Why You Get Hurt When You Start Working Out Again — And How Chiropractic Helps

Every year people return to the gym motivated to get healthy — and many end up injured by February. In this episode, Dr. Brant Hulsebus explains why workout injuries happen when restarting exercise, why chiropractic care prevents them, and why a chiropractor can fix the root cause instead of just covering up the symptoms with medication. If you’re training again this year, this episode is a must-hear.

www.rockforddc.com

Transcript

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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. Welcome to another episode. So as I'm recording this, it's the beginning of the year and a lot of people have decided they wanted to go back to the gym and start exercising. It's a very common thing, and what we see in the chiropractic clinic is we see a lot of people get hurt as they just rush right back to the gym. So we want to talk about. Why you get hurt when you start working out again and how a chiropractic can help bridge that gap. because we encourage exercise, so we want to teach you Chiropractically, why we should be a part of that. So gyms are full of motivated people this time of year, and injuries always show up. We see it every year. The chiropractic clinic. And remember, exercising shouldn't be dangerous. It should be awesome. It should be making you better, but that's how your chiropractor might be able to help you. So the jump right in January thing, right? People just want to go right back in. They want to try to pick up maybe where they left off in a previous exercise program they started a few years ago. Or maybe they wanna try to relive their high school days, some of the things they used to do and they end up getting hurt. We end up with really stiff joints. Maybe you had an old injury that hurt before and that's why you quit and you never did the things you had to do to fix that old injury. And that old injury comes back to talk to you again. Once you put the stress of exercising back on it, maybe you'll find out that because you haven't been exercising, you've got some weak stabilizer muscles. Now, I've talked a lot about stabilization muscles over the years, but we're gonna dive more into that as we go here. And maybe just you have poor mobility because you haven't been exercising in too long. And that's where diving into things really quickly can create some serious issues. When one joint doesn't work in their spine, remember the other joints will move extra to compensate for it. A couple weeks ago we talked about why you don't crack your own neck for that exact same reason, so maybe we'll have that and now you're starting to get hurt and aches and pains, and this is when you don't wanna go back. And now your good momentum, your good intentions died off. So what do we do as chiropractors? If you come to see the chiropractor before you start, like before you dive into this through our chiropractic exam and X-ray exams, we could figure out some of these weak spots. And we can test your range of motion and we can see how your stabilization muscles behave. With that information, we can either send it to a strength conditioning coach that you're working with and they can really do a great job customizing a plan for you, or we can give you tips and ideas of what we think you should work on before you get too aggressive. We can also identify previous injuries. You can say that. I know I was going back to the gym, I was working out, but I had this aches and pains between my shoulders, and so I quit. Now we can look at that area between your shoulders and see what was wrong before, why you had aches and pains there. And we can find these misalignments in your spine and we can correct these, so we can go back to the gym and actually enjoy it again. So we're able to do a little self screening or chiropractic screening of you before you go back to the gym to find some of these weak spots in some of these areas that. Need to be addressed before you just dive right in. And this way you don't have to go through the aches and pains, but let's say you don't wanna wait. Let's say you ran right back to the gym and you start exercising. Now you're having aches and pains, and maybe somebody told you to take an NSAID and a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug to cover up the pain, or maybe an anti. Inflammatory or maybe where she had a muscle relaxer. This is just masking the pain that, the dysfunction of what's going on in your body. It's masking the problem, it's not addressing it. And I believe you went back to the gym to improve your overall health and wellbeing. And so masking part of it and forging through other areas is only gonna make you worse. It's only gonna make you long term, not get the goals you want. So in chiropractic, we don't mask the symptom. We look to try to figure out what is causing the issue. Why is it that you can't do an exercise? Is it your posture? Is it this misalignment in your spine? Is it a musculature imbalance? Is that you have a weakness in your stabilization muscles that aren't doing your job? And we'll go through our chiropractic exam. We'll find these spots and we'll help you fix those and we'll take care of them and then we'll work with you to get you. Back a hundred percent. That's like we did to people before they, they saw us before they exercise. Those that go out and get hurt and then come in. Some of the most common things we see the first time of the year are lower back strains. We see shoulder pinching or tightness, hip irritation, especially during a squatting exercise or literally bad back pain the day after doing lunges, maybe knee pain while you're on a treadmill. Lower back stiffness, or excuse me, mid-back stiffness when I go to do some heavy weights oh, I got this irritation right down here. I just feel like I'm limited, and why do we have this? We had this for weak core activation, pore stability, muscles restricted motion or extremities because of our posture and just not enough mobility as a whole. And so as chiropractors we go through and we analyze your spine, looking for these areas and how we can improve them so that way you don't have to go through these injuries. And so if you're having these things, you go see a chiropractor and what, we'll find these areas. We'll make 'em struggle through a chiropractic adjustment and we'll talk to you about where he should be stretching and areas you should be focusing in more before you exercise. And more importantly, if you can't do this stretch and you're having pain, you probably should be doing these exercises. because trying to fight through it is only gonna make you worse. So if you're getting back into workouts. Get evaluated before the pain shows up. So if you want to go back to exercising, you wanna go back to doing stuff. Go see your chiropractor first, and if you didn't do that and you're already in the gym, you're already getting hurt and you're already having problems before you cancel your gym membership, before you cancel your training sessions, go see the chiropractor. The chiropractor can do as the x-rays the examination to figure out why you're getting hurt as you're doing these things. Make some corrections in your spine, make some corrections in your health and get you right back in there. And your chiropractor and your strength coaches should talk to each other. I know here in Rockford, I work with a gym down the street called Movement Fitness. And their coaches and I talk every week about different people that I see that they take care of too. And I tell them, Hey, on this patient I'm fighting this and this going on. So when you exercise with them, try to focus on here. Now these people come to my clinic. I don't dare tell 'em how to exercise and stretch. I just tell 'em I'm gonna call your coach and tell your coach what I'm seeing, and then your coach with their better background exercise and stretching and do a better job of preparing you. Now, if you don't have a coach and you're doing it all by yourself, then I might actually prescribe you to go see a coach to work. So we can work as a team to get you back. But if you are working by yourself and as chiropractors, we can tell you different areas to avoid until you can do certain activities without discomfort or pain. A common one, if you're having si pain, like the pain where your tailbone your hip come together, a real common irritant is that would be a lunge and we can replace a lunge with a step up so you can still get the exercise in without creating the injury more and more. And a lot of people will run and take like a a lotion, like a Biofreeze or something and put it over their SI joints and try to muster through that. The problem is rarely every your SI joints causing the problem, your SI joints feel the problem. They don't cause the problem. It usually has to do with an irritated, pure performance muscle or an irritated hip flexor muscle on the other side. And by putting the biofreeze over the spot that hurts. So you can keep exercising. You're not really addressing the cause of the issue. I even had a patient today came in, he had an injection into his SI joint and he felt zero relief, a big cortisone shot, right? The SI joint. Zero relief. I put him on the bench, show him a good hip flexor stretch. He stood up and felt dramatically better, a lot better than he did with that cortisone shot that his eye joint. So again, chasing the symptoms, chasing the spot that hurts isn't always the answer. Finding the cause of why that spot hurts is the key, and that's where we as chiropractors have unique training. Now, if somebody. Would it come to you and tell you that I, I'm gonna go talk with my family doctor before I see a chiropractor. Or I asked a strength coach if the chiropractor would be able to help me, or I asked a physical therapist, what about should I see a chiropractor? I wanna let you know that majority of those people have no education in what we do, no knowledge in what we do, and they're really bad people to ask whether you should come see us or not. You should always check with a chiropractor before you, ask about chiropractic care. Just like I never once asked my optometrist, my eye doctor about my teeth, I only ever asked a chiropractor, a dentist about my teeth. I'm like, Hey, can you look at this tooth for me? I've never done that once in optometry appointment. So you wanna check with a chiropractor about whether we can help you? As chiropractors, our biggest thing is thoughts, traumas, and toxins cause your back to go out. Thoughts, traumas and toxins. So emotional stress, physical stress, and then chemical stress. And the number one antioxidant that you can do to flush your system is exercise. The number one way you could prevent physical stress is exercise and getting yourself strong and keeping your stabilization muscles strong. As chiropractors, we always stress the stabilization muscles. You've heard me say before, when I went to college, I learned about cardiac muscle around my heart, smooth muscle, my blood vessels, and then skeletal muscles, the ones I think I'm exercising at the gym. But now the research is showing a fourth type of muscle called stabilization muscles, and those are the ones that are found in your ankles and your knees, a little bit in your hips and a lot in your spine. And their job is to keep your posture, keep you upright, keep you reacting to different stresses. These do not have any conscious control, meaning that I cannot move the fifth cervical in my neck no matter how hard I think about it. It those muscles only react or reactionary muscles, and so in order to get the muscles around my spine strong, doing squats is good. Doing the cat camel stretch. It's good, but in reality, we need to make these stabilization muscles strong so as your chiropractor can come up with realistic ways to make them strong. I know myself, some of my more advanced athletes, I have 'em actually play their sport on a wobble board. So as they're trying to keep their balance and play their sport, they're making their stabilization muscles stronger as they play their sport. Example, I'm a basketball player, I'm gonna shoot free throws on a wobble board. If I can keep my balance and my composure on a wobble board while I'm shooting free throws and my muscles around my spine are getting stronger and stronger, making it harder and harder for me to hurt my back. At the same token, I'm getting my core really strong. So if you were to come by and hit me during a basketball game, I'm less likely to feel the effects of that bump and I'm still getting my shot off. We had a ice hog player that made it to the pros and won two Stanley Cups. He was able to keep his balance standing on an exercise ball while playing catch with a 10 pound ball. He's not the biggest guy when you see him walk by you, but you can't knock him over. His stabilization muscles are so strong. He was a real interesting patient as a chiropractic patient to take care of because of how strong his stabilization muscles were. I'm the same token. I've taking care of the strong man games, big, enormous people. Some of them have some of the weakest stabilization muscles, but they can squat more than I can. More than a car ways, but they can't keep their balance on one foot, and we see they have chronic issues. So then we work on stabilization muscles. So if you want to get better, go see a chiropractor and they'll figure out those stabilization areas for you, how to incorporate them into your exercise, along with working with your trainer. If you've had aches and pains when you exercise, that means something's wrong. You need to figure it out. Your chiropractor could help you with that, probably better than most. I hope I answered the game plan. If you're having pains going back to the gym, how to why you see your chiropractor first? And if you're already there having pains, it's definitely time to go see your chiropractor. And if you have questions about chiropractor, chiropractic care, leave a comment or a post wherever you're watching or listening to this. And maybe next week you'll be the question of the week. Thank you.