Dr Hulsebus presents "Ask the Chiropractor". This is a short podcast with a different topic we, as chiropractors, get asked. He tries to give a straight forward quick answer. If you have a question about chiropractic only qualified person to answer is a chiropractor. He will present research and then break it down so easy to understand. Dr Hulsebus is a third generation Palmer Graduate. He is a member of the International Chiropractic Association, Illinois Prairie State Chiropractic and Professional Hockey Player Chiropractic Society. www.rockforddc.com
When you watch an elite athlete compete at the top of their game, you are almost always looking at someone who utilizes regular chiropractic care to stay structurally stable. However, taking care of an athlete requires a highly specialized understanding of neurology and sports biomechanics.
In this episode of Ask the Chiropractor, Dr. Brant Hulsebus explains the science behind safe athletic care and performance. As a Palmer College of Chiropractic graduate, the long-standing team chiropractor for the Rockford IceHogs, and a board director for the ICA Sports and Fitness Science Council, Dr. Hulsebus details how spinal misalignments cause compensatory patterns throughout the entire body. Learn why timing your adjustments around training schedules prevents stretch receptor fatigue, why recurring knee and ankle issues are often caused by pelvic rotations, and how structural screenings can catch ACL tear vulnerabilities before an athlete ever takes the field.
In this episode, you’ll discover:
The stretch receptor factor: Why pre-competition adjustments focus on stability over relaxation.
Treating the Strongman Games: Managing extreme joint load in athletes weighing over 400 pounds.
Neurological recovery: The role of chiropractic care in supporting patients recovering from concussions.
The pelvic instability epidemic: Retraining stabilization muscles in year-round teenage athletes.
Spine vs. Extremities: Why adjusting a sore wrist or ankle fails if the foundational gait is torqued.
Co-managing elite care: How professional sports relationships provide patients with top-tier orthopedic networks.
Have a question about sports performance, joint stability, or athletic recovery? Leave a comment or message on our platforms, and you might be featured as our next question of the week!
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. So last week if you tuned in, we talked about bending and twisting and hearing a pop or feeling your back lock up when you do that. And I mentioned how when you come to see us, that as a chiropractor, I know when it's safe to take care of you and not to take care of you. Of course, that's part of our education. I g- I laugh all the time when somebody comes and sees me and says, "Hey, I just had my hip replaced. My doctor said you probably shouldn't pull on my leg." of course, we shouldn't pull on your leg. Of course, we know that. We don't need to be told that. That's ridiculous. That's part of our education it's just, it, to me, it makes me laugh. But in our office in Rockford, Illinois, we work with a lot of sports teams. We work with the IceHogs. We've worked with Rock Valley College athletes. We've worked with different various individual athletes. In the past, we had a basketball team here called the Rockford Lightning I took care of with them. I used to take care of the Rockford Rampage indoor soccer team. we got the World Cup going on., many years ago, we had an indoor soccer team in Rockford that played at the, , where the IceHogs play., we've also had many different baseball teams. Everybody I can remember different baseball teams. I got to work with two or three of those baseball teams. So in other words, I've worked with all kinds of athletes, MMA fighters, , division one athletes, Olympic athletes, because some of our IceHogs are Olympic athletes. You name it. Even the Ironman. We took care of many people that were getting ready for the Ironman, training for the Ironman. So in Rockford, if you're an athlete, we take care of a lot of them. A matter of fact, you've heard of the American Medical Association. Well, in chiropractic, we have the ICA, and I'm actually on the board of directors of the ICA Sports and Fitness Science Council. And Dr. Hays, who's here with me, he's on the board of directors of the Pro Hockey Chiropractic Society. So not only do we take care of athletes, but we're help part of the leading the different areas of chiropractic to train chiropractors to work on athletes and how to work on athletes. So we're more than just chiropractors that work on athletes. We're chiropractors that help train chiropractors to work on athletes. Matter of fact, I go back to Palmer College all the time, and I help the students talk about careers with athletes and how to respect with athletes. I'm even going to be speaking at one of the largest chiropractic schools this fall about working with athletes. So yeah, we know a lot about working with athletes. I've had some really unique opportunities working with athletes, , besides, like I said, twenty-six seasons, twenty-seven seasons of working with hockey players. But there's things you take into consideration before you see an athlete., one, are you going to do some heavy lifting? Is your, is your athletic event require strength, strength conditioning? I am one of like sixteen chiropractors trained internationally to take care of the Strongman Games. those guys are like seven foot tall and weigh like four hundred and fifty pounds that throw boulders at each other. And the women too, I mean, they're, they're incredibly strong. I g- I'm trained to work on them. You see, if I'm a strength athlete and I go to pick up something heavy, I don't want to be sloppy. I want to be strong, stable, and secure, but I also want my back feeling good. So if I was to get an adjustment where all my stretch receptors are adjusted and exhausted, and then I go on the field to compete, I'm not gonna do good. I'm gonna not do as well as I should because the chiropractic adjustment has exhausted my stretch receptors. So I do different types of care for an athlete before a competition versus an athlete when they're not competing or during their time of rest. I do a different adjustment on the IceHogs before the game than I do before they get on the bus after the game. It's very important to understand the differences when it comes to working with athletes A lot of people think that, , just any chiropractor can give me an adjustment. It's all the same. And I'll be honest with you, I used to be one of those chiropractors until I got more involved with athletes, and some athletes tell me, " I don't like the way I feel when you adjust me before an event." So I went off and took all these classes and certifications and worked with some of the best chiropractors out there in order to get myself better at taking care of athletes. So now after all these years of working with them, they put me in leadership positions. It's kind of fun. But I've gotten to work with all kinds of different chiropractors, studied with some of the best, , even, like, when it comes to concussions. A lot of people have no idea that chiropractors do so much work with concussions. I've got to work with the chiropractor that helped Sidney Crosby get back on the ice. He's now at Harvard Medical School. I got to work with the chiropractor that helped Jim McMahon after his head injuries, so he went back to being Jim McMahon. So it's, it's opened so many unique doors to work with so many cool stuff. we talk about an athlete with a concussion. Well, I've had a lady slip and fall at a campsite, hit her head, and she had a concussion. But the stuff I learned by working with the hockey players, I was able to apply to her, and we were able to help her get better real quick and fast, and that's exciting. So when you go to look for a, a sports chiropractor, remember that the stuff that we learn with the athletes applies to everyday people. I also do a podcast for the Sports and Fitness Science Council, and there I, I kind of do it for myself. I, I be a little selfish. I get to interview some of the top minds in sports chiropractic. Recently, I've had a lot of young teenage female athletes come see me with pelvic instability. The lower back never feels strong. They're having issues, and that was getting frustrating to me. So what I decided to do was get better at taking care of this by having a roundtable discussion with five of the top sports chiropractors,
and the question I presented was:
How do we take care of young female athletes with lower back instability, especially in their teenage years? And I got to sit there and have a 45-minute conversation brainstorming with the top chiropractors in the world on this topic, and I was able to take that and bring that back. I often tease I might not be the smartest guy, but I'm clever, so I was able to use my positioning in the podcasting in order to educate myself better in taking care of these athletes. That, by the way, that's an extremely common finding today, teenage girls who play year-round, so whether it's basketball, volleyball, hockey. Gymnast, cheer, we see this all the time. They just keep going and going and going, and their lower back muscles aren't doing the job to stabilize their injury, and every time they bend or twist or get hit or, or do a lunge, their lower back goes out again. So not only do we do a unique chiropractic adjustment not to exhaust the stretch receptors, as I mentioned earlier, but we've also come up with the idea that stabilization muscles in these young athletes are not up to par. So we want to get them adjusted, and then we also want to get their stabilization muscles to get stronger so they can hold what we do better and longer, so you don't have to come see me after every event. So that's something we work really hard on Now sometimes when people see that they, , we're, we're s- working with athletes in sports, they assume that we do a lot of extremity work, we address a lot of extremities. And I'll be honest with you, we do very m- minimal of that. We don't do any of it in a professional arena because they have orthopedic doctors there, and they'd be curious why I adjusted someone's wrist right in front of a hand surgeon., But, but, I mean, we do do it for some of our other athletes. But usually if you're having hand or elbow problems, or if you're having ankle or wrist problems, there's a bigger biomimetic … Excuse me. There's a bigger biomechanical issue happening somewhere in your spine or your gait that's causing these things to happen over and over again. So if my ankle is bothering, my knee's bothering me, we might find a really badly rotated pelvis that causes your hip to come up and turn, and that creates a unique torque on your knee and your ankle every time you run, skate, jump, slide, whatever it is on that joint, which keeps making it injure over and over again. So just doing a quick knee adjustment might give you relief that day, but the next day you go out to compete again, it comes back again. And again, like I said, 20-some years of experience, we have to go back and look at the spine biomechanics first and see how that's moving to make sure it's not torquing the wrong way, irritating it. Now, when you have a gross injury, say I'm running and my ankle dis- my ACL tears, then that's definitely go see the orthopedic doctor. Here in Rockford, Illinois, working with athletes, it's real easy for us to get you in because we know them all because we've been working with them for years. I work with them on multiple healthcare systems because multiple teams use different healthcare systems, but they use the same chiropractor, so we've got relationships and friends everywhere. Did you know that it's easy for us to predict tears in the ACL for female s- players? There's a lot of girls today in sports that just are running during a non-contact issue and their ACL tears. Did you know there's a whole paper written about this that I've talked about on different podcasts? It all goes back to pelvic rotation again. So if the spine's misaligned, the pelvis is rotated, there's a weird torque on that knee, and you start running, that knee can just give out. I talked to my friends at Movement Fitness, my good friend Justin Kigley, and he said today when you go to a high school girls sporting event, you will either see a girl in a knee brace or you will see somebody with scars on their knee on almost every team. This is not just happening occasionally. This seems to be like constantly there's one girl on the team that's missing time, a season, because of this injury. And the cool thing is that we can figure this out for you. We can, we can determine if you have a bad hip misalignment which makes your ACL susceptible to injury. It's really easy. Again, our friend Coach Justin down at Movement Fitness He actually does those screenings and tests, and they can see this too. It's, it's so predictable now to see it before it happens, and it's sad when we see it and they don't follow through with the care and then it happens., we just feel awful inside. So there's so many different areas in sports and things that chiropractors are so in depth with. I'm a member of the Pro Hockey Chiropractic Society, and I told you Dr. Hays is on their board. I've worked with the Pro Baseball. I've interacted with the Pro Football Chiropractic Society. I've, I've talked to FIFA about us covering games. we just … Yeah, whenever you see an athlete, you're gonna see a chiropractor nowadays. It's just becoming more and more common. Matter of fact, the Blackhawks didn't have a chiropractor until the IceHogs came to Rockford. When the IceHogs came to Rockford, the guys were getting called up, and there was no chiropractor up there, and they were mad, so they got a chiropractor up there. The guys see the value of it, especially when the chiropractor knows how to take care of athletes. So if you're gonna see a chiropractor in your part of the woods, wherever you might be, let's say you're not in Rockford, Illinois, and you want to get a, a evaluation, make sure the chiropractor has some basic understanding working with athletes. There are certain things to consider. You can go onto the chiropractic.org website. You can find this Council on Sports and Fitness there. You can see who's already a member of our council or a member of our organization. They're gonna be ready to go. You can go to the pro hockey where Dr. Hays is, and you can see chiropractors that have signed up there and find sports chiropractors. My big thing, though, is I wanna make sure my sports chiropractor gi- gives chiropractic adjustments. Sometimes sports chiropractors don't give chiropractic adjustments. They just do a lot of PT, muscle work, and stuff like that, and that's all good stuff. I'm not saying it's not good stuff. I'm just saying for me as a chiropractor, I wanna make sure I get my spine checked too. Hey, if you got a question about athletics and chiropractic care and you wanna reach out, go ahead and leave a comment or a message wherever you're watching and listening to this, and we'll get back to you. So we talked a lot about sports. I got into sports because I always wanted to be an athlete. It never quite worked out. I got a championship ring from the IceHogs about being their team chiropractor. I always liked sports. That's kind of what drove me to chiropractic and sports. But I also have four daughters. When I have four daughters, um, I learned a lot about pregnancy and newborn babies and taking care of them, and when my wife gave birth to our twins, I had a really bad injury to my arm, and I had to go back to school and learn about pregnancy and taking care of kids because I had nothing else better to do. Why don't you come back next week? We'll talk about another area of our practice here in Rockford that we love, and that's taking care of pregnant moms and newborn babies and stuff. Thanks for tuning in. I'll see you next week
