He’d competed at a high level when he was younger, he has a connective tissue disorder that affects the collagen throughout his body, and he’d been in some degree of pain since he was a teenager. He’d seen chiropractors for most of that time. By the time I met him he had knee pain that interfered with running, and a desk job that was producing headaches at the back of his skull along with neck pain.
What everyone assumed. That his joints needed adjusting, thoroughly and often. His joints do produce dramatic noise when they’re moved, and he’d had a lot of care built around that.
What I found. Those noises don’t equate to a good adjustment. With his condition, his ligaments aren’t holding his joints where they should be, which means his muscles are doing that job instead. Taking him into the tension required for a manual adjustment was asking his body to go somewhere it had no business going.
What I did. I started with the Activator, which delivers a specific low-force impulse without putting anyone into tension, and used it to build his tolerance over time. These days I adjust him manually, but we had to let things settle and build strength first.
The other half was advice rather than treatment. He needed active warm-ups instead of the long-hold stretching he’d been doing, because lengthening tissue further is the last thing a hypermobile person needs before running. And he had to stop cracking his own neck, which felt good in the moment and was repeatedly taking those joints somewhere they didn’t need to be.
Where he is now. The knee pain resolved with the warm-up changes. The headaches and neck pain resolved with gentle work to the upper back and neck. I see him about every four to six weeks, rather than constantly, because he isn’t living in the pain he’d been in for years.