Lifting, Bending, and Twisting

When your back suddenly goes out from a simple motion like grabbing a shoe, it is almost never that single activity that caused the damage. Instead, a lifetime of minor microtraumas, poor daily lifting mechanics, and uncorrected spinal shifts finally catch up to your body.

In this episode of Ask the Chiropractor, Dr. Brant Hulsebus breaks down the mechanics of movement and outlines the real path to lasting lower back strain treatment. As a Palmer College of Chiropractic graduate and the team chiropractor for the Rockford IceHogs, Dr. Hulsebus explains the anatomy of the lumbar facet joints and details how structural pelvic rotations force your upper spine to compensate. Learn how to identify an unlevel hip by watching someone's walking stride, why ice packs outperform muscle relaxers during an acute spasm, and how comprehensive chiropractic testing pinpoints hidden structural issues that standard medical screenings miss.

In this episode, you’ll discover:

• The cumulative stress model: Why spinal injuries mimic long-term lifestyle conditions.
• Asymmetrical habits: How starting every staircase or stride with the same dominant leg warps the pelvis over time.
• The lost art of the human squat and why modern amenities changed the way we access the floor.
• Facet joints vs. spinal discs: Identifying the true site of localized mechanical inflammation.
• The emergency checklist: Red flags like foot drop or bowel changes that require immediate hospital care.
• Professional co-management: How our decade-plus role with the Rockford IceHogs connects patients to trusted local specialists.

Have a question about lifting mechanics, back spasms, or pelvic alignment? Leave a comment or message on our platforms, and you might be featured as our next question of the week!

👉 New Patients: Skip the clipboard and complete your registration securely online: https://hulsebuschiropractic.com/patient-intake-form/

📍 Visit Hulsebus Rockford Chiropractic:

• Address: 1877 Daimler Road, Rockford, IL 61112
• Phone: 815-398-3434
• Website: rockforddc.com

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. Well, hi there. Last week we talked a little bit about sleeping and not moving. Now this week I want to do a 180 and talk about moving. Let's talk about how when people get up around, they move, they bend and twist, they have problems. We see a lot of people here in Rockford with lower back strain. It's a common thing that we see. People just go to p- put their shoes on, or just went down to brush their teeth, or just do any kind of common little thing, and they tell me their back went out. They caused the problem."Hey, I went down to grab my shoe and boom, my back went out. Now I'm locked up, and now I'm having a problem." Well, a lot of people think it was picking up the shoe. I can't tell you how many people sit in the room with me and trying to tell me, trying to remember the one activity they did before that caused their issue. They'll sit with me as a new patient, 10, 15 minutes sometimes trying to be like, "Okay, now I think the three days before I mowed the yard, on that day the grass was a little slick. I might have slipped and did something." You know, then I'll take their X-ray and I'll look at their X-ray like, "There's no way this happened just on one day." This was something that's been building up for a long, long time, and it finally usually gets to the point where it gives out, and that's when you come to the chiropractor. W- what do I usually say about this? It's, it's pr- it's pretty simple. You know, one cigarette will not give you lung cancer, right? A lifetime of cigarettes gives you lung cancer. One bad meal, one, one piece of ice cream will not make you a type 2 diabetic. One candy bar will not cause diabetes. A lifetime of candy bars causes diabetes. So a lifetime of lifting things the wrong way, a lifetime of having bad biomechanics whenever I pick something up off the floor creates twisting and turning within my spine, and my spine has to adapt to the stress. And at times, other stress hits me, and we start seeing bad posture build up, which makes the spine weak and vulnerable. If you go back to text neck a couple of weeks ago, I talked about how the sitting puts your spine in a weird place, and then you bend and twist the wrong way and it locks up. The same thing happens in the lower back and the mid back. The, the more things we do wrong over and over again, our body starts to change and adapt to that. You know, I often say if you're not squatting to pick something up, the odds are you're doing it wrong. We're not meant to constantly keep lunging to pick something up to- over and over and over again. Let's talk about that Whenever I lunge, I typically am left or right-legged. When I go to a flight of stairs, I always start with the same leg. When I get up from sitting down, my first step is with the same leg. When I kick myself out of bed, it's always the same leg. So you're left or right-handed, but you're also left and right-legged. When I was younger, I had a skateboard. I always put the same foot in front, kick with the other foot. There's ways that we do things. Now, I'm gonna ask you not to challenge that. A lot of people will go to a flight of stairs and purposely try to walk with the other leg, and then they end up falling down because their coordination's so bad. But we're left or right-legged, so if we're left or right-legged, and every time I pick something up off the ground, I put my right leg forward, I bend down with my left knee to get it, I constantly keep doing that same twist, that ca- like the same stress to that hip. Rarely ever the other one. In fact, when I try to do it the other way, sometimes I even feel unsteady on my feet. I feel like I'm weak in there. I feel like my coordination's off. So it's very important that we always do it the same way, neurologically speaking. But unfortunately, it constantly creates the same micro traumas, the same micro hits to our joints, causing eventually a pelvic rotation. And what happens with a pelvic rotation is the eyes have to stay level, so you start to get another area that compensates. And you don't feel it that first time. You don't feel it that first 50 times. But after doing it 50,000 times, finally the back just gets tired, and you start to see a change in a person as they walk. The biggest way you can change this is walk, watch somebody walk. If one leg's taking a longer stride, the other leg's taking a shorter stride, we already have a tight hip flexor because the hip's already rotating, and we already have issues. Now we start walking on it. Not, not only do you have the misalignment in the hips, but now you start walking on it every day, creating more pulling, more tugging, more new muscular behaviors, the things that all have to be reset by the chiropractor. So we talk a lot about how these everyday activities just keep building and building and building. It's never one thing. So, so what do we do about it? How are we supposed to be doing things? Well, one, you're supposed to be always doing a squat. You know, I always like to tease, I blame local modern plumbing for the reason we don't squat so much because in the old days we had to squat a couple times a day. But now with plumbing and modern toilets, we don't have to squat outside anymore. Now, I'm not telling you to do that, go outside and start squatting. I'm just saying we've lost that ability. It's no longer our go-to move when we pick something up off the floor. I was at Home Depot the other day grabbing stuff off the bottom shelf and I, I squatted down. Well, you know, I practice what I preach, and they thought maybe I was a yoga teacher. And I told them, "No, I'm a chiropractor." And they laughed because that's the way I was doing it. But yeah, squatting down takes all the pressure off. And a lot of times, too, we talk a little bit about the, uh, the golfer pickup. You know how the golfers go to bend, pick something up, they keep one leg straight and they bend at the hip trying to keep the other leg out? And that's okay, but we're doing a lot more on one leg than the other leg, trying to balance that out from time to time for a light object. But learn how to squat and use those knees again. Lift with your knees. How many times have you heard that? But the problem isn't that last lift. Like I told you, a lot of people said,"Well, I lifted something up yesterday. I think I caused the problem." But it's over and over and over again starting to create misalignments in the spine. So if you want this to go away, you don't want this to keep happening to you, you have to go to the chiropractor, and the chiropractor has to take some X-rays of you and do an exam and do a bunch of pelvic tests to see really what's going on. Now, you might have been to another doctor that X-rayed you and told you that everything's fine, but they're not skilled to look at this. I can't tell you how many X-rays I've gotten from orthopedic doctors and family doctors that say there's no misalignments in the spine, and we look at the spine as chiropractors and we just burst out laughing because there's a huge curve and the pelvic's u- unlevel. Heck, I even do it in front of the patients. I'll say, "Well, your doctor said your spine has no misalignments in it. Everything's perfectly straight." I put the X-ray up, they go, "What in the world? That thing's totally crooked." I don't know what their ven- their judgment is for that or their grading system is, but to us, we see it all the time. Now, how do we know what it takes to get you better when we see this? Well, we're gonna look at that misalignment. We're gonna see a high hip or a low hip. We're gonna see a hip that rotates internally or externally. We're gonna look at the curve in the lower back. We're gonna see how many vertebraes are involved. We're gonna know that muscles attach to the L1, L2 and go into your pelvis, and when the L1, L2 are rotated, then we know one hip flexor's being stretched longer than the other hip flexor, and that's gonna create even more pulling and tugging. We're gonna know that when the hips rotate and twist, the sacrum, the tailbone, doesn't like to move, and there's gonna be more pulling and tugging on ligaments there. Heck, that could even mimic sciatica. When that pelvic is misaligned like that, that lower back's unstable. We see it all the time. People come in, tell me they have sciatica. What they really have is a really bad lower back from bending and twisting the wrong way too much. A common gym exercise that can really expose this, if you go to do a lunge and you have a problem after doing a lunge, that tells us a lot about what's going on in your back. We pretty much know this is what's happening to you. So again, you could have a, you could have a big trauma. You could fall down and hurt yourself and say, "That's what hurt my back." That's very common. But the little things of everyday activities like brushing your teeth, picking up a shoe, that's not gonna cause your back to go out. It's doing a thousand different things. So we get this asked a lot of times that people want to know what's going on. So let's talk about when it happens. Let- let's be realistic. I can tell you to come in, get your back checked. I can tell you to… A chiropractor can help make the corrections. They can teach you exercises and stretches. But, but really, what's gonna happen the moment it happens?

Let's say it's a Tuesday, 9: 8:24

00 at night. Boom, it hits. The chiropractic clinics are closed. What are you gonna do? Well, you want to grab some ice because the joint got smacked, the joint's inflamed, and the musculature around it has locked up to protect you. The muscles really aren't the problem. The inflammation in the joint's the problem. All too often, the number one thing that's prescribed for this is a muscle relaxer. You have to understand you have a disc in the front. Everybody talks about the vertebral disc. Disc this, the disc has this. You have a disc herniation, disc bulge. I have disc issues. I have degenerative disc disease. It's exhausting how much we talk about the disc. But in the back, there's a little joint called the facet, F-A-C-E-T. Most of the time that's the joint that's inflamed. Most of the time that's the joint that's twisted. The joints in the lumbar spine just come straight out perpendicular from the spine. And what happens, that's why they tell you not to bend and twist because those joints don't like to go that way. In the thoracic spine, they lay more flat, even with the spine because that's the way that part moves your ribs. And in your neck they sit nice and flat to help hold the weight of the head. When we twist and bend the wrong way too many times, that joint gets loose and sloppy. We come back, we pinch that joint. We pinch the capsule in that joint. Inflammation rushes in, and the musculature around there locks up to protect you from twisting and bending more, creating more inflammation and swelling within that joint, making that joint worse So the muscles are your friends, the inflammation's the bad guy. If the inflammation's causing the problems, how do you get rid of inflammation? Without a shadow of a doubt, the best way to do that is with an ice pack. Start putting ice on it, start reducing that inflammation. I usually tell people, lay on something firm, put the ice underneath you for 20 minutes, bend your knees, 20 minutes on, hour off with the ice. But don't-- That's something the chiropractor has to tell you directly. Everyone's different. And then give the chiropractor a call. These things do not self-realign. They do not self-correct. They, the inflammation goes down, you feel better, but then it happens the next time you pick something up. It happens again, over and over. The chiropractor can help strengthen this area, change this area. People call me all the time like, "Hey, my, I was in so much pain, so much spasm, I didn't want to come see you because everything hurt too much." If you can get in the car and get over to see us, you should probably try because we can start putting stuff on there to help relieve that problem. Now, if you walk and your foot's flopping, if you're walking, your bladder and your bowels are an issue, um, there's things that we're going to tell you that we should probably get you to the hospital instead. The chiropractor is trained when to tell you that we need to get more testing done. Sometimes we'll even tell you, "Hey, before you come in, with what you're describing, we need to get an MRI and make sure everything's safe." There are times there are exceptions. We are trained in how to tell that. To me, it's always funny when someone comes and sees me and says, "My doctor says we should probably do this before you see us," or maybe it's not this or that, before you see us. We are part of our training as chiropractors is when, when not to take care of you, when to order more tests and refer out. It's weird to think that people wouldn't think that's part of our care, part of our education. That's a big part of our education. So give us a call, talk to the chiropractor. The chiropractor can determine what your next course of action should be. And remember, we know your best course of action. We know it's not a chiropractic case. That's because we're forced to learn when to refer you out and when to use medicine as the helper. Chiropractic is not part of the standard medical education. They don't know what we do. They can't answer that question. I can't tell you what, what the medical doctor's going to do when they see you because I'm not a medical doctor. But I can tell you when it's outside of our scope, it's too severe, we need to get more help. After that, they do what they do. I don't tell them what to do or what not to do. I just pass you off to doctors we trust. So if you're in Rockford, Illinois, and you have this going on, we refer you to doctors that we work with. Where do we work with all these doctors? How do we know all these doctors? Well, we've been the team chiropractor for the Rockford IceHogs since 2004. We have very close relationship with ER doctors and orthopedic doctors throughout our whole community. So if you're too acute, we will get you where you need to be and then work on you afterwards. So remember, if you have questions about chiropractic or chiropractic care, only a chiropractor can answer those questions. So feel free to leave a message or a comment wherever you're listening to this, and maybe next week it'll be the question of the week. Thanks for tuning in.