Why Your Back Goes Out Suddenly — What’s Really Happening

Most people think their back “goes out” because of one wrong movement.

In reality, it usually is not sudden at all.

In this episode of Ask the Chiropractor, Dr. Brant Hulsebus explains what is really happening when your back suddenly locks up or flares. Learn how stress builds over time through sitting, lifting, posture, sleep habits, and repeated movement patterns — until one final motion becomes the last straw.

You’ll also hear why pain is often the last signal, not the first, how compensation hides the problem for so long, and what chiropractors look for when evaluating “sudden” back pain.

If your back has ever gone out while bending over, getting out of the car, or doing something simple, this episode will help you understand what was really going on.

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. Thank you for tuning in. So today's question has to do with why my back feels fine, and then boom. Now it doesn't. So everything's feeling great. Everything's moving good. I do one thing and then boom, my back's out. Now I'm having horrible pain. I hear it all the time from patients. I bent over. I went to come up and my back went out. Why is it that I bent over, came up, my back, went out. I do that all the time. What did I do different this time? Or I got out of the car when I got out of the car. My back locked up. Did I get out of the car different? I don't understand. I've had this car for four years. Why would it, why would the getting out of the car do it now?, Another one. I was brushing my teeth and I went to, to rinse my mouth. Boom, my back went out. Should I stop brushing my teeth? No. We hear this all the time and everybody always is asking me, what's that one thing that I did? What's that one activity that we did? What's the one thing that made my back go out? Why is it that I got out of my car and all of a sudden it went out? Here's the secret. It didn't start then. It didn't begin when you did that, okay? You were already accumulating stress into your back. Think of it as smoking. Nobody ever said, I smoked one cigarette and I got lung cancer, and that wasn't the last cigarette you smoked that gave you the lung cancer. It was a lifetime of smoking that gave you lung cancer. It wasn't the last piece of candy you ate, that butch made you overweight. It wasn't the last piece of sugar you ate that made you diabetic. It was a lifetime of eating sugar that made you diabetic. It wasn't the last acetaminophen that you took that caused your liver to flare up. It was a lifetime of acetaminophen that made your liver flare up. So what are some daily stresses that irritate your spine? That we all do all the time? It's real easy. I'm doing one right now. I'm sitting down. Sitting to your spine is the same as sugar to your teeth. There's nothing biomechanically spinal friendly about sitting. When I sit my lower back disc, take more of the weight, I roll my shoulders forward, creating bad thoracic posture, and my chin protrudes out, destroying my cervical curve, increasing the stress on the area between my shoulder blades, and again, ruining one curve, ruin the other curve. My lower back curve goes with it, and eventually I have to start wiggling around because my hips feel off. I'm getting pain on my leg. That's all just from sitting. And when did we learn this pattern? When we're kids, what did we do with our kids? We said to school, have 'em sit all day. How about lifting? How many of you can honestly say when you go to pick something off the floor, you squat down and grab it and stand up? That's how you're supposed to do it. Did you know that we're meant to squat? We're meant to reach down, squat, pick things up. I often blame plumbers. The reason why we're so bad at squatting. If it wasn't for modern plumbing, we'd all go outside and squat more. Now, I'm not saying go out and do that, but we're really bad at squatting. You can really tell someone's overall biomechanic health by whether or not they could perform a simple squat. I was at Home Depot the other day getting stuff out the bottom shelf and I'd squatted down the way you're supposed to look on those shelves. And I'm going through stuff and some old guy looked at me and goes, what are you some type of yoga teacher? And I'm like, no, I'm a chiropractor. He goes, yeah, you would be. And walked away. So we, when we lunge to pick things up, we always lunge with the same leg. Lunging is when one leg goes forward, one leg goes back and you bend on to grab things. You always go the same way, same repetitive cycle over and over and over again. If we wonder why our lower back and hips get twisted up. So when we lifting things, we have horrible, horrible biomechanics. because we're not doing that squat. Most of us can't. Most of you listen to this video. Couldn't do the squat right now if you wanted to. Next thing is posture. We sit all day. We look at computers all day. We look at phones all day. We read books all day. Our posture just gets destroyed from all the hunching over, and we take that with us. So when I hunched that hunched over all day looking at phones, doing podcasts and things like that, and I walk away, I stay with those shoulders forward and my head forward, and that doesn't really hurt. It's gonna create fatigue faster, but it doesn't really hurt. But then I grab something with that bad posture and I'm in a vulnerable position now. I've got problems and issues. Last one is sleep. Most of you sleep the same way you sit. Put your arms in front of you, put your head out. Same position as typing on all day. Exact same position. Difference is when you're sleeping, you're not moving. At least when you're typing, you're looking around the room, your arms and shoulders are moving. When you sleep, you just sit there, locked in that forward head. Posture, position. Shoulders forward, head forward, and you sleep like that all night long, and you get up in the morning and you blame your pillow. It's not your pillow, it's your posture. So these things all add up. So we're starting off with sitting, lifting wrong, bad posture, bad sleep posture, and then we ask ourselves, we had this hunched over this attitude. Then we go to like brush our teeth and we come up like, oh, I can't believe brushing my teeth caused that. No, no. Sleeping with bad posture for 10 years caused that. Having a desk all day long caused that being in front of a screen all day caused that. Picking up your socks won't cause your back to go out. Lunging to pick 'em up for the 500th time will cause your back to go out and not squatting. Twisting, real quick. Oh, my back went out. I can't believe I turned that way. No, that didn't make your back go out. By turning that way, it made your back go out because your posture was already bad and you were already in a vulnerable position. So why wait till the body sends a signal of pain, right? Why do it? As a chiropractor, we look to see where you're compensating. My head goes four to other parts of my spine. Had to change and balance that out. A lot of times I, with my kids who will be in a public place and I'll watch people walk, I'll tell 'em, that person has an all four problem. That person has an SI problem. This person has a C five problem. You just see it by watching it. Pain's usually the last thing that happens, right? We just have to compensate for the lack of motion areas or the fixation areas, and pain comes after it. We just can't do it anymore. The straw that broke the camel's back. You've heard that? I don't wanna say it's how we diagnose people, but there's some truth to that old saying. So what do people usually ignore when these things are starting to build up? Stiff. I'm really stiff. I feel like I gotta loosen up tight. Oh man. My shoulder's so tight. I know why my shoulder is so tight. It has a lot to do with the fact that you've been hunched over all the time. Fatigue. I tire out a lot faster than I used to. Of course you do. You are asking your muscles to keep weight doing things when they're not supposed to. If you had a good neck curve, you would distribute the weight of your head evenly amongst all your vertebras. The human head weighs about the same as a bowling ball. So if you had a good round curve, it'd be like carrying a tray on your hand. You can go a lot longer than trying to carry the tray straight in front of you with your arm outwards. So when your head comes out, you're asking all the muscles in your neck to compensate to carry all that extra weight. Where biomechanically, you were designed to distribute that weight evenly. Now it's all crashing in a couple of vertebras. Those vertebras get tired. When your hips are rotated, you know your leg twists and turns. Your left leg iss taking a longer step than your right leg. because you got this rotation going on. That muscle is constantly under torque, constantly tight, constantly being stretched and irritated. And you wonder why that leg tires out so fast while you're asking it to work overtime. Every step you take. Then we see is reduced motion, like I just said, shorts, stride on the right side, wrong stride on the left side. Short stride in the right, long stride in the left. We have to change our motion to compensate for this. And if it's in the neck and. Okay, we see the Frankenstein turn when they could turn their head, their chin, maybe five degrees, and the rest of their body will turn. So if someone's whole torso's turning to see on side to side rather than just their neck, we know there's reduced motion in there. Huge clue to what's going on. So what do we do?, You go see a chiropractor. You go see the chiropractor and tell 'em what's going on. Go see the chiropractor and tell them that. I was feeling great and all of a sudden I'm not, because you know what? This is not from, this is not from a lack of acetaminophen. This is not from a lack of medication. It could be from a lack of stretching, a lack of activity. Sure. But if you listen to previous podcasts, if it was from muscles being tight from overuse, as soon as you stretch, it would go away. It would stay away. So you go see the chiropractor, they're gonna look and see what's not working biomechanically wise. What we would do is we would lay you down. We would measure your feet length to see what's different. What's the same. We'd have you lift and lower your legs. We'd have you turn your head to the left and right. We'd see how your biomechanically working to see where the compensations are. Next thing we'd do is we'd go up and down and do a chiropractic exam on your spine. See how your laying with high shoulder, low shoulder, feel your vertebrae, see what's moving and not moving. And lastly, we probably usually match our findings with imaging to see what's happening. And if we could find these spots and we can go and start making these changes. We also will talk to you, coach you a little bit about your everyday activities. Boy, your neck posture's bad. We have to give you some homework to do on this neck posture to make this neck posture better. because what you're doing, you're gonna end up with a really bad neck in the future if you don't make a change. We're gonna find out your hip rotation, what you're doing, and your hip's wrong, what's causing the issue. Teach you how to do a squat, teach you how to bend and move better. Maybe even bring in some friends like here in Rockford, Illinois where I'm a chiropractor, down the street from me is a place called Movement Fitness. I'd send you down there with them, their strength coaches and I'd say, teach this person how to do a squat. They lower back and hips not getting arthritis to depends on you teaching how to do a squat. So go in and get checked. Now, do you have to have all these symptoms that get checked? Do you have to have the pain and all discomfort? Absolutely not. You can go in and get checked by a chiropractor tomorrow. They say, what are you in for today? I'm this in for a wellness visit and I want to make sure that I don't have any underlying things that could make me worse later. Chiropractor should be able to do the things I just described. Now, if you're in pain, you're probably gonna come in a few days in a row. If you go in paint free. You gonna probably do one or two, three days in a row, then after that, back off right away. because we're not fighting your inflammation because you didn't wait for your bucket to be overflowing before you had the flare up. You got it ahead of time. So you can definitely get in ahead of time. And , if you've got these physical jobs, you got these sitting positions, you do some things I described. Going and getting checked before it's a flare up is a lot more fun than dealing with a flare up. Now you could ask a physical therapist, a massage therapist, maybe your family doctor. These questions ask 'em whether or not you could help 'em. But that person you're asking is not a chiropractor. They do not know how to look for the things that we look, it's not part of their training no more is me knowing the right prescription to give to you for a rash on your forearm. I that's, I'm not taught that's not part of our chiropractic education. It's part of a medical education. because the medical doctor gives medicine and the chiropractor does chiropractic. So I wouldn't ask my family doctor, my massage therapist, my strength coach, or anybody else at PT about whether or not I should go to the chiropractor. The only person qualified to answer. That's a chiropractor. If you're in Rockford, Illinois, you want me to check you, come on in. I'll be more than happy to give you a straight answer. If you're not my area, go to chiropractic.org. Chiropractic org. That's our national association. You can look for a chiropractor in your area who probably thinks a lot like me and can work with you. Thanks for tuning in and listening. I appreciate you and remember, if you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, the only person qualified, the answer to that question is a chiropractor. Thank you.