Why Your Back Pain Keeps Coming Back in the Same Spot

If your back pain always seems to return in the exact same place, that is not random.

In this episode of Ask the Chiropractor, Dr. Brant Hulsebus explains why recurring pain in the same spot usually means the same joint or motion pattern keeps failing you. Learn how old injuries, repetitive habits, compensation patterns, and spinal misalignments create weak links that flare up over and over again.

You’ll also hear why stretching or massage may only help temporarily, what chiropractors look for when evaluating repeated pain patterns, and why correcting the weak link matters if you want lasting relief.

If your back always seems to “go out” in the same exact spot, this episode will help you u

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 and thank you for tuning in again. I want to talk today about why your back pain keeps coming back at the same spot. When I'm out in public, a lot of people ask me this question. I keep getting the back pain, the same spot. It doesn't matter what I'm doing, it just keeps coming back and it always hurts at the exact same spot., Here's the bottom line. Reoccurring pain usually means the same joint or motion pattern keeps failing you. So you come up to me in the public and you say, Hey, it's always right here. It's always right there. It's never anywhere else. I always have the exact same spot, maybe a little bit over here, a little bit over here, but whenever I have the other spots, it's always this spot first and this spot more. Why is it always right? Always the exact same. It's not random., It's not just That's your bad genes. It's not genetic. It's not, oh, I got this from my dad. That's not the truth at all. As we go through life, we have different thoughts, traumas, and toxins. Dr. Palmer from Palmer College always described it as the three T's thoughts, traumas, and toxins, and they accumulate within our system and they eventually start to create a weakness inside of our spine. What do I mean by that?, If you've been in a lot of whiplash accidents, you've got a weak spot in your C five C six. If you're a hockey player, you've got a rotated upper shoulder and lower shoulder.'cause the way you carry the stick. Various things that we've done in our past, various sports, we've played various, and activities that we do. I'll talk about, when I was a student, we didn't have cell phones really yet. They were just first coming on and we definitely didn't have headsets. Most people had a phone they would put underneath their shoulder with a little pad there so they can still type and you could x-ray 'em and you'd say, Hey, you need to get a headset. Your phone use is killing your neck. Now. I know in, in 2026, that's not a thing anymore. But we have pollster carriers that carry the bag on one side all the time, and they develop a weak spot in their spine. This case, a vulnerable area, and toxins and bad thoughts and stress and more physical stress, they just keep building up at that spot. And that spot's not straight up and down on your vertebrae. It's turned, it's twisted. It's not the same biomechanics it's meant to be. It's now holding loads irregularly not the way it was designed to hold loads. And this spot doesn't keep you stronger. It keeps getting weaker, it keeps getting more vulnerable. It keeps having bigger problems, and this becomes the weak link., When I was a kid, I'd go to the mall with my dad back when people still went to the mall and he'd see a patient from the clinic. He'd always walk over, introduce me, this is my son, Brant Hulsebus, he's gonna be a chiropractor in the Rockford Clinic someday. That's always what he would tell people. Gonna go to Palmer, become a chiropractor. But he would never tell me their names. And I'd say, dad, you don't remember that patient's name, do you? He's like, no, but I know C five, T seven and L three. I know this one's, T two and a right SI joint , and I used to think he was teasing me, but as a chiropractor, the longer we see you, we learn your weak spots, we get to know your spots. Why is it that so many people are so particular that they only want to see their chiropractor only go to their chiropractor clinic? I don't want to see another chiropractor. I, because that chiropractor gets to learn your weak spots. They get to learn how to take care of you, and they get to learn how you behave. Me, my dad adjusted me almost my entire life. Then I started going to Palmer College. Having different people adjust me, it felt so weird or different because he knew all my weak spots. He knew my spots that I've injured various sports, playing football, , having a. Half pipe in our front yard with our skateboards, jumping off of boats, water skiing. He knew my weak spots in my spine from all my previous trauma, and he could just look at those weak spots and know instantly how to adjust me. When I started to see a different chiropractor, we had to start over again and had to learn those spots on me because we also had this thing called. Compensated patterns 'cause your eyes always stay level with the horizon no matter what it's called, the right reflex, like left and right, the right reflex. Keep your eyes level so dad knows that., I got this spot on the base of my neck from a football injury. My neck wants to. Tilt and bend to the left. Then we know that my L one L two goes to the right to compensate for it. Now, if I've never adjusted me before, I'd have to try to figure that out. But someone's taking care of me for a long time, knows right away exactly what's going on. They know that pattern. That's why it's always in the same spot, because you're always going to. Give out where you're weakest and he knows my weak spots. So what are some of these things that make these things go out a lot? Same trigger all the time. Right? You know, I talked to my friend, he's an orthopedic surgeon. He says he spends half of his career now telling people. If it hurts when you do that, don't do that no more. Or you're gonna have to have shoulder surgery., I told him after my surgeries, if I do a bench press, I get pain. He goes, don't do a bench press. So it's the trigger that re-injure the thing every time.'cause I have a weak spot in there.'cause I damage my shoulder in a previous injury. And so now I have to work around it. If I do the thing that triggers it, it's gonna come back. So if I injure my spine, it's gonna have the misalignment there. I can get it adjusted and make it stronger, but it will never be as it was before the injury. Not only that, but the muscles around there don't have the same integrity. They're not made of the same stuff. After they get injured, they get full scar tissue and things like that, and that creates the same weakness in that area. That's the vulnerability of that area. So if I had the same triggers doing the same things to that area with the same weakness in that area, I'm gonna have the same outcome over and over again. I have a lot of people that come in I try to do a lunge again. And now I'm my upper, upper lower. Her backs out. I know you've told me that it affects my hip flexor, but I was feeling good. I thought I would give it a try, and so I have to give them adjustment to correct that and then they go back on their everyday life, six months go by, they come and say, I tried that exercise again and I'm back again because of the weakness on their spine and where that is. We try to change that exercise in a different exercise and yeah, we try to make that area stronger so it's not always a chronic problem, but. Does everyone do what I tell 'em to do and everyone follow my instructions perfectly? No. So these things come back up all the time. And so a lot of times people will say,, maybe I'll just get like a massage area. Maybe that'll make it go away or do some stretching. And if you listen to my previous podcast, if it's a muscle strain from overdoing it, those things will probably pretty beneficial. But if this is the same problem, the same spot after the same activity every single time, now we know there's probably a subluxation in there. One or two bones are misaligned. This has created an alternate pattern to protect the nerves around there. Your muscles will lock up to protect these joints from turning or twisting more, more informational, more stress on that vertebrae. As a chiropractor, we're uniquely trained to go in and find these subluxations and adjust them. A lot of us work with you too, on how to make them stop from coming back. So if I have a subluxation, you cannot stretch a subluxation out. If I have a subluxation, you can't do a massage therapy to make it go away. If I have a subluxation, there's no amount of anti-inflammatory ibuprofen I can take to make it go away. If I have a subluxation, nobody's able to diagnose that. Or find it other than a chiropractor. Nobody else has that training. You can go to the doctor and get a x-ray of your lower back. You had the same reoccurring problem over and over again. The orthopedic doctor or the family doctor, whoever you're seeing, is trained to look at that x-ray and say, you don't have any tumors here. You don't have any trauma here. You don't have any toxins here. You don't have any fractures here. You don't have anything that's not supposed to be here. I don't know what's wrong with you. You take it to the chiropractor. The chiropractor looks at an x-ray and goes, I can see it. It's clear as day. The Inver. Everybody's misaligned causing problems. I know exactly how to adjust. You make you feel better. They don't know how to do it. They don't know how to see. It's not part of their education no more is me knowing how to prescribe you a medicine for something. It's not part of my education. It's not what I do. But as a chiropractor, I do look for those misalignments. So if you had an x-ray taken somewhere. And you're not sure whether or not they're missing the chiropractic part. Ask for a copy of your x-ray. Take it to a chiropractor, x-rays or x-rays. Chiropractor can get that x-ray in 10 seconds and tell you whether or not that can help you. That's all it should take., And that's all it takes me. Maybe 30 seconds for a new graduate. It takes me about 10 seconds. There's the misalignment. I can adjust you. I can make this better. Family doctor wouldn't know how to do that. Family doctor wouldn't know what we're looking for. So now you go to the chiropractor. We're trying to make the correction. We're trying to go in there and change that to give you long lasting relief. We go in there, we do the adjustment, we reduce the stress in the area, and the area starts to get stronger and better. We'll teach how to do stabilization exercises that put the glue on that. It's more about making it stronger than it is about stretching it, but there's no reason to break it stronger if it's crooked. So here's what you gotta do. Same problem over and over again. Same spot. You only can get temporary help. It won't. It just keeps coming back over and over again. You gotta go to the chiropractor. The chiropractor's gotta find that spot for you. It's gonna figure out whether that's a spot or there's a spot above or below that's causing the torque on that spot. They'll do it through a chiropractic exam and usually using images. The chiropractor then will identify the area, give you a plan, tell you what they're gonna do to take care of it, start adjusting it. After it starts to loosen up and feel better, chiropractor did should teach you how to stabilize it, give you some stabilization exercises and make it stronger. Remember, there are four types of muscles in the human body. If you look at the current research, there's skeletal muscle, your muscles in your arms, your legs, your hips. There's smooth muscle in your blood vessels. There's cardiac muscle in your heart, and today there's to under stabilization exercises. Stabilization muscles are all throughout your spine, your hips, your pelvis, and other areas. Chiropractors should know these things and the chiropractor should be able to teach you how to make those stronger. By doing this, we break the pattern because of eruption and hopefully that one spot that keeps happening over and over again, we'll get stronger and stronger and stronger over time, and it stops happening. But again, the only person trained to do this is a chiropractor. Chiropractor might, you've worked with other doctors, might work with physical therapists, but the only person to do all the above is the chiropractor. Nobody else has that training, so don't ask your physical therapist. Don't ask your massage therapist. Don't ask your family doctor. Ask a chiropractor. You can always go to chiropractic.org, chiropractor.org. That's a National Chiropractic Association. You'll find s wherever you live. But if you're in Rockford, Illinois, you want me to take a look? Bring your images in, bring your case in, let's talk about it. Thanks for tuning in.