Fitness Tips From a Chiropractor in Clarksville TN
Pulled muscles, strains, sprains and a low back that objected to one particular lift are among the common ways exercise catches up with people. These fitness tips from a chiropractor cover what's happening in the tissue when that happens, not a workout routine. The last section covers where an exam at our Clarksville TN chiropractic office fits in.
What does a warm-up actually do?
Muscle and tendon are viscoelastic, which means how they respond to a stretch depends on how fast the load comes on. That response also changes with how warm they are. When general activity warms them, they resist being lengthened less. Blood flow to the working muscle goes up, and nerves conduct and muscles contract faster as temperature rises, too.
Here's where the usual version of this goes further than the evidence. Warm muscle is less stiff, and you'll often hear that it also soaks up more energy before it fails. In the controlled work that varied muscle temperature directly, researchers found the opposite: warmed muscle failed at a lower load and absorbed less energy than cold muscle. Less stiff isn't the same thing as harder to tear. A warm-up isn't body armor.
Warming also changes how the tissue behaves. It doesn't add length, and it won't make a muscle permanently longer.
The other half of a warm-up is usually explained as rehearsal: doing a movement easy before you do it hard. That's the reasoning behind it, not something a study has shown. Most warm-up routines come out of coaching tradition, not out of studies that tested each piece, and rehearsal is one of the pieces that hasn't been tested.
Why do strains and sprains happen when they do?
A strain is an injury to a muscle or to the tendon that anchors it to bone. A sprain is an injury to a ligament, the tissue that holds one bone to another, as in an ankle sprain. The difference matters, because ligament has a poorer blood supply than muscle and is generally slower to heal.
Both usually happen when tissue takes more load than it can absorb. And both are most likely at the extremes: a muscle being stretched while it's contracting, at the end of its range, at speed, or when it's tired. That combination is why strains pile up in the last reps of a set and the last minutes of a game, not the first ones.
What limits flexibility, and what does stretching change?
Flexibility is how much range of motion a joint has. What limits it differs from person to person and from joint to joint. In some it's how far the muscle and tendon will stretch, in others it's the joint capsule and ligaments, and in others still it's the shape of the bones. Stretching doesn't change bone shape, which is one reason two people can do the exact same stretches and end up with very different ranges.
What static stretching most consistently does in studies is raise the range a person will tolerate. The evidence puts most of that down to getting used to the feeling of the stretch, not to the tissue getting longer.
Does stretching before exercise cut injury rates? That's genuinely contested in the research. The evidence is stronger for general warming than for stretching specifically.
Does a cool-down prevent next-day soreness?
A cool-down is easy movement after hard effort, so you come down in stages instead of stopping dead. The popular claim that it prevents next-day soreness isn't well supported.
That soreness has a name, delayed-onset muscle soreness, and it follows load your muscles aren't used to, especially load taken while the muscle is lengthening. Muscle damage is the usual explanation for it, though the exact mechanism still isn't settled, and how sore you feel is a poor guide to how much damage actually happened. Either way, it's part of adapting to new work, not a sign that something has gone wrong.
Does building up gradually prevent injury?
Tissue adapts to load over weeks, and a sudden jump in volume, intensity, surface or technique can get ahead of that adaptation. That's the reasoning behind the standard advice to build up gradually.
But the advice itself has been tested, and it didn't hold up. Two randomized trials in recreational runners found a graded increase made no difference to injury rates. And the wider training-load framework built on the same idea has been shown to produce its results just as well when its own inputs are swapped for random numbers.
So the mechanism is real. The rule built on top of it isn't established, and anyone quoting you a specific safe percentage is going past the evidence.
Which exercise injuries need a physician instead of a chiropractor?
Some exercise injuries belong with a physician, not a chiropractor, and some of them need one urgently:
- Chest pain, breathlessness out of proportion to the effort, palpitations, light-headedness or fainting during exercise. This is a medical emergency and not a musculoskeletal question.
- Confusion, agitation, stumbling or collapse while exercising in heat, with hot skin. Call 911. This is heat stroke and it can kill quickly.
- Severe muscle pain, marked weakness, or dark or cola-coloured urine after unaccustomed intense exercise. Any one of these is enough: they frequently do not appear together and muscle pain is often absent. Seek immediate emergency care, rather than waiting to see how it develops.
- A limb that is cold, pale, or numb below an injury, or a limb swelling rapidly with pain out of proportion to the injury. Both are time-critical and are judged in hours.
- A wound over an injury with visible bone, or bleeding that will not stop.
- A head injury with loss of consciousness, confusion, repeated vomiting, or a worsening headache.
- A joint that is deformed, that will not bear weight, or that gave way at the moment of injury
- A joint that becomes hot, swollen and red, particularly with fever or feeling generally unwell
- Numbness, pins and needles or weakness in a limb
- A sudden severe pain with an audible snap, particularly in the calf or the back of the thigh
What seeing a chiropractor looks like after an exercise injury
With a sports injury, how it happened tells us a lot: which rep or which minute of the game, what position the joint was in when it went, and what's changed since. You'll go over that with one of our chiropractors first. Then we look at how the joint moves and how strong it is now.
We'll tell you what we find, including when what we find isn't something we treat. If we are not able to help you with your problem or are unable to reduce your pain levels, we will make sure to give you a recommendation to another experienced provider.
If a strain from training or a back you tweaked lifting is still bothering you, give our Clarksville office a call and tell us how it happened.
Follow the evidence
Research, with context.
Selected published sources behind what we've written, each with what it found and what it can't tell us. We give you both halves because no paper can diagnose you or predict how your own care will go.
World Health Organization 2020 guidelines on physical activity and sedentary behaviour
Recommendations for children, adolescents, adults and older adults, including people living with selected chronic conditions or disability.
What it foundThe guideline recommends regular activity, strength work and less sedentary time. For adults, the general target is 150 to 300 minutes of moderate activity or 75 to 150 minutes of vigorous activity weekly.
What it can't tell usPopulation targets have to be adapted to a person's health, capacity and recovery, and some activity is better than none. The guideline doesn't test chiropractic care, and it isn't a rehabilitation plan for an injury.
Publication details & citation
Bull et al. World Health Organization 2020 guidelines on physical activity and sedentary behaviour. British Journal of Sports Medicine. 2020. DOI: 10.1136/bjsports-2020-102955.
Read the publication recordAcute effects of muscle stretching on physical performance, range of motion, and injury incidence in healthy active individuals: a systematic review
Studies of stretching before activity in healthy, physically active participants.
What it foundStretching can increase range of motion acutely. Longer static stretches immediately before performance had larger performance reductions than shorter holds; the surrounding warm-up mattered.
What it can't tell usThese are mostly immediate responses in healthy people. More range of motion doesn't automatically mean less pain, and the findings don't establish stretching as a treatment for an injured tendon, an unstable joint or an irritated nerve.
Publication details & citation
Behm et al. Acute effects of muscle stretching on physical performance, range of motion, and injury incidence in healthy active individuals: a systematic review. Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism. 2016. DOI: 10.1139/apnm-2015-0235.
Read the publication record
Our editorial policy explains how to read these sources and what our clinical-review labels mean.