Spinal injury rehab 101.

Healing and recovering are two different things.

Tissue heals on its own schedule. A strained muscle knits back together in a few weeks whether you help or not. That is healing.

Recovering means the joint moves again, the muscle around it fires at the right time, and the spine can handle a normal Tuesday without complaining. That part does not happen on its own. It happens because you worked at it.

This is why people say their back healed but never felt right. The tissue closed up. Nothing taught it what to do next.

Week one: calm it down.

The first days after an injury the area is inflamed and guarded. The goal is not strength. The goal is settling things down and keeping you moving in the ranges that do not hurt.

• Short walks, often. Movement is what feeds a disc and keeps a joint from stiffening.
• Ice on the sore area in the first couple of days if it helps, in short stretches.
• Gentle, pain-free range of motion. Small movements, several times a day.
• No bed rest past a day or two. Beyond that, lying still makes most backs weaker and stiffer.

This is also when we examine you properly. Dr. Boss checks how you move, which joints have stopped, and whether reflexes, strength and sensation are normal in the arms or legs. If the exam points to a disc, a fracture, or anything outside chiropractic care, you get sent for imaging or to a physician, and he will tell you so on day one.

Weeks two to four: get motion back.

Once the area calms down, the job is restoring movement. Injured joints lock up, and locked joints leave the muscles around them working double.

Adjustments do the joint side of that. Soft tissue work and massage therapy do the muscle side. If a disc is involved, this is usually where spinal decompression starts, taking pressure off the disc across a course of visits rather than one long session.

Your part is daily, small, and unglamorous. Ten minutes of the specific movements Dr. Boss gives you, most days. Not thirty minutes twice a week. Frequency is what retrains a nervous system.

Expect progress to be uneven. A good day followed by a stiff one is normal in this stretch and is not a sign that something went wrong.

Weeks four to twelve: build it back.

Now you load it. This is the phase people skip, and skipping it is the single most common reason an old injury comes back a year later.

The work shifts to strength and control. Holding a steady trunk while your arms and legs move. Hip and glute strength, because weak hips make a low back do their job. Shoulder blade control if the injury was in the neck. Slow, controlled, boring, effective. Therapeutic exercises in the office give you the pattern, and you run it at home.

Somewhere in here you should notice you have stopped thinking about your back for hours at a time. That is the real marker, more than a pain score.

What good rehab feels like from the inside.

You should be able to describe your own plan. What is wrong, what we are doing about it, roughly how many visits, and what you are doing at home. If you cannot say those four things, ask.

You should be doing more over time, not the same thing every visit for months. Care that never changes is not rehab.

And you should be improving against a timeline you agreed to at the start. Dr. Boss gives you a real number of visits up front and checks against it as you go. If you are not tracking, we change the plan or refer you to someone better placed to help. We do not keep people coming in for no reason.

Getting started.

Your first visit runs about an hour: history, exam, a look at your spine on a 3D model, and a plan you can repeat back to someone. We tell you what it costs before you commit, we take most major plans and self-pay is available.

Reviewed by Dr. Christopher Boss, DC, Boss Chiropractic. Last updated September 11, 2026.

This page is general information, not medical advice. What is right for you depends on your exam. Dr. Boss will tell you straight whether we can help, and where to go if we cannot.