DO YOU LIKE TO JOG OR RUN? St Peters offers many locations to exercise like this. Well, consider that the spinal discs in your lower back lose fluid and decrease by greater than 6% when you run. To add insult to injury, this is in young adults, not older folks with disc degeneration and advanced aging changes in their spines. Imagine the loss of disc height in them! We chiropractors do, and your St Peters chiropractor worries about your spinal discs. And Old Mill Chiropractic confers with St Peters joggers and runners like you to reduce potential damage.

So here is the research behind the worry: Magnetic resonance imaging was used to measure 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 compares to the normal day-to-day difference in disc height and volume of 0.6 and 0.4%, respectively. (1)

At Old Mill Chiropractic, the chiropractor can direct you to suitable spinal manipulation, exercises and nutritional changes 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 St Peters chiropractor understands that repetitious loading of the low back, such as what happens in running, damages the part of the disc referred to as 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 St Peters chiropractor at Old Mill Chiropractic for advice on how to exercise as safely as attainable with minimum damage to the spine. Your future spinal health depends on it!