Rib Pain

I want to talk to you guys about rib pain. From time to time, everyone will bend or twist the wrong way and what ends up happening is you start getting your chest pains and it feels like someone’s stabbing something sharp into your chest. Now that pain that you experience might go around the rib cage coming front to back or back to front, and sometimes when you breathe in really deep it gets even sharper! Twisting your upper body tends to make that a lot worse. What we see in our office is where the rib doesn’t move properly for various reasons. The ribs in the middle of the back are tightly attached to the vertebrae and what happens is if the vertebra stop moving properly, they become swollen …what happens is that the nerve comes right around the rib cage can get irritated and that’s where you’ll get the pain shooting around your ribs. When you get problems and through here into your middle back it can refer pain all the way around the front and that’s where you get that pain in your ribs. Sometimes it requires adjustment of the rib which we can certainly do, and we may also adjust the spine itself which is also very common.

People always wonder what else they can do to help their rib pains. The first thing you gotta remember is what not to do. So avoid twisting if possible. If your job has a lot of twisting motions, you know that might be hard for you and you can see why these problems might be painful and might go on for longer than you’d like it to. If your job is picking up baggage or something like that, and you twist and turn with it -well obviously you can see that’s going to be problematic for you. When you must twist, turn more with your feet rather than twisting and torquing your shoulders and upper body.

The second exercise we recommend that people do is simply start with the arms at your sides. With your palms facing the ceiling, slowly lift your arms up to the side, breathing in really deeply…. Bringing your arms all the way up until your palms touch each other keeping your elbows straight as you can. Then slowly let your arms down while breathing out.as your arms come down. I recommend doing that about 50 times a day…so when these problems happen to you, make sure you get adjuste…do this exercise and put some ice on it or take some anti-inflammatories. The ice and anti-inflammatories will temporarily get the swelling down so you can at least feel little bit better. Hat’s everything for today take care and have a great day!

Daily Back Exercises

We’re going to go over some basic exercises.  Now these are exercises that many of you should be doing particularly if you’ve got lower back troubles or sciatica. 

Sciatica is pain down your rear end or down into your leg.  There’s a few fundamental things you want to do:

  1.  The bird dog exercise.  You want to find a spot it on the floor.  Get on your hands and knees in the crawling position.  Looking slightly up, lift one arm and the opposite leg straight out.  Repeat this up and down. It doesn’t matter how high the arm or leg goes.  Ideally you want to completely relax after every repetition. Then do this again 20 times in a row on one side, and then 20 times in a row on the other side.  It’s really important to keep your pelvis level – imagine a glass of water placed on your lower back and you don’t want that glass to spill.
  2. Now the second exercise we want you to do is called a side plank.  If you have shoulder problems, there is a variation which will show in our video (link below).  Lie on your side, with your whole body held in the air propped up on one elbow. You can either put your feet staggered (one in front of the other) or on top of one another.   We lift our hips off the floor up toward the ceiling and hold for an eight count. Then relax your hips back down to the floor. Do it again for a total of 5 times on each side. If you find that the side plank difficult for your shoulders what I’m going to recommend that you do is simply do is lean up against a countertop or a wall instead of the ground.  This will make it easier. Make sure that you remember to do this on both sides.
  3. Lastly, we want you to do squats.  The research it shows that almost all people with lower back pain have weak butt muscles.  Do simple knee bends (also in our video link below). Have your feet about shoulder width apart with toes pointed slightly outwards (think 10 and 2).   Keeping your belly button pushed outward and maintaining a curve in your back, let your butt sink down until it touches the chair or bench. Now come straight up and then squeeze your your butt at the very top.

If you have bad knees and that gives you a lot of knee pain, then try a different version.  Lie on the ground with one leg straight or bent, hanging in the air. The other and knee will be bent with that foot flat on the ground.  Holding your hanging leg in the air and all you do is push your bum upwards with the opposite leg. Do that 20 times on one side and then 20 times on the other.

Those are the basic exercises that almost everyone should be doing that will help your middle back, lower back and it will help you heal faster.