Chiropractic Care: Swing into Spring and Improve Your Golf Game

In this episode of 'Ask the Chiropractor,' Dr. Brant Hulsebus from Rockford, Illinois discusses the benefits of chiropractic care for golfers. He explains how chiropractic adjustments can enhance a golfer's performance by improving flexibility, reducing pain, and preventing injuries. Dr. Hulsebus highlights the importance of pre-game adjustments and offers insight into what to expect when visiting a chiropractor, including the necessity of taking spinal x-rays and understanding the role of biomechanics in a golf swing. He also emphasizes the importance of consulting a chiropractor with experience in sports care to get the most effective treatment.

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. Welcome to another podcast. So it's spring where we live in northern Illinois and the trees are flowering. The snow is gone. It's starting to have 70 degree days and sunny. And we're starting to see our golfers come back time. The golf course has reopened. People are all hitting the golf ball again. And I was asked about, does chiropractic play a role in golfing? Does chiropractic help people golf? And the answer to that is, of course, because chiropractic helps anybody with a spine, golfers have spines. If you ask me if chiropractors help landscapers, the answer is yes. If chiropractors help lawyers and judges, the answer is yes. We help anybody with a spine. But let's talk about golfers.'cause golfers like to put a lot of torque on their spine. When you look at a golf swing, the thoracic spine on where your rib cage is, it knows a lot of twisting In order to swing that golf club, you also load up one hip, then load the other hip as you go through your swing. Also, if your neck isn't turning, you're moving, right? It's gonna limit your swing Also. So if I'm a golfer, should I go see a chiropractor? Absolutely. You should definitely go see a chiropractor. I've taken care of many people and most of the time we see our golfers, not after they golf and they're sore. We see 'em the day before.'cause I have a little saying around here that I tell my golfers, I can see you once before the golf weekend, or I can see you six times after. Words, it's always better to get adjusted before the event than try to fix yourself after. It's always easier to stay healthy than it is to get healthy. A lot of people are surprised that when we go cover the hockey team, the ice hogs here than we do the majority of our work before the game. The players all wanna skate faster, move quicker, and have little faster reflexes, and so they get adjusted by us and they feel like that helps them. Perform at a higher level. We're not really doing a lot of care after the game. When the game's over, they're pretty much just sitting on the ice packs and doing things that'll reduce the inflammation from playing the game. We do most of the care before the game. It's about staying well, staying healthy, so absolutely. Golfers and chiropractors have been together for a long time now. I have a good friend out in Utah and he actually has a deal with the PGA and they fly him out to different PGA events where he takes care of the golfers. And he's, I'll tell you the same thing. He's seen the professional golfers before they golf. Not so much after or during, but before.'cause they want to be loose. They wanna have that good range of motion. So what could you expect if you're a golfer? Say, Hey, I'm a golfer and I want to go see a chiropractor. What does that look like? What should I expect? The first thing is, I don't go to a chiropractor unless they take x-rays of my spine. Because even taking care of this hockey team with a bunch of the boys on the hockey team, right? They're all young, strong men. We always find a couple abnormalities on their spines that make us use a different technique or alter the technique that we use to accommodate the way their spines grew. Not really from an old injury, but more just the way your spine can grow different. Not only that, but having the x-ray gives us a great idea how we're gonna take care of your spike compared to not having an x-ray. And then I might look for, any chiropractor can adjust your spine for the most part. But I might look for a chiropractor with a background in sports if I'm going to go see somebody for golf. And what does that mean? We take care of many athletic teams here, work lots and lots of athletes. So if you go to my website, you'll see that we're the chiropractors for the hockey team. We the preferred chiropractor for the local junior college here in town. And we just worked with tons of different athletes and we've been exposed to more things that athletes put their bodies through than say just a general family chiropractor. Doesn't mean a general family chiropractor wouldn't do a great job for you, but if I was looking for somebody for sports, I would find somebody with sports background. If I was looking for somebody for the pregnancy, I would find somebody with that background. If I was looking for something for an auto accident, I would look for something more of that background. Not that all chiropractors can do all of the above. It's better to see some, a little bit more education or familiarity with the sport we're talking about. I. So you come to our office and we would definitely take your x-rays, and then we wanna see you actually swing a golf club. Now, we won't give you a golf club in the office. We'll give you something to hold onto and we want to actually see how you swing. We're looking to see how your body reacts through the swing. Are you limiting how far you're going back? Are you having a pinch when you twist this way? Are you finding out you're too tight here, too loose over here? And so that's the things we look at. We'd also put you through a bunch of chiropractic exams where you want to see the way your pelvic is lined up. If your pelvis has rotated, your hips and your tailbone, that's really gonna alter your swing and or make every swing more energy, more stressful, which will result in tiring you out faster and affecting the second half, the back nine more than the front nine, and also affect you the next day. I tell people a lot of times that having pain after golfing the next day is not normal. You're not supposed to hurt the next day after you golf. You're not supposed to hurt at all. You're supposed to go out, hit the golf ball and enjoy yourself. Now, if you play, four rounds in one day, you're gonna be fatigued, but you shouldn't be in pain. You should just be tired and sore and worn out, but you shouldn't be in pain. So if you're in pain today, after you golf, that's a signal that something's not right, and we don't want to take off away from you. So we want to fix you. So that's what we do. We look at your range of motion to see how you're bending and twisting in your pelvis. Then we look at your thoracic spine. There's an old stretch called the bookend stretch where you put up against the wall and you go side to side. For us, it's interesting to see. How well your biomechanics performs. Maybe not so far how you can twist, how far you can go, but how smooth of an action is it? Is it clunky? Are you limited? Can you go really far on the left, but not very far on the right? Those are huge indicators. What's going on? The muscles between your shoulders and your rib cage area, that's gonna dramatically affect the fatigue and the way the ball travels after you hit it. And lastly, we're gonna want to look to see your range of motion in your neck, your cervical spine.'cause if you're a jack knife in your neck, you're not going all the way down with your head that's gonna mess up your swing. You've all hurts slowly. Make sure you keep your eyes on the ball. If you can't train your head enough to see the ball, that's a problem. It's gonna cause slicing and stuff. So it's very important to get your spine checked out. Now if you go with a chiropractor. We usually promise the next day you won't be in pain. We don't always promise to improve your score. However, many people have said that maybe the chiropractic adjustments might play a role in that because of the factors I mentioned earlier, not having the fatigue and the strain and the being more tired, but having more energy and more pep. You see they've done research on chiropractic adjustments for performance with athletes. Can you jump faster? Can you run quicker? How do you reflex steel? There's a lot of favorable studies that show chiropractics a benefit to you before these events. And of course, this definitely applies to the game of golf as well. I. So if you're a golfer and you go out and you golf a lot and you find yourself that you're just not swinging like you used to, you find out that maybe you're limited your range of motion and what it used to be.'cause it's been, compared to 10 years ago, it's probably overdue to see the chiropractor because you could already start having some arthritic changes and that's starting to limit your range of motion. Now I did a podcast a while back about arthritis in your spine and the bony stuff that grows. It's hard for us to reverse, but getting your disc height back is huge. So if you're out there golfing and you don't have very strong disc, the chiropractic adjustments can restore the motion in the vertebrae, which will rehydrate the disc. And your disc height should return. With the return of the disc guide, you're gonna have less arthritic like symptoms. From the compression of the nerve, but you're also gonna have a bigger range of motion and less fatigue and less sore spots when you're done. So if you feel like you're the game of golfing, you haven't been golfing because you're gotten older and you think you're just healthy enough for it, go see a chiropractor. You might be able to add a couple more years to your golf game, and if you're not having this experience and you're younger and you want to keep playing until you're older, going to see the chiropractor now would be a great idea to help reinsure. You don't get these kind of changes in your spine so you can play later on. So the question was, should a golfer see a chiropractor? Absolutely. Chiropractor can loosen up your spine, make you move. Good. We might give you tips. The old tip I've been told is, put a golf club behind your shoulders, interlock it with your elbows. And gently turn side to side, and that'll warm up your disc to get your disc ready. So you go into the game of golf, you're not cold and you won't irritate something as easily. We have all kinds of trick, little tips like that to help you on the day in the golf course. So what's the best time to get adjusted if I'm a golfer? Definitely the day before. Some people even come in here, I gotta have a seven 30 appointment. Why am I got an eight 30 tee time, I gotta get my adjustment to get right over there. So a lot of people will come and get adjusted right before their tee time. We try to accommodate them the best we can, but we feel like the ones trying to get to work might be more important. But all kidding aside, a lot of people come in right before they golf, i'm gonna go to a chiropractor for my golf game. I'm gonna get adjusted right before I golf. Now, do I need to go see the chiropractor afterwards? Maybe. Maybe if I hit too much grass, not enough ball, depending how bad the day was. It's chemical, physical, and emotional stress. So if you had a horrible day in the golf course, then maybe you need to go see the chiropractor again for that chemical and emotional stress. The other thing else, we talk about is what to expect when I go make a chiropractic appointment for my golf game. Again, I would tell you just about any chiropractor can take care of you, but if you're really concerned, I would find a chiropractor that either takes works with athletes or maybe has some certificates that shows they have extra training in the athletic world, either field experience or book experience. They might know a little bit better how to take care of you. Also like Dr. Sam in our office, she has a degree in kinesiology, which is like exercise and stretching and everything before she went to chiropractic school. So you might wanna find a chiropractor that has that. I didn't take kinesiology. It really wasn't a major, 25 years ago when I was at college. But it is today. It's a neat major teaching how to exercise and stretch and move your muscles. So then she has ideas above and beyond what the typical chiropractor would say because of that extra degree. But there you have it. Now you know whether you should see a chiropractor or not before you go off, and what to look for in a chiropractor. If you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, go ahead and 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. And remember, if you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care. The only person qualified to answer that is a chiropractor. So always make sure you only ask a chiropractor. I got good friends who, orthopedic surgeons, some of the best in the area, but they don't know anything about what I do. So make sure you always ask a chiropractor. And by the way, I don't know what they do either. It's a don't ask me about what they do, ask them what they do. Alright, thanks everybody for tuning in. We'll see you again next time.