're holding what we did to you, then we want to start making your ankles stronger. Because I said that these are a bunch of little bones all packed in with ligaments around there. Want the ligaments heal loosely, right, so there's, they're kind of what we call sloppy. That allows the bones that can to move, and make those noises that irritate you. So once we know the alignment's back, and the stress from the spine's better, once we know the sciatic nerve coming out of your lower back is improved, and now that the nerve's firing, now that the nerve's performing the way it's supposed to, now your, your ligaments are able to heal. Because if the nerve's not firing down your leg, the sciatic nerve, it's not firing right, You can't really train your ligaments to do anything until the nerve works again. Because the nerve is just vital to make that work first. And then we, then we do the PT, then we do the rehab to make the ankle better. But with the nerves not working, all that other stuff won't be nearly as successful if it's successful at all, unless it's working. So we got the nerve working, we get the biomechanics fixed, now going to make that ankle strong. And it's real easy. Stand on one foot. Try to keep your balance on one foot. As you're keeping your balance in that one foot, all the ligaments in there are firing like crazy. They're going off, and they're making that ankle get stronger and stronger, and they're packing it in tighter, and tighter, and tighter. So a lot of the athletes I see that are recouping from this, not only will work with the strength conditioning coach to regain the strength from the nerve also being weakened, because as the nerve weakens, the muscle's weakened. But they'll work on stuff on one foot. Like a lot of times I'll see them standing on one foot playing catch, or I'll see them, you know, doing various poses for 30 seconds at a time, on one foot only, trying to maintain that, keep that ankle tighter, and tighter, and tighter. A lot of the, the IceHog players I see do all kinds of ankle stuff. Now the the hockey, the ankle's aren't really a big deal like they are in other sports, because the hockey skate really protects your ankle, right. So there's not a lot of give and play in there. But like I watch like the basketball players and the soccer players are constantly doing ankle exercises and strength things. Another thing that helps a lot with this is a wobble board. Those little, you get on there, and they're all out of balance. Just trying to keep your balance and maintain on there, that's huge. And again, these balance exercises are also we call, stabilization exercises. And if you listen to any of my podcasts in the past, I'm talking about lower back issues or spinal health, the number one thing that we see that people with chronic lower back issues, or constantly reoccurring lower back issues, what they're missing out on is their stabilization muscles aren't there. Not their, not their, what we call the "beach muscles," the ones you lift, and you try to make yourself look, look good when you go on the beach, not those muscles. It's the ones whether or not your stabilization muscles are solid in your spine. But the same holds true for your feet and your ankles, your knees and your hips. We want to work on all those stabilization exercises. They're so vital to maintain what we've earned. So when I have an athlete, when I have any athlete that comes in, that soccer player, basketball player, anything that's going to require a lot of running and, you know, twisting and stuff like that, we really wouldn't want them to have super strong ankles. So a lot of times we immediately start with them doing, standing on one foot doing things like that. And I like, I like, standing on one foot's kinds boring, right? So you're standing on one foot. What are you going to do when you're on one foot? That's where a lot of times I encourage my players or athletes to like maybe do your, a version of your sport while you're doing it. So if you got on a wobble board, and you shot free throws, you know, you're on that wobble board, you're shooting free throws, your ankle's getting stronger, your hips are getting stronger, your lower back's getting stronger. But not only that, but if I can shoot a free throw while standing on a wobble board, imagine how strong I'm going to be during a game if somebody bumps into me. I'm trying to shoot at the game winning shot and somebody bumps into me, I'm not really going to be phased by that bump, because my core, and my stabilization is so strong, I could probably still make that shot, and get the bonus free throw, right? Get the foul. So you know, it'll make you stronger and competitively too. And not only that, but as that ankle gets stronger, and stronger, and stronger, the odds of re-injuring it go down so much. So this doesn't have to be a chronic thing. I think we all know somebody who has a chronic ankle issue, somebody that's dealt with their ankles, and they, "I sprained this ankle, I'm always re-spraining it." They're always re-spraining it, for the simple fact they didn't get that strong enough to pack it in there nice and tight, and keep it in place. Or, you know, that their lower back's still out, and the nerve's not working good. Or their upper lower back's out, and their hips are rotated, and the biomechanics are off. So those are the three things that we talk about when we have a chronic ankle issue. So there you have it. If your ankle, you can move your ankle around, you hear all kinds of creeks and pops, that means you have a sloppy ankle, you're very susceptible to injury, very susceptible to spraining that ankle. Not only are you playing a sport, but maybe just walking in the snow, walking in the field, you twist a little funny. Or even just turning and planting funny. You know, especially here in Illinois, it's January, and we have snow out there, you slip, you fall, you just, little twists like that can really, really irritate it if it's vulnerable. So there you have it. I hope I answered the question about how chiropractic could help with chronic ankle issues, or that cracking and popping in your ankle, and what that means, and how do we prevent that, and how do we keep it from coming back. If you have a question for me, go to my website, rockforddc.com, R-O-C-K-F-O-R-D-D-C.com. Leave me a message there. If you'd like to learn more about, if you have a question for my friend, Coach Mason, who asked me this question about the ankles, you can leave it there too. I'll make sure he gets it. Other than that, stay healthy, stay strong. And remember, if you have a question about chiropractic, there's only one person that's qualified to answer, and that would be a chiropractor. Thanks everybody.