Reflection 2

A focus of mine this semester was on improving my overall confidence and skills with
adjustments. I am feeling quite confident with most, except for lumbar spine side postures. I
find this is the most difficult region for me to adjust, especially in being careful to not create
too much rotation in hypermobile patient’s and those who find this position generally
uncomfortable. In combination with this, I am also generally a lot smaller than most in my
class and find this can pose as a challenge as well.

We have been provided with the information needed to solve this problem in class,
however, I needed a more personalised approach. Therefore, I asked Andy for his help in
providing me with techniques that will help with my size, as well as those which do not
create too much lumbar rotation. He clearly demonstrated to me ways in which I can have a
mechanical advantage, such as placing my thigh up higher on the patient’s bent leg, using a
kick with a much larger patient, and how to create more overall torsion and pre-loading
force. These techniques improved my ability to create high velocity, low amplitude
adjustments through the lumbar spine, which improves the success rate of the applied
adjustments (Owens et al., 2016). Andy then also showed me how to ‘squash’ the patient
which is a technique popular in females as it requires much less rotational forces.

I practiced these new techniques over the next following weeks on various students and
recorded my progress as seen in appendix 1. This clearly demonstrates the success of the
newly applied methods as by week 4, all attempted lumbar adjustments were successful.

In the future, I can use a similar approach in asking my tutor questions that will help me gain
more skills and insight into how to develop my own personalised approach to adjustments.

Appendix 1.

WEEK 1 WEEK 2 WEEK 3 WEEK 4

Successful 1/5 3/5 4/5 5/5
Lumbar
Adjustments

Owens, E., Hosek, R., Sullivan, S., Russell, B., Mullin, L., & Dever, L. (2016). Establishing force and
speed training targets for lumbar spine high-velocity, low-amplitude chiropractic adjustments*. Journal
Of Chiropractic Education, 30(1), 7-13. https://doi.org/10.7899/jce-15-5