Chiropractic Secrets: The Way You Walk

In this episode of Ask the Chiropractor, Dr. Brant Hulsebus from Rockford, Illinois, discusses the intricate ways chiropractors observe walking patterns to diagnose potential spinal and hip issues. Highlighting the impact of misaligned bones on gait, he explains how different walking irregularities, such as uneven steps or foot slaps, indicate specific problems, such as L4 nerve issues or hip flexor tightness. Dr. Hulsebus also touches on using modern technology like the Apple Watch to monitor and improve walking symmetry as part of chiropractic care. Tune in to learn unique insights into how your walk reveals your spinal health.

www.rockforddc.com

Transcript

0:00

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. Welcome to another edition of Ask the Chiropractor. Today's kind of a fun one. I was out the other day with some friends and they saw me watching the way people were walking. And I was watching the way people were walking and I was making comments about what must be going on with their hips and their spine and their misalignments. And my friends were quite amazed at the way I was able to see things. that they never noticed before. And I would tell you that I was just calling them out because a lot of times I'm in a room full of chiropractors and we'll kind of laugh like, Oh, look at this guy. He must have a left SI fixation. Look at this one. I bet his hip flexors are super tight. Look at the way he's walking or look at that one. They must have an L4 problem. You see, when the lower back doesn't move biomechanically correct, the number one thing that gets altered is your gait or your walk. We start to see changes in the way you walk and carry yourself. An example of this could simply be your upper lumbar, your lower back bones rotate. When they rotate, they'll pull or stretch one side of your hip flexor muscles, but maybe not the other. So if one of your hip flexor muscles is already being stretched, already elongated, when you take a step to try to elongate it as you normally would, if it's already a quarter of the way there, you're going to lose a little bit of the length of your step. We start to notice that you walk a longer step with one side and a shorter step with the other side. And now you have irregularity with the way you walk. So as a chiropractor, I would see that and say, Oh, they must have an upper lower back problem. Or if we see them swing a hip, then we know they probably have a locked SI joint. Or if we see them like slap their foot when they walk, L4 is not working because the nerves that come out of the L4, they're the ones that lift your toes up when you walk. So a lot of times as chiropractors, we can just observe you to see how you walk and how you carry yourself to know what's going on. By the way, the L4 is called drop foot because what happens is your toes don't lift up and so you lift your foot up really high and you slap it down so you hear a quiet step and you hear a smack, quiet step and a smack because you don't want to drag your toes so you lift your foot up extra high and then your foot slaps as it goes down. You see when you have a subluxation or one or two of your bones are misaligned, there's stress that comes out of that nerve and that nerve weakens. And if it's your L4 nerve, that nerve goes down your leg into the muscles that lift your toes up when you walk. So if you see a scuffed up toe on a shoe, we know that that toe right there is getting drugged a lot and we imagine that person has an L4 problem. Another thing we'll do is, you know, you see us as chiropractors, we lay you down and we measure your feet and we look at your shoes. We like to see how your shoes wear out because if you've got a rotated L5 or sacrum, that's going to cause your foot to flare one way or the other. So, if you're walking with one foot nice and straight and one foot flared out, then we know your shoes are going to wear unevenly. No different than if you're misaligned tires on your car. We start to see one tire wear out faster than the rest. Exact same idea, but this time your shoes. So, as a chiropractor, we like to look at your shoes a lot and see what's going on, too. That's why you'll see us check your feet out when you're laying face down. Some chiropractors have you take your shoes off. I want your shoes on because I want that as a clue. Now, if you're wearing brand new shoes, it's not much help. Ironically, when I first started practice, I thought I had a young man with this problem. Turns out he skateboarded, so one shoe was worn out. One wasn't. That was quite a learning experience that day for the young man. I think I scared him pretty good until I did the math and realized he was a skateboarder. And that's when she was totally warned the other one wasn't. I thought we had a real problem on our hands. But also, as a chiropractor, we just like to watch you walk. Right? We do it all the time. Like I just said, I was with some friends and they were watching me watch people walk and I was making comments on them and they thought it was quite amusing. At chiropractic school, I graduated in 2002. Back then, way back then, we had these places that people used to go that were quite popular. They were called shopping malls. And we'd be at the shopping mall. The professors from school would send us in groups. And we'd make a list of like people we'd see. And we'd say, well, the person in the blue coat. And then we all guess, like, okay, what do you think is wrong with that person by the way they're walking? And then we compare notes afterwards. We had no way to check. And it was kind of neat when we all agreed that this person must have an L4 problem because of the way they slap their foot. Or this person must have a right SI joint problem by the way they don't glide or doesn't move when they're walking. So that would be something that we would do. So a lot of times if you see me out in public, and I'm watching a bunch of people walking around, I'm just kind of surveying the, the territory to see exactly what's going on with everyone's overall health. Now when you come to my office, you know, we do the history, then you go into the adjusting room, I'll come in and introduce myself, we'll chat a little bit, maybe we'll do a little bit of an exam first, or maybe we'll go to write the x ray. But what's fun for me is I always have you lead the way. I say, I want to go straight across the hall and then take a right and you'll see the x ray room on your right. There'll be a big sign that says x ray. Really what I'm doing is I'm watching you walk. If you could make a point about lower back stuff. I want to see how much it actually affects you. I don't like to tell you that's what I'm going to do because if you know we're watching you, you're going to carry yourself a little bit different. You're going to try to be perfect. That's just human nature. So it's kind of fun to watch people walking for me to kind of see what's going on with them. So that way I know whether they're off or not. Like and you can tell right there by the way they walk. You'll see like a lot of us will have them walking. That's the first thing you'll see the other doctors in my office too. Dr. Hayes, Dr. Sam, Dr. Dace. They're going to look right down at their feet to see how they're carrying themselves. A lot of chiropractors think that we might like be in the shoes, but we're not. We're just checking out the way you're moving and the way you carry yourself. Now today, there's a way you can actually measure this, which I think is kind of cool. It's not perfect, but it's a neat tool. You see, I have one of these, an Apple Watch, and my Apple Watch connects to my iPhone. So when I open up my iPhone, right, and I go to the health, when I'm on the health screen right here, I see one that shows show all health data. When I click on show health data, it shows my number of steps I've taken today, my walking versus my running distances and my walking. And then my double support time, my walking speed, walking step length, and then walking asymmetrically. So what does that mean? Well that's saying, what's my walking pattern like? Am I, am I going faster or slower? Am I asymmetrical? Is my walk different from one side to the other side? And it's really interesting to open it up and take a look at it. Uneven walking patterns such as limping can be signs of disease, injury, or other health issues. An even or symmetrical walk is often a fortunate physical therapy goal when recovering from an injury. So it's just kind of a need to take a look at it to see where you are. I'm glad to say that I'm pretty much pretty even. Surprise, I work in a chiropractic clinic and I see a chiropractor all day long. But it's kind of a neat way to say, I wonder how I've been doing. So open it up, take a look at it. Matter of fact, we're going to start introducing this to our patients, especially our new ones. And we want to see if we can actually start to measure change after they start care. So on Monday, Coming up, our new patients coming in with Apple watches, because we can see if you have one of those on when you're laying on the table. We're going to pull this up and get that number from you. And then once a week, we're going to check that number to see if you're getting better. I think it's kind of a cool indicator or a good, Objective way to mark how you're progressing along the way. Now, obviously, if you've had a hip replacement, a knee replacement, ankle surgery, or something like that, that's going to change all of this. A lot of that goes right out the window. We're assuming that both of your legs and knees and hips and all that, they're still the original parts and they've yet to have been altered. So, if that's the case, it's going to be really cool to kind of do a side by side comparison. So, again, if you have a Apple watch and the iPhone. I don't know if it works without the watch or not, but open up the iPhone and go to that data and look for that walking symmetrical thing. I don't know how they can tell with just the, I don't know how they can tell half this stuff, right? But apparently it's in there and it tells us. So, So, again, it might not be the most accurate measurement. I know one time we went on vacation and somebody, I had the iPhone, the Apple Watch, somebody else had a Garmin, TomTom, and we all three spent the whole day together. By the end of the day, it was like 3, 000 difference in number of steps we took. So none of this stuff's perfect, but it's kind of a neat little thing. I mean, if there's, I believe that it won't give you an exact perfect data, but I believe that if something's wrong or something's definitely different, it's going to give out a number. Now, if it says that you're only walking symmetrically 20 percent of the time, are you really that bad? No, but it's a clue that we should probably do a deeper dive of more of an intake, more of a look into it. So, if you want to know if you should be seeing a chiropractor, use your iPhone, open that app up, take a look at it, and see whether or not that has given you a number. A couple of weeks ago I did a whole podcast on like, if you want to be healthier this year, one of the most important things you can do is go for a walk every day. Go for your 30 minute walk and look at your steps afterwards. That would be a great idea to see whether or not you should be seeing a chiropractor. Now remember, you can ask your family doctor these questions. You can ask your dentist these questions. You can ask your optometrist these questions about chiropractic. But there's no good reason to because only a chiropractor can answer questions about chiropractic. No more than asking an optometrist about a root canal, right? Why would you do that? Why would you ask a dentist about you know medication you take. Why would you ask your family doctor about whether or not these contacts are better than those contacts? If you get a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, there's only one qualified person to answer that question and that is like always a chiropractor. If you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care that maybe I can answer for you, leave a comment wherever you're listening or hearing this and I'll get back to you and try to answer your question next week. In the meantime, Use these gadgets so they can give you some clues about your health. Thanks.