Why Stretching Alone Isn’t Fixing Your Back Pain

If stretching worked, your back pain would be gone by now.

Many people stretch daily to relieve back pain — before work, after workouts, and before bed — yet the pain keeps coming back. That’s because stretching often treats symptoms, not the real cause.

In this episode of Ask the Chiropractor, Dr. Brant Hulsebus explains why stretching alone usually isn’t enough to fix back pain. You’ll learn the difference between flexibility, mobility, and stability, why joint restriction and nerve irritation are often the real problem, and how chiropractic care complements stretching to create lasting relief.

If you feel tight all the time, stretch constantly, or notice that your back pain keeps returning, this episode will help you understand what’s really missing.

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. hi. Welcome to another episode of Asked the Chiropractor. Our lower back series that I've been doing here the last several weeks have got a lot of comments and people asking questions. So I'm not gonna stop doing them until somebody asks me a question about something else. So this was a question that every chiropractor gets asked everywhere, and I have no exception here in Rockford, Illinois. I'll be out and somebody will come up to me. I'm having this lower back pain. What stretch will fix this. And I always laugh at that because stretching alone isn't gonna fix your back pain., It never has. I've never seen it do it., I see it give temporary something that's extremely temporary relief, but it doesn't get rid of the problem., It's, we gotta get rid of this situation that's causing your muscle to tight, to make you want to stretch it more than I just need a good stretch., We hear it all the time. They come in, they want to get one adjustment. Me teaching the one stretch, that secret magical chiropractic stretch that we all know that we're hiding from you. So it, to me, it's funny because if stretching worked, I mean we all, your pain would be gone. Right? So, you know, if you would've found the stretch by now.. Some of the behaviors that we see a lot of people doing that come in and tell me, , I saw this guy, he's supposed to be a back guru on YouTube, and I've been doing his stretch. I'm like, he must not be that much of a guru because you're here. He didn't work., Or they have their morning stretching routines like every day before I get outta bed, I do this, and this. Or, somebody showed me how to use a foam blower to get rid of all my problems. What do you think about that? Now as I talk about these things, I want to make it crystal clear. I am a huge fan of stretching. I am a huge fan of using a foam roller. I'm a huge fan. I, if you were to go to the, I live here in Rockford, Illinois. If you went down the road in the morning when I'm working out, you would see me stretching and using a foam roller before I exercise. These are great tools to keep a healthy back healthy. These will not make an unhealthy back healthy. So if you want to keep a good thing going, you want to keep your spine in alignment. You got even into the chiropractor, you got your adjustment, they corrected the subluxations. You're feeling great. How do I keep this going as long as possible? Stretching routines, foam rolling. Those are great things to do to keep it going, but they don't fix it. So why does stretching always feel like the right answer? If it doesn't fix it? You have a tight muscle because something in your back is wrong, and stretching that tight muscle, making that one of those symptoms, one of the components of your back being misaligned, going away. There is a short term relief of that. There is something that says, you know what? I do feel a little better right now. I'm gonna dive back into doing everything I was just doing that caused that muscle to be angry. What do I mean by that? Let's say I'm shoveling snow and my lower back starts to hurt., I, because I have a misalignment, a bigger problem, my lower back be, I should all be able to shovel snow, pain free. But if I have an underlying thing going on, I do a stretch. Okay, I feel a little better. I'm gonna shovel a little bit more. I do a little bit more, and then it comes back faster this time. So I stretch it again. Ah, I can keep going. I do it again, but now it hits me even quicker again. This is not from a lack of stretching. This is not from a muscle being wrong. There's an underlying condition that keeps talking to you more and more. So a lot of people feel like stretching will help because you're able to get their job done, but it's not fixing it. Another big thing that makes people think stretching is good. Like I talked about earlier, some guru they see on social media, some chiropractor somewhere on the other part of the country telling you this is the cure for all your lower back pain. My one stretch. And, they're just doing this to give views. They're getting this to get people to watch their video. There's no magical one cure. And matter of fact, a lot of those, if you're doing them, can make you worse because you might have a different condition than what they're describing on the video that you don't know, and you're doing the stretch and you're actually making yourself worse. Your chiropractor could actually help you do that, right? So what's the difference between flexibility and mobility and stability? That's easy. Your flexibility is how much you can touch your toes, your mobilities, mobility about how much you can move, but your stability about how you can control all this. So stretching is great. Stretching helps with the flexibility. Stretching helps it make it a little bit more mobile, but it doesn't really do a lot for stability. If you listen to my podcast in the past I've talked about the four types of muscles. Four types of muscles. I, there's only three. Today in the research you're showing us a fourth type of muscle. You have your skeletal muscle, you know your biceps and your leg muscles. You have your smooth muscle and your blood vessels, and you have your cardiac muscle in your heart. Today there's saying their stabilization muscles too, and these stabilization muscles are located throughout your core, and they're the ones that keep your balance. Now they look like a skeletal muscle on dissection, but when you look at 'em under a microscope, they look very different. There's things in my arms and legs that my brain and consciously move and control and tell it where to go. Your stabilization muscles, you cannot do that. I'll give you an example. If you go to the bottom of your hairline, there's a little bump right there. That's your second bone in your neck called your C two or your axis. I want everybody right now without moving your head, without moving your shoulders, and without moving your neck, I want you to move your C too. I'll wait. You can't do that because that muscle doesn't have the regular skeletal muscle around it. It only has stabilization muscles now. What makes stable ditch and muscles a little different is they have tons and tons of neurological connections, hundreds more than anywhere else, and so their job is to keep your eyes level at all costs. So we cannot outstretch the stabilization muscles. We have to take the stress off the stabilization muscles in order for 'em to work properly. So what's usually happening is your stabilization muscles are angry or irritated, and your skeletal muscles are trying to balance you out. You can stretch out a skeletal muscle, get a little bit of relief, but your stabilization muscle still mad and only chiropractors are trying to find and get rid of that pressure on there. So what happens is when the stabilization of muscles mad, what we find out is that you have a restricted joint and the joint doesn't wanna move anymore. because the stabilization muscle won't allow it to move more and create bigger problems. It's trying to protect you. It can also irritate the nerves because these nerves are firing the stabilization muscle over and over and over again. And the stabilization muscle now is dominant where the normal nerve flow no longer is. And this leads to more guarding and more fatigue because it's working so hard to keep you from causing more damage. And over time as this one area is pinching down and bearing down on this one joint so you don't hurt it more, you start to compensate other spots because your other stabilization muscles kick in and say the eyes have to stay level. So if my lower back is out and I'm leaning to the right. Now the stabilization muscles have locked up tight and they're not allowing me to move certain way, putting extra stress on some of my larger skeletal muscles, which I can stretch and get a temporary relief. But it does nothing for the stabilization muscles. And the longer I wait to correct the stabilization muscles, the more the rest of my spine compensates. And now all of a sudden I have two issues, not one. So the wind is stretching help, , stretching helps, and the muscle's actually shortened. If you tuned in last week, I talked to about people who sit behind it too long and their shoulders roll forward and as they're always roll forward, , the pectoral muscles actually will shorten over time because you're not using them. And then when I tell you to have good posture, it's almost hard to stay up a good posture because you've shortened these muscles so much for being wrong so long. So going into a doorframe, grabbing that and sticking your chest out big and stretching those pectoral muscles will help stretch. Lengthen them so you can get your shoulder posture back from sitting too much. So there's a great benefit to stretching. As I told you in the beginning, I'm not, again, stretching. It does great things, but again, it's how to keep a healthy person healthy, not get a sick person. So chiropractic adjustments with stretching. Absolutely. You get your adjustment then stretch. because now you're in the right place. Now you know where you need to be. Now your muscle memory is where we want it. Now it's time to reinforce it. Now it's time to kick it in. Who am I reaching out to today? I'm reaching out to that friend of yours. I was looking for that magical stretch. We all know that person because they're always stretching because it doesn't seem to hold very long. So if you know somebody that's had lower back pain and neck and shoulder pain, but let's talk about lower back pain, and they're always stretching, or they have the newest stretch, oh hey, what do you see? This new stretch I came up with, oh hey, I just watched somebody on social media. I got a new stretch that's gonna fix everything. Or you know why your lower back hurts? You don't know my magical stretch. You know that person's probably having two vertebras that are getting , really stuck underneath there, and the ones above and below are becoming hypermobile and the degenerative disc disease is probably starting to kick it in those discs. So this is the person we're looking for. This is the person we want to talk to, and we want to get you adjusted. Then we want to teach you how to stretch specifically for what's going on in your spine so you keep a healthy back healthy. Here in Rockford, we actually work with people down the street at, at the gym called Movement Fitness. All the time. We tell them what we see on the x-rays and they customize stretching routines for them after we see 'em. So they'll come here and get adjusted by me. They go down the street and work out. It's a great relationship we have here., If you're chiropractor is not a Rockford, hopefully your chiropractor has the same relationships that can help you lower back pain. But here in Rockford when you have lower back pain, we have people that we work with also besides just us. Yeah, so if you had that friend that constantly keep stretching or things they know the secret or found the right trainer or the right person online, when they continue to have the problem, have 'em go see a chiropractor, we'll work with them and we'll give'em, we'll, how 'em to stretch. But we'll tell 'em when, where, and how and when it's good to do it and when it's not so good to do it. Remember, chiropractic is a cause. Chiropractic solution for lower back pain. We're looking for the cause of lower back pain. We're not looking at the symptoms. We're non-medical we're. We have long term solution, long term working with you to make this an ongoing thing to make sure doesn't keep coming back. So thank you for tuning in and if you have questions about chiropractic or chiropractic. Pain or chiropractic issues only a chiropractor is uniquely trained to answer these questions and then come back here next week. because I've been asked questions about when should I see a chiropractor or a physical therapist from my lower back pain? And here in Rockford, we have a neat answer to that because we actually work with a physical therapy place in town. So thanks for tuning in. Come back next week.