The Whole Life Chiropractic Movement Assessment

While there is no specific consensus on what constitutes perfect human movement, there are a handful of largely agreed upon concepts that help us to at least have some idea as to what constitutes good movement capabilities.

Shoulder evaluation

What we do know is that inefficient or restricted movement in one joint region can have a spillover effect that causes compensatory movement at neighboring joints, and at times even to far away joints. This has been coined in physical therapy circles as regional interdependence. 

For example, let’s say someone has a stiff ankle resulting from an incompletely-rehabbed ankle sprain. This lack of ankle movement can become a driver for knee pain as the knee is forced into compensatory movement patterns to make up for the lack of ankle movement.

Or another example: an individual with decreased hip ranges of motion (perhaps from a sedentary job or a past injury to the hip) may place undue stress on their lower back as the lower back attempts to make up for lost hip range of motion. This may manifest in low back pain during bending movements as the individual cannot access the hip range of motion required to keep their back relatively flat during lifting.

Another concept that may yield some insight into what ideal human movement should look like is by looking at the healthy neurodevelopment patterns that all healthy children go through in the first 12-18 months of life.

All healthy children learn how to properly create intra-abdominal pressure while laying on their back and stomach. This must manifest first before baby learns how to begin turning over, crawling, and ultimately walking. During this period we see the formation of ideal joint stabilization patterns in which the muscles around each joint learn how to optimally co-contract to provide the best stability possible. In the physical therapy world this is referred to as joint centration. As is the case with intra-abdominal pressure, baby must display optimal joint centration before progressing into rolling, as well as before learning to crawl, stand, and walk. We see these systems get perturbed in developmental disorders such as cerebral palsy.

Baby showing movement at its finest

Using the template of how baby learns to concentrate joints during development, we can extrapolate these concepts to the adult population. In the process of developing orthopedic injuries, we often see a loss of healthy joint concentration patterns and the development of less-than-ideal joint stabilization patterns, similar to what we might see in cerebral palsy. 

In essence, it is almost as if we’ve been designed to run on a specific movement program from a neurological standpoint, and when this program is perturbed, we can see the development of orthopedic injuries.

We can also see performance loss as well when we lose the ability to ideally concentrate our joints. This may be our nervous system’s way of putting on the brakes in order to prevent injury.

So how do we know if our movement system is firing on all cylinders or if we might have some inefficient movement patterns that are both predisposing us to injury and robbing us of athletic performance?

The Whole Life Chiropractic Movement Assessment is a series of movements we can test in clinic to see where your movement may be off kilter. It helps us to determine where you may have potential joint mobility deficits, flexibility issues, as well as poor stabilization patterns.

Whole Life Chiropractic Office

We strongly believe that identifying and improving upon these impairments can be a powerful way to diminish the risk of future injuries and to set a sound foundation for athletic development. 

We’d even be as bold to say that the impairments we can uncover through this assessment may spare you the joint replacement surgery decades down the road, as well as a host of other issues that left untreated will undoubtedly lead to a future surgical intervention.

The assessment takes roughly 30-45 minutes to perform. Following the assessment, we offer a review of findings to educate you on where you have the most glaring movement inefficiencies, and we can work with you to create a succinct action plan to address these movement issues.

We recommend this assessment for those who aren’t currently in a lot of pain. This is often something we take patients through after we’ve helped to resolve an injury that they sought treatment for.

Are you ready to bulletproof your body and improve your athletic prowess? Schedule a Whole Life Chiropractic Movement Assessment today!