Fix your ankles
If you suffer from stiff ankles or tight calves this blog post is for you. The assumption to make when you have tight calves is to stretch the calves. However, to gain length in your calves it is often helpful to train the muscles at the front of your lower leg. This is because they are often weak in people who have chronically tight calves. This is because stretching causes a mechanical change in the muscles whereas strengthening causes a change in the way your body perceives length. What are the problems if you have poor ankle mobility? Common for people to roll off the outside of their foot when walking. Big toe bunions can form If your ankles are tight when walking your calf is used more, therefore becomes tighter. Your body mass is more forwards when walking Collapsing of your foot arch So when you are at home instead of forcing your knee over your ankle to create mobility in your ankle, try to strengthen the front of your lower leg which will allow you to access more range of motion for the long term. This will be more long term because you won’t be relying on an […]
Headaches and Hydration
Headaches can affect peoples life from work, hobbies and when you are trying to relax at home. The most common headache is tension-type headaches. This can cause pain in the back of the head, into the neck and around your eyes. This typically happens on both sides of the head. There are many factors that contribute to tension-type headaches. These include: Stress Anxiety Not drinking enough water Holding your head in one position for a long time Sleeping in an awkward position Eyestrain Head and neck injury Clenching your jaw or grinding your teeth How can chiropractic care help your headache? In the clinic, we can first check the lifestyle factors that may be aggravating your headaches and give you ways to manage them better. This includes looking at your posture and giving home exercises to you. We perform a full examination on every new patient which should identify the triggering factors for your headache. We will also do various treatment methods that best suit you. These can be: Soft tissue massage Active Release Techniques Chiropractic adjustments Joint mobilisation Home rehabilitation Drink more water Especially with the weather warming up, it is important to touch on water consumption for […]
Is elbow pain getting on your nerves?
Elbow injuries are a common injury in desk workers and athletes. In people who lift weights they are one of the most common injuries to have. Although the elbow may appear to be a simple hinge joint that simply has two movements (bending or straightening the elbow), the reality is far from it. The elbow is a more complicated joint than it seems because the movement occurs between three bones and surrounding this are 16 small muscles. These help to not only straighten and bend your elbow but also rotate it as your palm is either up or down. Although many elbow issues are due to overuse of the muscles causing a repetitive strain injury, it is common for people to cause an injury to one of the several nerves in the arm. This can cause tingling, numbness, a burning sensation and possible weakness in the hand. A type of exercise that is used to help nerve pain is nerve gliding. This aims to either stretch the nerve or glide the nerve. Gliding techniques will stretch the nerve and have the aim of increasing the tension and pressure through the nerve. This sometimes makes symptoms worse in people. Sliding techniques […]
What To Do For Your Tight Back?
Your mid-back as a structure overall is built to be stiff and stable. This is because attaching to it are your ribs which are crucial for protecting your organs that are underneath it. But a lot of people are in poor postures during the day and therefore have a rounded upper back. If the upper back is stiff then you will be unable to extend your back fully. Not being able to extend your upper back fully has knock-on implications for your neck, lower back and especially your shoulders. So, when trying to fix these issues it is important to not just look at the site of pain but try to fix the mobility in your upper back. If a fire starts in your house and you running to the smoke alarm and taking out the batteries is similar to just focusing on the site of pain when you get an injury. Without looking at your upper back mobility you can miss the true cause of your problem and therefore not recover efficiently or perform optimally at a chosen sport. This is especially true for gym-goers and throwing athletes. It is very common for people not to have enough mobility […]
Sort your hamstring pain out
Chances are you know someone with a hamstring injury or have had one yourself. If you have had a hamstring injury you will know first hand they can be very difficult to get rid of. Also, you are faced with the problem that if you have a hamstring strain you have a very high chance of re-injuring the hamstring again. But what are hamstring tears? Class I: There are only a few muscle or tendon fibers are torn. You will usually have pain during or after activity which would be worse when sprinting. There may be a small amount of swelling and discomfort. Usually associated with minimal strength loss. You will likely be able to walk directly after the injury. Class II: A partial tear of the fibers. You will usually have pain during activity which stops activity. There will be a significant loss of strength and a significant amount of pain. You will likely have some pain when walking. Class III: This is when there is extensive tears to the muscle, you will usually have felt pain immediately and may have fallen to the ground. Your range of movement at 24 hours is usually significantly reduced with pain on […]
Test Your Balance
Hip pain is very common in people who exercise regularly. But how can you help your hip pain and tight hips? To prepare the body to be able to squat or lift weights pain-free, you should improve your sense of balance and general control single-legged. Think about it, when was the last time you trained single leg exercises? I mean, really trained it? But it’s never too late to start incorporating it into your workout routine. The hip airplane which was designed by Dr. Stuart McGill with the aim of being an active flexibilty exercise deals with both balance and general control head-on so will seriously challenge you to perform it equally side to side. Therefore, the hip airplane will test and improve the stability of the muscles in and around your hip. Even people who can squat huge amounts of weight can struggle with this and it will lead to injury. This is because of progressively causing micro-trauma to your tissues because you don’t have the functional stability around your hip. So, people of all athletic ability can benefit from training single movements. So why is the hip airplane so important for the squatting movement pattern? When you squat […]
Easy tips to help your back pain
Most low back pain is primarily caused by the way you move and how you sit. During the day there are ways to do these things that put less stress on your back. Your spine has 24 vertebrae and it is common to think that all the parts move evenly. But certain areas take on more movement than others which are called hinge points. This blog post will give you some techniques and ideas to help remove these hinge points and to start getting you more pain free. In between the segments of your spine, there are discs that act as little shock absorbers. As you sleep the discs gather water and hold the water so they become more pressurised when you wake up first thing in the morning, this means they are easier to injure. After an hour the pressure decreases to nearly normal so this is why it is extra important to be careful in the morning. Ways to manage this in the morning: Don’t bend and round your back when getting out of bed When brushing your teeth, avoid spinal movement. Try and hinge from the hips. You should feel like you’re gliding your bottom backwards in […]
What to do for tight hips
Tight hip flexors are a common issue we see in clinic. With tight hips people commonly look for one of two reasons to why they are tight: – Is it tight because it’s short and so we should stretch it? Or – Is it tight because it’s weak so we should strengthen it? This brings us to an important point. The psoas muscle plays a role in hip flexion but hip flexors shouldn’t purely be judged off the muscles action but should be judged from the function of the muscle, which for the Psoas is stability of the lumbar spine. The psoas has a broad origin that is from all the segments of your lumbar spine. Your lumbar spine has no structural stability unlike for example its neighbour, the thoracic spine. So the lumbar spine relies on muscles to stabilise it. What can we learn from this? Rather than attempting to fix your tight psoas by really pushing the muscle into a stretched position or by just directly strengthening it, a different line of attack can be taken by focusing your time on stabilising the lumbar spine and your core muscles. To really increase the effectiveness when you try to […]
Back pain in cyclists
Many cyclists suffer from back pain. Firstly, cycling in comparison to other sports has a low rate of injury, apart from crashes or collisions from, for example, someone jumping into the cycle lane on your morning commute and your morning coffee failed to wake you up in time. However, cyclists do need to take care of their backs because in general, the most common thing cyclists complain of, is their back. Being hunched over on a road bike will take an effect over time. Low back pain is reported by more than 50% of cyclists and in overuse injuries lower back pain causes the highest rates of functional impairment and medical attention amongst cyclists. Why do cyclists get low back pain? There are many potential reasons why cyclists can get back pain but the following are the most likely: Poor bike fit: This can be from an incorrect saddle height or and uneven saddle Knee has a less than 25% bend at the end of the stroke. This will force you to rock your pelvis from side to side to get enough power at bottom of the stroke. Your handlebars are too far forward causing you to overstretch which will […]
Let your high heels gather dust after lockdown.
Wearing high heels shoes can create a lot of problems when it comes to walking biomechanics which could cause injuries in your feet and further up your body into your hip and lower back. What changes high heels make? It creates a-lot of pressure in your big toe It will reduce the ability to get a spring in your step because there is less tension in your calf due to it being in a shortened position. You have to step higher to clear your foot off the ground and this can cause injuries to other areas of the body. The higher the heel, the higher you have to step. With your heel raised the knee is moving forwards so there is more loading through your quadriceps and therefore more compression across the knee. Whereas the people who use a low heeled shoe are more likely to put the foot under their centre of mass and use the muscles around the front of your lower leg as shock absorbers. Simply put, if you run downhill you will feel like your knee is under more pressure. Therefore, if you wear high heeled shoes you are changing the biomechanics of your walking to […]
