Your Groton Chiropractor Worries About Your Spinal Discs When You Run or Jog!

DO YOU LIKE TO JOG OR RUN? Groton provides quite a few areas to exercise like this. Well, take into account that the spinal discs in your lower back lose fluid and decrease by greater than 6% when you run. To make matters worse, this is in young adults, not older folks with disc degeneration and advanced aging changes in their spines. Just think about the loss of disc height in them! We chiropractors do, and your Groton chiropractor worries about your spinal discs. And Shoreline Medical Services/ Hutter Chiropractic Office talk with Groton joggers and runners like you to minimize potential damage.

So here is the study behind the concern: Magnetic resonance imaging was used to asses the influence of moderate-intensity treadmill running on the disc height and volume in the mid- and low-backs of 8 healthy young people with no back pain. They ran for 30 minutes on the treadmill. An MRI study of their spines was performed before and after the run. After moderate intensity running, a 6.3% reduction in disc height and 6.9% reduction in disc volume were found. This analyzes the normal day-to-day variation in disc height and volume of 0.6 and 0.4%, accordingly. (1)

At Shoreline Medical Services/ Hutter Chiropractic Office, the chiropractor can direct you to proper spinal manipulation, exercises and nutritional adaptations in your diet to help curb this detrimental spine change. Remember, although moderate intensity running is generally advocated for apparently healthy adults, running causes a loss in stature that is thought to reflect compression of the intervertebral disc that causes loss of disc height.

Know that your Groton chiropractor comprehends that repetitive loading of the low back, such as occurs in running, damages the piece of the disc called the annulus fibrosus which holds in the nucleus pulposus. Such disc failure is unlikely to happen with repetitive bending in the absence of compressive load. Compressive cyclic loading with low peak load magnitude also did not create the failure of the disc. (2) However, we see that the compressive loading of the disc as occurs with running does cause the disc to lose height and volume.

Contact your Groton chiropractor at Shoreline Medical Services/ Hutter Chiropractic Office for recommendations on how to exercise as safely as possible with minimum damage to the spine. Your future spinal health relies on it!