Depending on the kind of person you are, winter is either the best time of the year or the season for hibernating and only going outside when you absolutely have to. Regardless of whether you love or hate it, it’s no secret that winter weather brings with it increased risk for injuries, with the cold and the ice and all. Luckily, we’ve compiled a list of seven helpful winter chiropractic tips to help you keep your body in good condition and avoid injury, no matter if you’re a winter sports fanatic or if you only venture outdoors to go to work and the store and the like. 

#1. Stretch Daily

Stretching is often something people just associate with athletes and dancers and very few people stretch on their own. However, stretching is one of the best winter chiropractic tips we can give you because of how everyone can benefit from it. You don’t need to be able to touch your toes or do a split, but simple stretches like child’s pose and downward dog and calf stretches and the like will boost your body’s mobility and flexibility. 

When your muscles and joints are stiff, this increases the likelihood of injury, especially when it’s icy or when the cold makes you even stiffer. Regular stretching will loosen your muscles and joints, which is especially important in cold winter weather. 

#2. Warm Yourself Up Before Activities

A common mistake people make is trying to jump right into activities like shoveling snow before taking the necessary precautions to warm their bodies up. This is a crucial winter chiropractic tip, regardless of whether you’re a skiing enthusiast or if you just need to shovel your driveway. Warming your body up with stretches and exercises like jumping jacks and squats and a brisk walk will reduce your risk of injury. While this is more commonly known among athletes, if you aren’t sporty, it’s still vital for you to warm yourself up before doing any sort of winter activity!

One of the most common reasons we see new patients during the winter months is due to back pain and other such issues that result from shoveling snow, slipping and falling, and more. While warming up before doing any outdoor activity won’t guarantee that you won’t get hurt, it will make it less likely, which is why this is one of the most frequent winter chiropractic tips chiropractors will give. 

#3. Maintain An Exercise Routine

We get it – it’s cold outside, if you try to do anything outdoors, there’s this entire process of bundling up, and if you drive to the gym, you’re risking potentially icy roads and decreased visibility due to snowfall. In spite of this, it’s important to find some way to stay active, for the health benefits and to reduce your risk of injury. You don’t need to log intense cardio workouts or do heavy weights or anything unless you want to. Even taking a walk around the block or going up and down the stairs in your home are a great way to keep active during the cold winter months. 

#4. Don’t Spend Too Much Time Hunched Over

People are more likely to be on their phones when they’re spending more time indoors, so for one of our winter chiropractic tips, we recommend trying to limit your screen time, or to be mindful of your posture while you’re on your phone. Many people hunch over and don’t really think about their posture when they’re clicking through social media, but poor posture can result in neck pain, shoulder pain, back pain, and more. Try to remember to sit up straight with your shoulders aligned with your hips and not to constantly have your neck bent over your device.

#5. Ensure You Have The Right Outerwear

A common reason why people slip and fall is because they’re walking in the snow or on ice without the proper footwear. You want to ensure that you have shoes with grippy soles and good traction in order to keep you more stable. It’s not just improper footwear that can cause problems, which is why one of our winter chiropractic tips is to have the right outerwear, which yes, includes your footwear, but also extends to warm sweaters and coats and bottoms and the like. The colder you are, the stiffer you are, which puts you at higher risk of injury. 

#6. Be Mindful Of Your Diet

It’s so much easier to stray away from healthy eating in the winter months, with all the holiday treats and the snacks while you’re bored inside and opting for hot chocolate instead of water in order to stay warm. While treats and snacks and hot chocolate are all wonderful in moderation, too much of anything isn’t good for you. While this may not be a winter chiropractic tip you’d expect, chiropractors know how your diet impacts your health and your body’s ability to protect itself and stay in good condition. Indulge in treats, but be mindful of how much you do, and make sure you’re still eating well and staying hydrated with water. 

#7. Schedule Regular Chiropractic Visits

By seeing a chiropractor regularly, you’ll set yourself up for success this winter by keeping your body in better condition and through having someone who can help keep your body in alignment and treat pain and other issues that may flare up. We know, we know, you expected this from winter chiropractic tips, but we recommend it because it’s proven to help and will indeed make getting through the winter months safer and easier on your body. 

Elevate Wellness offers top notch chiropractic services. With our expertly trained professionals, you can rest assured that you’ll be receiving excellent treatment that is personalized to you and your needs. For more winter chiropractic tips or to set up an appointment, don’t hesitate to contact us today! 

Everyone has heard how important good posture is. Growing up, you’ve probably been told to “Sit up straight!” and warned that you’ll develop a hunch if you don’t. Yet in spite of all the evidence showing us how and why good posture is important, it’s easy to hunch and slouch, either from wanting to make yourself seem smaller or from sitting down all day. 

While your neck and your back are the most common parts of your body linked to your posture, your shoulders play a vital role too. If poor posture is left uncorrected long enough, you may end up with shoulder pain. If you’ve tried to fix your posture and your shoulders hurt, this can be for a number of reasons ranging from the impact of long-term poor posture and improper attempts at correcting your posture.

How Poor Posture Causes Shoulder Pain

People often overlook the impact your posture can have on your shoulders. Hunching and slouching causes your upper back to bend forward, which affects your shoulders. This can change the position and how your shoulders move over time, leading to shoulder pain.

Loss Of Strength

Poor posture affects your muscles, leading to muscular imbalances which can result in muscle pain. This is because when you slouch, some of your muscles tighten while others loosen. This muscular imbalance makes it so that your shoulder muscles can’t produce the same amount of force as they would be able to if they were balanced. This weakens your shoulders, as well as stretching the muscles in your back while loosening the ones in your chest. Since your muscles become imbalanced, they lose strength they’d otherwise have if you maintained proper posture.

Lessened Range Of Motion

Slouching doesn’t just affect the strength of your muscles, it also limits your range of motion. You can notice this immediately, not just over an extended period of time. If you have poor posture and attempt to do something even as simple as circling your arm, it may be stiff or hurt. If you then try to do the same thing with corrected posture, you’ll likely notice that it instantly becomes a bit easier or less painful. 

Improper Movement Leading To Injury

Your shoulders aren’t meant to be hunched forward. Prolonged poor posture can misalign the positioning of your shoulder blades, which can lead to injury at your rotator cuff when you try to move your arms. Since poor posture limits your range of motion, it also heightens your risk for wear and tear injuries, tendinosis, and tendonitis.

Why Pulling Your Shoulders Back Won’t Help

One of the most common responses when people talk about posture is for others to automatically pull their shoulders back in an attempt to improve their own. Merely pulling your shoulders back won’t fix the hunching of your upper body and neck, though. This is because your shoulders sit over your rib cage. 

This means that in order to fix your posture, sitting up straight means that your breast bone and your pubic bone shoulder are aligned on top of each other. Puffing out your chest and pulling your shoulders back won’t put your spine in alignment or fix the position of your rib cage, and ergo, your shoulders.

How To Fix Your Posture

Fixing your posture won’t happen immediately. In many cases, especially if poor posture has gotten to the point where your shoulders hurt, correcting your posture will feel wrong. This is because your body has grown accustomed to hunching, so working to change that is changing what your body has grown used to, which it will naturally resist. In order to prevent injury and to correct your posture, it will take time and effort, but it can be done.

To fix your posture, it’s going to take conscious effort all day long. Good posture is simply a part of your day to day life. Strengthening your back and core muscles will make it easier to maintain good posture. Sitting up from your hips instead of pulling your shoulders back will help keep your rib cage properly aligned. Pinching your shoulder blades lightly together and rolling them up and back can help too.

Changing your posture requires awareness of how your body is positioned always, and making those constant adjustments until it becomes something your body does automatically.

How Chiropractors Can Help

If you’re struggling with fixing your posture, especially if it’s because of shoulder pain, chiropractors can help. Chiropractors can observe how you sit and walk and test your strength and range of motion in order to determine how best to help. Poor posture can put a lot of pressure on your spinal discs, so they may also take a look at your back. 

Chiropractors can help by adjusting your spine in order to increase movement and reduce tension, so that it will be easier to adjust to better posture. They can also work with your muscles to help strengthen them, so that they can hold good posture, and so that it is more comfortable when you work to sit or stand properly. They can also guide you through stretches and rehabilitating exercises which will reduce tension and strengthen your muscles. 

Fixing bad posture on your own can be difficult, because it’s not as simple as “just sit up straight!” There can be underlying issues resulting from poor posture. Chiropractors can help guide you back to good posture, so that you can go about your life without pain or injury.

Do You Need Help Fixing Your Posture?

Elevate Wellness knows how important your posture is for your health, and also how difficult it can be to fix your posture by yourself. We can help you regain good posture, and help treat any pain resulting from bad posture. Contact us at Elevate Wellness today to schedule a consultation.

We use our necks all the time, so when an injury like whiplash impairs their movement, it affects everything. We can’t easily turn our heads, nod, or anything if our neck is hurt. Luckily, chiropractors can both diagnose and treat whiplash so that your neck is back to normal as soon as possible. 

What Is Whiplash?

Whiplash is a neck injury that occurs from a sudden and forceful back and forth movement of the neck, like the lashing of a whip. This motion can injure the bones in your spine, the spinal disks, ligaments, nerves, muscles, and the tissue of your neck. It can also be called a neck sprain or strain, but these terms encompass other types of injuries that aren’t necessarily whiplash. 

What Causes Whiplash?

It is most commonly caused by car accidents, with the abrupt change from being in motion to crashing to a stop. It can also result from a number of other things too, though, such as a sports accident, a fall, physical abuse, and a number of other different traumas that can cause this kind of neck movement. 

After car accidents, sports are another common cause of whiplash because of the nature of the activity. Collisions resulting from contact sports as well as any number of activities that can cause this movement can lead to whiplash. 

Whiplash can result from physical abuse because if you are punched, shaken, pushed, or otherwise hurt by someone else, it can cause your neck to make that forceful back and forth movement of whiplash. Since shaking can be a cause of it, babies can frequently be victim to this, because if people shake their babies, their heads will snap back and forth.

What Are The Symptoms Of Whiplash?

Symptoms of whiplash typically appear within a few days, but in some cases, it can take weeks to notice. Some of the common signs of symptoms of whiplash are as follows:

• Neck pain
• Stiffness
• Soreness
• Headaches
• Vision problems
• Limited movement
• Worsening pain with neck movement
• Dizziness
• Fatigue
• Irritability
• Difficulty concentrating
• Tingling or numbness in the arms
• Ringing in the ears
• Memory problems
• Sleep troubles
• Depression
• Shoulder pain or tenderness

These are some of the common signs and symptoms of whiplash, but there can be others not listed here. If you’ve suffered an injury that could result in this kind of neck injury, it’s best to seek out help right away in order to avoid complications and to get on the road to recovery as soon as possible.

How Is Whiplash Treated?

Whiplash is treatable and many people find themselves recovering within weeks, so long as they follow their set treatment plans. In some cases, whiplash can result in further injury and chronic pain, though, so it’s important to seek out treatment as soon as possible after the injury. 

Depending on the severity of the injury, you may be required to wear a foam collar in order to immobilize your neck. Some people are fine to recover with at home stretches, exercises, and medication, while others require more intensive care including physical therapy. 

Treatment generally involves a variety of methods aimed at helping your pain, restoring your neck’s range of motion, and assisting you with getting back to life as normal with no fear of developing chronic pain or complications. 

How Can A Chiropractor Help Whiplash?

A chiropractor can treat you in a number of ways. Generally, when you go to a chiropractor, they will conduct a physical examination and ask for information about the injury and your personal history in order to determine both the cause and how best to treat it. 

The chiropractor’s goal is to reduce the inflammation in the neck, restore its motion, and reduce your pain through adjustments and exercises that won’t just help you now, but also help to prevent long-term damage.

Chiropractic Treatments For Whiplash

Everyone is different and the causes for their injuries differ, too. This means that what your treatment plans look like will differ from someone else’s because it’s targeted to your personal circumstances. Some of the ways that chiropractors treat whiplash include:

• Spinal Manipulation.

Spinal manipulation is aimed at moving the joint back in the way from which it was restricted through the use of chiropractic adjustments.

• Muscle Relaxation And Simulation.

This helps to relax tense, tight muscles in order to help it regain mobility.

• Exercises

Chiropractors may use a number of different exercises to help regain range of motion and maintain neck stability. These can typically be done both with the chiropractor and at home. 

In addition to these treatments, a chiropractor may also employ a number of other methods to treat whiplash. These include: soft tissue therapy, ultrasounds, and interferential electrical stimulation, amongst others. All of these are meant to help stimulate the muscles, reduce inflammation and pain, and restore motion to your neck. 

Are You Suffering From Whiplash?

Elevate Wellness can help you with any whiplash injuries. We’ll conduct examinations to find what injuries happened and then personalize a treatment method to you. If you’re suffering from whiplash, we’ll get you feeling better. Contact us at Elevate Wellness today to schedule a consultation or for any questions you may have!