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By the time you were five years old, you\u2019d had about 200 (or more) falls that were serious enough to misalign your spine. The first falls you had while learning to walk, the ones you had on the playground running around and the crashes you had on your bike all had an impact on your spinal alignment.<\/p>\n
Your body doesn\u2019t initially heal itself from these traumas\u2014it just compensates. It compensates by dropping your head down on one side, by carrying one shoulder higher than the other, by rotating one of your hips forward and the other one backward. You can see this clearly on your X-rays.<\/p>\n
One of ways your body compensates is by laying down scar tissue in the area of the original injury. This makes the muscles in that area tighter and weaker, and an imbalance develops between that muscle and its counterpart on the other side of your body.<\/p>\n
The problem of the misaligned vertebrae becomes cyclical, then, as the left-right muscle imbalance prevents the original area of injury from healing itself. You may end up with one shoulder muscle stronger than the other, one bicep stronger than the other and so on. Anyone who has lifted weights in the gym for a period of time can feel this left-right strength imbalance.<\/p>\n
A misaligned vertebra disrupts the body\u2019s healing process, causing muscle-imbalances and scar tissue to form in an area of strain or injury\u2014in turn, this worsens the condition of that misaligned vertebra and creates a cycle.<\/p>\n
So in order to reduce the frequency and severity of spinal misalignments, we have to follow the ABCs:<\/p>\n