Patient Resources

On this page we will add links to relevant information we feel will guide you whether you are in pain, need to improve your posture, or your performance.

Pain

As patients of the clinic you get ‘insider information’ to get your spine and body stronger – we most commonly start when we are in pain, and in this phase we need a deeper understanding of how everything is linked together. We will go through all the relevant parts in your sessions, however for reference, or if you want a heads up, here are some key lessons that you might want to learn from to help you understand pain and function.

Lesson 1: Understand where you are at, and why

Are you in 5% of people that we see in the clinic who have suffered a significant trauma which caused their problem (once they recover from the injury as long as there were no other compensations they will be fine) or are you in the 95% of people who gradually have accumulated a series of compensations in their body over months or even years, which have left them vulnerable to injury?

These issues can come from repeated stresses and strains on the spine and joints, older injuries, postural changes and working positions – and over time your body compensates to adapt, but it loses some level of function or tolerance with it – leaving your more vulnerable to injury.

That’s why ‘my back just went’ with something trivial like sneezing or picking up a sock.

Lesson 2: Everything is connected

Lesson 2 has a few parts that you can check. You might not need to read all of them, so check with your Chiropractor which one is suited for you.

If you have lower back pain and sciatica we have 4 articles for linking areas of your body together to help you understand the connections, but also know what to do to help you recover and get better than before.

Part 1 covers how neck problems can be linked to lower back problems

Part 2 details how ankle problems can cause lower back pain

Part 3 highlights how chest tightness causes postural changes affecting the lower back

Part 4 discusses a foot issue called ‘overpronation’ which can effect you higher up

If you have neck pain then parts 1 and 3 (even though we titled them for lower back pain) will still cover and give you more information on how the muscles in the back of your spine are all connected.

Lesson 3: Breath!

Don’t worry as nice as this looks you don’t have to sit in a field to practice this one – but breathing is so important and can be key to your recovery. One of the main reasons is that you breath between 15-25,000 times a day – and if you aren’t doing it right you can not only be using the wrong muscles (which can cause tension in the neck and upper rib cage), but also the muscles in the lower back don’t get that rhythmical pumping action which can be beneficial for that area. Check with your Chiropractor how you are breathing and we will make sure you have the correct technique when you come in.

Lesson 4: Sit to stand properly

This will be covered in an exercise session, or a handout given to you by the Chiropractor

Lesson 5: Lets have a performance mind set

If we are only thinking about pain then as soon as you are out of pain, we have no baseline for improvement or targets – once you’re out of pain you can’t be more out of pain – but you can still make improvements in your health.

We now want to move on to some of the topics below and learn all the ways we can make postural changes – this is by far the most effective department to look at first as posture is something that is going to be with us 100% of the time! Let’s get that right and develop some good habits now.

You can then move on to changing your focus to that of making continual and sustained improvements over a longer period of time. Just think of how you could be in 5 or 10 years time if you stayed the same as you were Vs gradually getting better and better.

Posture

We should start by reviewing the importance of posture and your spine however if we have gone through that in the session in enough detail then the following article may be more handy:

– See our blog 5 tips to improve your posture – remember integrating these changes will help enhance the treatment and help prevent the problem from coming back once we fixed it.

We also have a checklist of things that you should get your Chiropractor to show you in one of the sessions, so make sure we cover how to:

• Be able to release your own chest muscle tension
• Be able to have a good and safe stretch for your mid back and chest
• Be shown how to sit
• Be shown a good stretch for the hip flexors to undo the postural tightness of sitting.

Performance*

If you have only seen your Chiropractor when you were in pain – and you are wondering what all of this ‘performance’ talk is about – see our blog post on how we improve your performance in clinic.

Otherwise it is all about having a ‘performance mind set’ where you want to add in more good things for you, and minimise or remove the bad things. There are lots of good things you don’t know about yet, and there are of course some bad things you are doing that are doing that are going under the radar as well!

*Nothing has made it onto this page in terms of a recommendation without Andrew doing it himself.

Additional complementary strategies:

Getting Chiropractic treatment is brilliant and it is a sure way to help you improve the function of your spine and joints – we will make sure your body is as god as we can get it checking your symmetry, resolving joint stiffness, getting you stronger, and checking all the signals are going to the right places.

However we can ‘hack’ your rate of improvement by adding in some other things.

Sports massage

If you haven’t met Helen yet, she is our in house sports massage therapist at Duffield Chiropractic Clinic and is as passionate about muscles as your Chiropractor is about spines!

Sports massage is a very effective add on treatment which works very well with your Chiropractic programme. It has the right blend of being relaxing, whilst being firm enough to release muscle tension. We work together to make sure our advice for your problem is in tune with each other, so you won’t get conflicting advice.

YouTube channels for performance:

Until we have our YouTube channel up and running yet (our Chiropractor is still camera shy) please check out some of the following channels:

– If you want to train like an athlete – all the exercises and advice given by Jeff at Athlean X are recommended

– If yoga is for you, check out Yoga with Adriene

– If you want to look at training on the parallettes or improving your flexibility – check out GMB fitness