Is It Safe To Adjust Your Own Neck

Can you adjust your own neck? Coming right up. Hey I'm Dr. Ekberg with

Wellness For Life and if you'd like to truly master health by understanding how

the body really works make sure that you subscribe and hit that notification bell

so that you don't miss anything. Can you adjust your own neck?

Well whether you can or you can't the question is, is it a good idea? And the

answer is no. It is typically a really bad idea to adjust your own neck and

when we say adjust then I'm talking about the people that you might see out

in public sometimes on a bus or a train or whatever and they grab their head and

they give themself a nice big lever and they just yank and twist and they get

that pop what's wrong with that is that it's an adjustment that has very very

poor precision is very very unspecific So what happens is you'll typically have

a several segments next to each other and there'll be one segment that is

stuck and then that's the one that you feel tight and that feels that gives you

the tension and then you yank and twist and what happens is you'll have a

cavitation you'll have a movement of the joints above and below so you're

adjusting the wrong joint and over time so it feels good because you get that

pop but in the long run it gets worse because you're creating hypermobility

above and below and that tight move that tight segment is getting more stuck

than ever so I would recommend you find a chiropractor who can adjust

specifically and move the segment that needs to move. Now what you can do is

that if you do it carefully if you just stretch in general if you sit down and

then you stand up and you really stretch and you get a pop or two that's not a

bad that's just the body kind of self

adjusting as you as you move about and if you're stretching and you kind of

move your neck carefully and you give yourself a little stretch and it pops a

little bit that's not a big deal that's just your body self regulating

self-correcting but if you start pulling and yanking and trying to get the pop

then that's not a good idea something that you can do however is if you go to

a chiropractor or not if you do then in between adjustments you can support the

adjustment by doing little stimulations yourself but without the popping so what

you do is let's say you have a really tight neck and you find a tender spot if

you find a really tight spot and you rub it a little bit and then while you're

rubbing it you start doing some movements so your band forward you bend

back you turn to the left you turn to the right and as you're

doing this you're combining the proprioception the incoming signals from

the point of rubbing you're adding to that the signals from the motion so now

you're giving the brain more information about that area and it's not as

effective as an adjustment but it can give the brain a little bit of

information to get by in between adjustments you can do the same thing

for the lower back so if you have some some stiffness just find the spot where

it's tight whether it's on the sacrum or low back and then you can walk in place

you can shift your weight a little bit you can do a little hula circle with the

hips you can kind of arch your back and tilt your hips forward and back move a

little bit while you're rubbing and then you're adding the proprioception from

the rubbing to the motion of moving the active motion and it's not as effective

as an adjustment again it can provide some very very useful and

some relief for information for the brain in between adjustments so I do

that when I feel a little stiff if I'm out traveling if I'm driving than any

time I go to a rest stop then I'll get out of the car and I'll do these things

I'll do the three winged friends which we have another video on I'll do the

rubbing on my back the hip stretches just because I'm sitting so much that

there is very little proprioception the body gets stiff when you sit that long

so once you have a chance you want to create a little movement a little

increase in signals and that way you get through the quick trip much easier and

at the end of the trip you're not going to be as stiff as if you just sat all

the time so if you enjoy content like this and you're new to this channel make

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this content because this information is life-saving it's not about pain it's

about how the body works how do we restore the body to normal so that

symptoms go away and we can enjoy optimal health thanks for watching