The Most Common Question in Our Practice
Over the past 30 years, there is one question I hear more than almost any other from patients here at Family Chiropractic Chatswood.
“Dr. Brett, what’s the best exercise for my back?” …Or for my neck…Or my hips… Or my core.
It is genuinely one of my favourite questions, because it tells me you’re engaged, you’re motivated, and you want to take an active role in your recovery. That matters enormously.
But after nearly three decades of clinical practice — and working with thousands of people from across Chatswood, the North Shore and beyond — I have learned something important: that question is almost always asked too soon.
And giving you the wrong answer at the wrong time doesn’t help you. It can actually set you back.
So let me walk you through the process. Because understanding why the sequence matters might be the most useful thing you read this week.
First, We Take Away — We Don’t Add
The instinct when something hurts or feels weak is to want to do more. Strengthen it. Build it up. Get moving.
But when your body is stressed, inflamed, and structurally imbalanced, adding load is like trying to straighten a bent nail by hammering harder. You need to address the underlying structure before you can build effectively on top of it.
The first priority is always to remove the aggravating factors. To reduce the stress on the system. To make recovery the path of least resistance.
Your Habits Are Hard-Wired — And That’s the Problem
The very first clinical step we take with every new patient is to begin identifying the habits that contributed to the problem in the first place.
This is harder than it sounds, because habits are not just physical patterns — they are neurological ones. Your posture is literally hard-wired into your brain. It is how your brain perceives your body in space. And over time, whatever you do repeatedly becomes your brain’s new ‘normal.’
That forward head posture from looking at your phone? After weeks and months of repetition, it stops being something you do and starts being something you are. It becomes your sitting posture. Your standing posture. And yes — it even becomes the way you swim. How you stand on land is how you lie horizontally in the water.
This is why immediately after your first adjustments, we focus on just two habits: how you sit, and how you stand.
Because if you continue with poor posture — sitting heavily to one side, loading one hip, one side of the lower back, the opposite shoulder and neck — combined with a forward slouch and the torsion that comes from dominant hand use, you are placing twist and torque through your entire spinal system every single day.
And no exercise programme in the world undoes that if the habits are still running in the background.
How Chiropractic Adjustments Set the Foundation
Chiropractic adjustments are not simply about moving bones. What they do — neurologically — is far more significant than that.
When we adjust a joint, we break down accumulated scar tissue in the surrounding muscles and ligaments. At the same time, we restore the correct sensory information flowing from that joint back to the brain. Within milliseconds, the brain registers this shift and motor nerves begin re-firing — postural muscles that had switched off or were firing incorrectly begin to come back online.
This is sensorimotor integration. Better brain-body communication. And it changes everything.
It makes it easier to sit correctly. Easier to hold a better posture. Easier to build new neurological habits, because — as the science tells us — nerves that fire together, wire together.
Then We Stretch — When the Body Is Actually Ready
With the nervous system functioning better after the adjustments, the muscles that have been overworked, facilitated, and locked tight finally get the signal to relax. Now stretching becomes effective. Now we can genuinely rebalance the tight against the inhibited, the facilitated against the weak.
Stretching at this stage is not just loosening up. It is bringing the body back towards structural symmetry — so that when we do start rehabilitation, we are working with an even foundation.
Finally — Rehabilitation That Actually Works
Now we are ready to talk about exercise.
By the time we introduce rehabilitation work, three critical things have already happened:
- The muscle’s nerve supply and blood supply are functioning properly — meaning it is genuinely receptive to training stimulus and can respond to the work you put in.
- The structural imbalances are actively being corrected through your chiropractic care — so you’re not strengthening a twisted frame.
- The postural habits that were recreating the problem daily have been identified and are being changed — so you’re no longer working against yourself every waking hour.
This is when exercise does exactly what it’s supposed to do. This is when the results are real, lasting, and cumulative.
The Bottom Line
The best exercise for your back — or your neck, or your hips, or your core — is the one given at the right time, to a body that is ready to receive it.
We are building that readiness with every adjustment, every visit, every habit change. The exercise conversation is coming. And when it does, it’ll be worth the wait.
Ready to start from the right foundation? Book your next appointment online, or call us on (02) 9415 4606. We’d love to help
