Oh! The joy of healthy joints

Once we were young and our joints were unencumbered; our body weight was seemingly too insignificant to cause joint degeneration and we lived without pain. But that was then and this is now- with each passing year, the natural resilience of our joints recedes a little more. You may feel it while running, a sudden twinge in the knee; you may spend all day seated, only to find that your back is stiff and sore. The truth is our joints have a finite lifespan, and we are (hopefully) going to live past their shelf date. So it’s no wonder that joint pain is becoming a leading cause of disability in our population, with as many as 1 in 5 people reporting having experienced significant joint pain.

Joint pain is not restricted to the elderly

There is a perfect storm contributing to the rise of joint pain in our country:

• Aging population
• Obesity epidemic
• Lifestyles becoming more sedentary 
• More and more jobs moving in front of a screen 

These are just the most glaring factors. Unless we take proactive measures to look out for our joints, they are going to cause us grief. Joints are susceptible to: 

• Underuse
• Overuse 
• Inflammation

Joints rely on movement to maintain their range of motion. But activities that cause repetitive trauma to a given joint (like running to the knees, or football to the spine) can cause more damage than the good that they impart. It’s all about striking a balance: if you feel that your sport is jarring your joints too much, it may be time to scale it back to a lower-impact sport.

The most significant thing you can do for your joints is maintain a healthy weight

It is worth repeating over and over again: every single pound you carry over your target weight is an additional burden on every joint in your body. At our office in Hackensack, we help people manage joint pain with natural methods. If the most important factor for maintaining healthy joints is movement, we want to help you move more! We do this by using chiropractic modalities to help get your body into a conducive state for movement. Spinal adjustment helps maintain the proper alignment of spinal joints, improving range of motion and circulation; the end result is more effective movement in previously restricted joints. If you want to make 2018 the year of healthy joints, give our office in Hackensack a call to schedule an appointment today.