How To Safely Crack Your Own Back

Do you ever feel like you need to crack your back to just get some relief from the stiffness intention back there? Well, in today’s video, I’m going to show you three ways to safely crack your back joints. So you can get that relief that you’re probably dying to get because you got that stiffness, that tension in those back muscles, either the upper back or maybe the lower back.

Now, just a quick disclaimer about this, I want to be very careful in how you proceed about this. If you have a known disk problem like a herniated disk, some sort of disc injury, then I highly advise you to proceed with extreme caution, make sure that you move, move very slowly through everything, maybe go get checked out by a specialist, somebody who knows how to crack joints, like a manual therapist, a physical therapist might know how, or a chiropractor might know how as well. And just proceed with caution.

And the reason being, let me just explain why. If you have a herniated disc, anywhere in your spine, one of the most common places to get it is in the lower back, especially at the most bottom vertebrae, l four l five disc or l five is one disc, you can also get them in your neck in virtually any spot in the spine, where you have a disc.

If you have a disc injury, what is going to happen at that level of the spine is it’s going to be too loose, it’s going to move too much, it’s going to twist too much specifically. And if you’re going to go pop your back a lot of these techniques involve extreme motion, some of them twisting, you’ll see today, and you got to be careful that you don’t over twist.

Now I’m going to cover how to avoid over twisting. But just be careful with that. And the second thing, the second part of this disclaimer is repetitive back popping is not recommended. Let me tell you why. If you’ve already got that loose disc, or maybe you don’t have a disc problem just yet, but you might be developing one and you go to repetitively pop your back, the joints that are least stuck are probably going to be the ones that pop.

There’s usually some joints nearby that are above or below that are very, very stuck in those aren’t as easy to get on your own. And so if you’re repetitively popping your back, you might be overstretching the joints that are least stuck, the ones that are going to move. First, well, not stretching or moving, the ones that are very, very stuck that might require a little more in depth investigation in your specific situation are being seen by a specialist healthcare provider that knows how to handle this type of problem.

So let’s get into the techniques. If you want to get your mid back, I’m sitting in a computer chair here. And I like that I have some armrests here because we’ll use them in a moment for twisting. And then we’ll also do a version where you’re lying down. So we’re going to cover three techniques.

The first one pretty straightforward, no twisting in this one, you’re just going to interlock your fingers, you can overlap, it doesn’t really matter, you can get your hands behind your head just like so to support your head. And then where your backrest of your chair ends, you’re trying to bend backwards over it.

Now before you do that, I want you to suck in your abs tighten up your abs. The reason being is because like I was saying in that disclaimer, if you can control how your back is moving, then you’ll force joints that are more stuck to move a bit more. So this is a way to proceed with some safety. So go go with this and slick in those apps, holding your abs in and start to lean back in over the edge of the chair.

That your footing right and just hang out there. And you can even do a little twisting rotate one way very mild twisting, rotate the other way. You can kind of side bend with a twist as well. And just skip all the different directions that you’re backing go. And if you’ve popped a few times doing this, chances are it’s not going to pop again right away. That’s normal.

The way these joints operate, the cartilage within the joint can get dehydrated, it gets kind of stuck. And so when you go to do a technique like this, it, it pops free, and then it moves normal again for a while. Now there’s the reason why it will get stuck again here in a few hours. And you might feel like you’re stiff and tense you might need to this technique again, is usually because there’s an underlying root problem that isn’t being addressed that’s setting you up for this.

A lot of people blame this on posture or working at a desk or having a job or you drive a lot. And that can contribute but usually there’s some muscle imbalances that put forces on the spine in such a way that you get too much compression on the joints that causes that cartilage to get stuck.

I’ve actually got a video that talks all about muscle imbalances. Go check that out. It’s in the description below. You can find the link for it and learn about muscle imbalances. I want you to go do that because it’s critically important especially you’ve been popping your back repetitively to get relief. You’re going to herniated disc or cause some other problem by popping your back because popping your back is really just symptom relief. It’s not fixing the root problem.

It’s Okay in the short term, especially if you’re trying to avoid taking a pain pill or going to an injection or seeing the doctor for this, but you don’t want to be doing that all the time to get relief once in a while is okay. And if we had to put a number on it, no, I’d say once a day or less would be ideal.

But if you’re doing this multiple times a day, every other hour, every hour, multiple times an hour, as I’ve seen some patients come through our clinic, that is not a good idea, you’re going to tear something or create something, you’re asking for some issue to develop later on, which can set you up for arthritis and other problems. So proceed with caution on these.

Let’s get into the second one. So using the same chair, now you’re going to do some straight up twisting, again, start by sucking in your abs, that’s going to be a constant with all these second, your abs real good as if you’re pulling your belly button towards your spine. It might even cause you to slouch a little bit, watch what I do that my chest and shoulders come down a bit.

That’s okay, you’re actually forcing the spine joints to open up a little bit and preset to pop loose. So sucking those abs real good. A little bit of a slouch is okay, as long as it’s from sucking in your abs, then grabbing onto your armrests.

Or if you don’t have armrests, just kind of grab the side of the back of the chair on the side and start to twist and pull over my back just popped and continue holding in your abs. What is tempting here is to let go of your abs because then you’ll go further. Remember how I said that you’re going to overstretch those lay the most loose joints already.

That’s what we’re trying to avoid having your abs sucked in checks how far you can go, it stops you from going too far. And it forces the joints that are most stuck to move better. So holding those abs and skip to the end range. You don’t have to do anything fast here, by the way, a lot of people go. And they try to pop their back really fast as holding those abs and get to the end. And once you’re there, don’t even hang out, go the other way.

Don’t have to hang out there for very long. Just once you’re there for a second, that’s fine. And then come back to the middle. While we have a table. Now I’m going to show you how to do this one that you can do on the floor or on the bed. And I like this one because it takes away gravity from the to see the ones that we just did. So you lie down on your back, bend your knees.

And you’re going to use a little bit of leverage from your legs. To get at your lower back. This one specifically targets the lower back, you might still get joints that pop up higher. It’s hard to be specific on a joint and free up a specific area. Especially if you feel like you got a nod or one tense area in a part of your back.

You’re not going to target it, it’s very rare that you actually get the joint that you’re looking for, you know, every single time consistently, you might get it here and there. But to get it consistently, that usually requires somebody like an expert getting their hands in your back and finding the joints and freeing it up. And then I’ll tell you a little bit more about some joints that feel like they need to pop but really shouldn’t pop.

I’ll tell you more about that here in a second. Stay tuned. So let’s get to this this technique, you’ll be on your back against sucking your abs like this real hard. Hold that in, holding your abs in started letting your knees fall over and I’m kind of pushing my shoulders the other way and go as far as you comfortably can.

Once you feel like you’ve got a stretch going through your legs or body or in your back. That’s the end point you got to come back and then do the other side. And I’ll show you a slight modification here in a second. So I’m still holding in my abs pretty good. going the other way. It’s going as far as I can.

Now a slight modification which you would do is lift up your hips and shove them sideways. And then from there, now you’re going to hold your abs in and do the same exact thing, you just added a side bend to your spine. So you can get slightly different angles on the joints and get it to pop a certain way.

The other way, I shifted my hips over to my right, now I’m going to twist in the left. And you can twist the opposite way too. So I left my hips, my hips shifted to the right. Still stuck into my abs, letting my knees fall over. go as far as you can. Great. So those are the different techniques you can use to pop your back on your own.

Now I just want to tell you about a certain situation that’s really important. Oftentimes, we get people here in the clinic that are like pop my back, I can feel that it just needs to pop. And we check out their joints and they’re actually loose at the area that they’re telling us that they need to pop. The reason being for this is because there’s nerve endings that surround the joints. And those nerve endings register pressure, they’re actually pressure sensing nerves, and they tell you about the position of the joints.

It’s called proprioception. For those of you nerds out there that want to look it up those nerves can give different kinds of feedback to the brain and tell you that things you’ll lose her stiff or tight. And in some cases that can be giving a certain feedback to the brain that reports that it’s tight, making you think that it needs to pop, but it’s actually already loose. And it’s just the muscles and other things that are contributing to the tightness in the area.

So if you try these techniques, and you found that you didn’t really get a pop like you were hoping for, that’s okay. Don’t force it. Don’t try to make it happen. Chances are, you might already be loose at that segment, it doesn’t need to pop in, you actually need to go investigate that muscle imbalance like I was talking about a little bit earlier.

Find the link for that video in the description here below for muscle imbalances and how to begin treating them and fixing them. I hope this video was helpful for you today. I hope you got some relief. Hopefully you put away that Tylenol bottle or the ibuprofen or are you you now know a more effective way to do this if you’ve already been trying this on your own. And my hope though, is that you really fix the root problem, go check out that video on the muscle imbalances so you can get the long term relief.

Keep in mind this is just short term relief. This is not fixing you for the long term. If you’ve got some disc herniation or some arthritis in your back some more serious problem in your back. This is not going to cure it. You need to go fix some muscle imbalances. That’s the cure for sure.

If you did try these techniques out drop a comment below and let us know how it went. Did you get the relief? Did you get some pops? How many pops that you get? Was it just one or two or did it feel like a zipper was going off in your spine. Those are really fun really cool to feel and you skip that instant relief afterwards.

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