00:13
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Today we’re going to talk about back pain because we love back pain. We don’t love back pain. We love to get you out of back pain.
We like to help you out with your back pain. We want to teach you about back pain, but today we’re talking about a different type of back pain. Well, not really. It’s all the same back pain, but it’s just in a different location.
Pain In One Side Or The Other
Have you ever had that pain that it’s not one side or the other? It’s not. It’s kind of directly like right in the middle and you feel it like when we have clients describe it’s like it’s right next to my spine, right by my spine.
I can feel it. It just it’s on the right side or the left side of the spine. It’s sharp when you’re moving it sharp to like, sit it, doesn’t go sit to stand.
01:00
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
It just hurts all the time. If you try to stretch it’s like, and when you get up, it’s it just, it knocks you right back down.
01:09
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Forward bending.
01:10
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Oh yeah. Like trying to stretch it out or it’s horrible. I actually had this happen to me one time where I was walking from my, from my bathroom to my bedroom and I was talking on the phone and I could feel my back.
I could feel the facet joint actually move out of place. I was like, I’m about to be on the floor for the next like three days. It was awful.
We’re talking about facet joints today. Now you may be asking yourself, like, I don’t even know what a facet joint is.
01:40
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
I’ll go get them.
01:41
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
I know you moved Scully. I was going to like, so what facet joints are? facet joints are the connections between the bones of the spine, right?
We have vertebrae that make up our entire spine and I would show you Scully, but somebody took him away. The nerve roots passed through the joints and they go from the spinal cord and they go down to the arms and legs. Let’s go through your vertebrae right here.
Like we have a nice scoliotic curve right here. If you have your vertebrae, each of your vertebrae is stacked on top of one another. Right? The spinus processes are the spot that sticks out on the backside.
It’s kind of like our dinosaur bones. It’s the ones that stick out the back. It moves out to the transverse processes. That pushes out to the side because they go transverse.
They go out to the side, what, as they stack one to the next, the, the articulation or where the bones meet is called your facet joints.
02:46
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
The facet joint are the connections between these bones.
If you look at slowly, these little yellow things that I’m moving around are called your nerve roots, right?
The nerve roots pass through the joints and they go from the spinal cord. They go down to your arms.
They go down to your legs, into all the parts of the body,
03:06
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
How many percent joints or other Julie, there are one vertebrae.
03:10
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
To homicide. He just gave me like a total math question that I was all,
03:20
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
I don’t do math very well. I don’t like it, but.
03:23
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
On.
03:24
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Eat, you have 1% joint on either side of this vertebrae. Right?
And they stack all the way up. Now, if a sedge joint allows you to bend twist, they keep your back from slipping too far forward and backwards without or twisting without limits.
Right? So.
03:42
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Structure.
03:42
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
And yeah. With having mobility in it as well, the set joints are really, really impossible. When people hear what I said, oh, it’s very, they’re very possible.
They’re there. They’re the set joints are things that people don’t think about. We hear joints, we think about knees. We think about elbows.
We think about the job. We think about the hip, but your spine contains these joints, right? And, and like Mike said, each vertebrae has a set of two facet joints.
The synovial joints that are located on either side of the posterior process of the vertebral bodies are attached right into there.
04:21
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
People glaze over.
04:23
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
I know I went wig. Woo. All right. What these facet joints do is they link all the vertebrae together.
It’s really important that we understand that because when they go out, this is why you will have pain going here. It’s like out, out all over the place, just pain going everywhere.
Because when they go out, it moves up and down the chain, right? Some researchers estimate that the set joint syndrome accounts from anywhere from 15% of all low back complaints to 60% in men and almost 70% in women.
So the facet joint pain is real. It is a huge part of low back pain, along with SSI, joint pain. A lot of times facet joint pain will be the precursor to SSI joint pain, which is your sacral iliac joint, right?
Your SSI joint is where your sacrum and your ilium meet. And that’s part of your pelvis.
05:23
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
If these aren’t working, these are going to have to work harder. And then these get thrown out. That’s why pain goes up and down.
The body law facet joint syndrome occurs mostly in the lumbar spine. You do have some cervical and some thoracic pacet joint issues that go on all our last talk about ribs, because set joints are a big part of it.
Why? Because the ribs are hanging out right into the transverse process. They attach to the pacet joint. They attached together.
Think about how cool the body is that everything attaches and everything functions with one.
06:02
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
This is also the problem with one thing goes out. It’s going to affect a multitude of other systems in the body.
06:08
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Sure, sure. So what happens with facet joints? Right? So why would they go out? This is kind of crazy.
Remember muscles attached to all of these joints, right? Muscles pull bones. You have to have muscles that pool in order to create movements. Skeleton, the skeleton skull had been in the same dog on position until we move him forever.
He doesn’t move on his own. He needs the muscles and nerves in order to create that. What will happen is muscles or pull muscles will pull we our posture because we don’t stand correctly.
We don’t sit correctly. We sit too much. We hang out one side versus the other. We do too much overuse syndrome. It’ll start pulling onto the bones.
What will happen is you’ll have arthritis and degeneration. So, because you’re getting polled, like all of a sudden you’re having pull, pull, pull the same side.
07:03
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
It’s starting to wear down the joint because remember the stress that’s being pulled into the bone, remodels the bone and degenerates a lot of the time, because it plays that role all the time, because attention goes where the energy flows, right?
Our energy flows where the attention was, it’s a one or two. What will happen is you’ll have arthritis starting because you haven’t been moving very well, or you’ve been sitting too much or degeneration.
You’ll start to have a wear and tear in these specific joints. That causes abnormal movement of the vertebral bodies. What that’ll do a lot of times, it’ll start to create a bone spur.
Those are no fun. If you remember what a bone spur is when you’re getting pulled onto the bone all the time. And it starts to create bone growth. It’s like a, it’s like the calcium deposits pulling on it and it starts to grow.
08:05
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
You’ll have bones for in an up there. You have no real movement, because you’ve got degeneration, you’ve got arthritis.
You don’t have a lot of movement. What happens? Pain, painful syndrome symptoms. So at times of painful symptoms, right? Let’s say, we’re talking about the neck.
We’re going to go to the lumbar because the lumbar actually occurred way more than the cervical, but let’s talk neck, because everybody’s got that tech neck going on.
Let’s say that we’re sitting there with our head forward and all of our vertebrae are now stacking anterior to one another, which means these facet joints are not sitting on each other very nicely.
Wear and tear on the cervical vertebrae
Now you’re sitting like this, but you’re looking like this because you’re looking at your monitor. And so now everything is rotated. All the wear and tear is going into the cervical vertebrae. Right? Well done. Good job, mark.
09:06
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
This is why I’m doing it for you. Let’s say all of this now creates pain, stiffness, and then that starts to worsen, right?
You’re like, oh, my neck is sore. Let me move it around with activity. All of a sudden you’re like, now it’s really sore. I don’t really like this, right?
This is where you get that. I’m turning my head and I hear this. You’re hearing the grinding sound going on into your neck because that’s what’s happening. These guys are scraping against one another.
That’s fun. Isn’t it? The movement of the neck is like, oh, because now you’ve taken something. That’s a well-oiled machine and you have taken all the oil out of it.
So you start scraping and moving it. This is where I’ll give you headaches, muscle spasms in the neck and the shoulders.
This is always like first thing in the morning, thought I wake up and, oh my God, it hurts so much.
10:05
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
I didn’t do anything and woke up. Now I can’t turn my head to the left at all.
10:08
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Exactly pain. That is the most intense pain, first thing in the morning. At the end of the day, like throughout the day, you’re like, kind of goes away . I could move.
At the end of the day, you’re like, oh, it came back and got mocked. There’s also can be pain that radiates from the neck to the shoulders between the shoulder blades. Remember our last tissue, talk on the ribs, same kind of thing, guys.
It’s all connected. Sometimes you’ll have this little stinging pain that goes down the arms, right? That is your cervical facet joints not being in the right place.
How do we fix that? Posture? Pull our neck back, trying to pull all of this back and get it mobilized. So that things move again.
10:53
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
The biggest thing is get those muscle structures, wonderful. Holding all those bones and joints locked in, get those to relax, put normalize those muscle structures. Then you can normalize the joint.
11:02
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah. That would be more of your cervical and upper thoracic, right? The sitting we’re doing the like trapped over, like everything is sitting on forward on top of itself.
Remember, these guys have to move these they’re in there to move. Especially the thoracic guys, these vertebrae, they need to move us when we breathe. They extend. Remember. If they’re not moving these facet joints, aren’t moving.
They’re just grinding against one another or they’ve moved. They, then all of the muscle structure around it gets inflamed. And so you’ll have inflammation.
You’ll have soreness, you’ll have pain, you’ll have muscle guarding hypertonicity, which means all the fibers are like, it’s just like, don’t move me. I’m just guarding. I’m afraid to move.
That will happen a lot because of we’re sitting into the forward head world. Right? So now let’s talk low back. The low back is actually the most common place.
12:00
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
4% joint issue. Why?
12:04
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Yeah.
It’s got your whole body stacked on top of all the pressures just coming down, especially when we’re doing what we’re doing right now, even though we’re sitting with fairly good posture.
Tremendous amount of pressure coming down right on this.
12:16
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Remember it’s almost one and a half of your body weight, your entire body weight on your. Yes. On your discs. I had to pause on that one. Pause for the cause.
Low back pain, the most common chronic pain that we have in America, low back pain, again, the most common cause of chronic pain and people search everywhere for the problem.
Most people remember when low back pain hits, they think disc automatically, they go to, oh my God, I guess I’m going to have surgeries. Not so guys, not necessarily.
Remember what’s in between these Knights, vertebrae are your disks and your disc are lined by this nice annulus. That’s like the covering of it. There’s degeneration or movement it’s going to get pulled.
There will be disc issues and dysfunction and degeneration, right? Let’s go back to this nice beset joint review. Guys re can see over there.
13:26
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
These lumbar vertebrae are ginormous, right?
They’re the biggest vertebrae that we have in our body because their job is to hold up the rest of the body and provide structure. They can, you couldn’t, we couldn’t last. If we add cervical vertebrae down here, we’d by fluke, we break into it.
We’re just not, it would just wouldn’t be able to hold us up in movement. Right? Low back pain with the set joint degeneration of the facet joints can lead to a spiral of problems that caused serious symptoms, such as weakness.
As we age the cartilage between our joints loses water or loses volume, and then more pressure has put onto the facet joint. It’s just degeneration is happening as it goes.
14:12
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Another way to think about this, you’re creating a tripod effects, both facet joints and the disk create a tripod for violence movement, cushioning, all that. If you have one problem, anywhere in that little tripod area, you’re going to affect the whole.
14:26
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Area.
14:28
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
If your disc gives you generate because you’re over twist it too much load coming down. That’s gonna affect that off a satchel, I guess, locked. That’s going to affect it’s all creates that degenerative effects,
14:36
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Right? As it’s degenerating to make up for all the lost cartilage, that’s happening, new bone begins to grow it. Remember it’s called PCO electric effect and or the Wolf’s law.
They worked together as it’s pulling the stress applied will actually create more bone growth. In called a bone spurs come right up in here, pinch off the nerve. There you go.
There’s your cyanotic pain potentially. There’s your other type of pain that’s running and referral down to, into your back, into your butt, into the front of your leg, depending on what you have.
If you have this, the majority of us that have this pain down in our facet joints, we have a tendency to want to lean forward because it’s, we’re trying to loosen up the area or create space in the area.
And, it doesn’t really work because there’s so much gardening that goes on.
15:34
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Only for a little while will that cause of relief. It’s an arthritis, like condition, but it is a significant source of back pain. How do we get out of it? Is there a treatment for it?
Can we actually get this pain to go away? Yeah, you can. Absolutely. We do it all the time. The thing with the set joint pain is it’ll actually feel, you’ll feel it right here or right here.
This is your pain and you’ll feel it as we hope on you. You’ll be like, oh, there it is. You won’t be able to move to one side or the other. Right. It’ll be really acute and fired up really, really hard for the first few days.
And then it’ll start to go down. If you have chronic percent joint issue, it just will be consistent. Okay.
16:33
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Better Paul, over and over maybe a week, month later to hit you again.
16:37
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
So how do we do it?
16:40
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
How do we get them? Like we talked about with everything. Why, why is it happening? What’s what’s causing that to happen.
It just doesn’t happen on its own. Typically, usually there’s a, cause there’s some muscular imbalance, right? Postural imbalance, mostly that is causing that starting to cause or traumatic injury. Yeah.
16:56
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
So, so let’s talk again about posture. Cause we love posture here. Right? So posture actually pulls the muscle.
The muscle pulls on the bone gets rotated. All of a sudden, now the sculling has right here, he’s got the set joint issue right there. He’s got a preset joint dysfunction because his lower lumbar is rotated.
Nothing is sitting on top of each other correctly. What we would do is we go in and we stretch out the side with you guys helping of course. What that does is as we stretch and move it, we’re able to rotate the pacet joint right back into the right spot.
What that does is it calms the muscle structure down. It calms the nerves down and it starts to put everything back into its natural resting place.
Does it, does it help? Does it help create and treat arthritis? It can.
17:54
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Can it reverse arthritis? No, but what you can do is if you get this, you can start really getting to a point where you don’t have to have it anymore by balancing out your body.
Right. Facet joints or facet joint syndrome is really unknown about back injury. Like a lot of people have no idea that they have facet joint dysfunction.
They all think that they can be hurt in so many different ways, but they don’t realize that the vertebrate, all they need to do is move just and you can take care of it.
The pain that’s originating from it is just the nerve sensation that’s coming off of the fact that you, their bones are not in place. When, I mean you’re not in place.
I mean, you’re not a Lego look how much I’m trying to move Scully.
The Spine Is Meant For Stability And Support
18:48
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Even though he’s a skeleton, I can’t barely move him. And that’s how our bodies are too. We don’t have a ton of movement in there because the spine is meant for stability and support.
You don’t want to have so much movement in there that you can’t hold your own body up. Right? The biggest thing that we need to understand is that with the facet joint porting, the facet joint back in alignment will actually allow for the rest of the body up and down the kinetic chain to relax.
If you’re having SSI joint issue where your sacrum and your ilium are off because your pelvis is tipped off, like Scully’s is here and you’ve got pain going across the back.
If you release that, it may be coming from your facet joint, being out. If you release the facet joint and start mobilizing these guys, then you can mobilize the lower half of your pelvis.
19:48
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
That will ease off all of that pain. That’s probably been sitting there bothering you forever.
19:53
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
It’s going to come down to posture,
19:58
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Right. And posture. The other thing too is what’s on the opposite side of our back.
20:05
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
That’s usually where the problem is coming from.
20:08
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
But what is.
20:08
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
It that hip flexor is? So as a core or basic core.
20:13
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Think about all of the muscles that attach to the front. I E the, so as remember the psoas attaches to the lower lumbar into the vertebrae and come down and attach down into the leg, they pull the trunk forward.
You’ve got, you’ve got the QL that attaches from the side, back down into the backside of the ilium. They hip hike.
They pulled the pelvis up and down and rotate . You’ve got this deep core that attaches from the ribs all the way down to the pubic bone.
They stabilize and hold the core. If nothing is either too tight or not strong enough in here, this.
20:59
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Chance,
Stability Is Necessary On Both Sides Of The Spine
21:00
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
This can’t be stable. It can’t be, you have to have stability on both sides to compress and hold it.
You can’t just get away with thinking about working on your back without working on your front. It really is. It’s a team effort.
The body is a huge teamwork of a muscles joints, nerves. It really is set up that way. We want to make sure that the set joint syndrome, you can take care of it’s really, it can be chronic, but it cannot be.
If you take care of it the right way, get this mobilized open the front of your body up because the front pulls on it to make the back hurt. Remember it’s never in the spot that you think it is.
Most of the time it’s on the opposite side of the body or the other side it’s the opposite side or the opposing muscle group.
22:03
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
It’s one of the two, because that’s how our bodies move in the world. We Slingshot.
22:09
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
I am a proponent. Why am I I’m? Since I have so much, I bought the company that once I had got my core stabilized my chronic low back pain that I’ve had since I was 10 years old, went away and it stays away long as I keep that core activated.
If I don’t in about a week or so, it’ll give me a little warning, sign a little shot across the bow. Hey, you’re not doing your exercise.
You’re not doing what you supposed to do. If I still ignore it by about the next week, I’m on the floor, writing and pain, kicking myself.
If I could kick myself now, I can’t kick myself because I’m in so much pain. I get the core stabilized again and goes away. Keep that core on you’ll be at steel, stay out of pain.
22:48
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yep, absolutely. And that goes for S I joint. That goes for facet. That goes for all of the low back facet joints.
Remember the set joint, sit on top of one another. They need, they need that movement. There’s cartilage, that’s attached. You don’t want to be rubbing down that cartilage because that’s where your arthritis comes from it.
And that’s where all the degeneration starts. You want to make sure that you were as mobile as you possibly can, but that also starts with a strong foundation.
If you’re building your mansion of your dreams, you cannot have a foundation of sand to build it on, right? If you’re your mansion will fall apart, it may look good for a hot second, but it’s not going to hold the test of time.
You want to structure your foundation with the steel beams and then you can start making this pretty and then it’ll be there for the rest of your life.
23:39
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
That’s what we’re working on right now. All right. Hopefully that set you guys on the facet joint facet joint dysfunction is not a big deal. If you’re feeling pain right next.
Oh, it hurts so bad. It feels like a huge deal hurts like a mother, your have pain right next to your spine. You’re not going to be able to poke that area. Sometimes facet joint pain will lead to nerve compression.
It’s just releasing that movement onto the nerve root. You, if you think you may have something and it’s not getting better and it’s not getting better, it might be your facet joint.
You might just have to have that thing mobilized. The best way to fix that is with posture and functional movement to begin with.
Because the more even you are to begin with the less pressure you’re putting one side of your body or another.
24:36
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Right. All right. I hope you guys got a lot out of this today for all you people with back injuries.
If anybody who might have pain, they’ve been trying and trying, and trying and trying to get their pain to get better, but nobody’s been able to figure it out, might be set joint, have them watch this video, and hopefully they can get something out of it.
We’re moving our way back down the body. We will see you next Wednesday with another breakdown of the hip joint. Awesome.
Have a great day guys. See you next week. Bye.