Compensation Patterns: How Chiropractic & Biokinetics Help

As an active person, I see a lot of other active people during my running or cycling training. Often I spot somebody running a little bit funny, maybe their foot kicks out to the side, or cycling with a knee that’s doing the hoola. This made me think that a blog on compensation patterns in the body would be interesting to share. So read on for a brief mildly-scientifically put explanation of what compensation is and how chiropractic can help. Then read on further for my own personal experience with compensation. So here we go then...

Compensation is present in 100% of people- everyone has movement imbalances, asymmetries, or dominant patterns. The body is brilliant at adapting, but these compensations often cause overuse, pain, or joint degeneration over time. Common causes include old injuries, poor posture, prolonged sitting, repetitive movements or muscle weakness. Left unaddressed, compensations create a cycle of dysfunction that can affect everything from walking gait to spinal alignment.

Why function based treatment matters

This is something chiropractors see daily. Everybody has this going on in their body. Chiropractic care isn’t just about cracking joints—it’s about restoring natural, efficient movement. Adjustments improve joint mobility, function and relieve soft tissue tension. But function goes beyond alignment—it requires strength, control, and neuromuscular coordination. That's why treatment must include movement re-training to create lasting results.

The Role of Exercise & Movement in Joint Health

Joints are designed to move. Motion feeds and nourishes them through synovial fluid circulation. Regular exercise keeps muscles strong, joints stable, and movement patterns balanced. Targeted exercise can reverse the effects of compensation by retraining underactive muscles and offloading overworked ones. Even light, consistent movement improves proprioception, coordination, and functional strength. Inactivity causes compensations to worsen and solidify. Sedentary habits lead to muscle atrophy, joint stiffness, and postural dysfunction- all of which increase your risk of injury. Prolonged sitting or lack of movement can weaken stabilizers, leading to faulty movement patterns that place stress on joints. The result? Pain, fatigue, and chronic musculoskeletal issues. So how can we get the absolute best outcome for our body? One of the ways is to couple chiropractic care/physical therapy with exercise based treatment, such as biokinetics.

The Power of Chiropractic + Biokinetics

While Chiropractic care restores joint mobility and function, Biokinetics focuses on movement analysis, muscle balance, and exercise prescription. A Biokineticist conducts detailed functional movement assessments to identify compensations, weaknesses, and imbalances.Together, the Chiropractor and Biokineticist create a comprehensive, individualized plan that addresses both structure and function. This collaboration leads to:

Better movement quality
Longer-lasting pain relief
Reduced injury risk
Improved posture, strength, and coordination
Chiropractic opens the door; Biokinetics keeps it open
through corrective movement and rehabilitation.

KEY TAKE AWAY:

You don’t need a perfect body—you need a functional one. Compensation is normal, but it shouldn’t run the show. Combining Chiropractic care with Biokinetics allows you to move better, feel stronger, and live pain-free by treating both the cause and the consequence of dysfunction.

My Own Personal Experience

Just as you take a history when you are with your doctor, I am going to explain my own history because it is all important in understanding the underlying issues I have to work on in my body.

The Original Injury

Over the last few years of triathlon, I noticed that the same injury kept repeating itself. It started after racing the Sun City Ultra Triathlon where my ankle tracker strap seemed to be slightly too tight around my left achilles tendon. I had double secured it with some tape because I have this irrational fear that the velcro will just suddenly stop serving its purpose and I lose the timing chip into the water. During the last three kilometers of my run portion of the race I started to feel a tightness in the left achilles. After the race it was sore but I walked it off like the tough farm girl that Hekpoort made me. Three days later I attended the team's track running session and managed most of it okay, until the last few sets where I started to feel that familiar achilles pain, although mild. I was running with one of the coaches at the time and so thrilled to be doing such a strong set only a few days after my race, and so was encouraged to finish my set. Just like a Hollywood movie, on the very last stride of my very last set, I was suddenly limping like I had been shot by a sniper!

This is important to note because as a chiropractor I should have used my medical brain and realised that not only was I slightly injured but I was also very fatigued. That is the perfect recipe for a much worse injury, so perfect that I ended up unable to run for three months after that. Fast forward through some rest from running, some dry needling by my chiropractor friend and no rehabilitation to the area, I was running again and preparing for my next race. I have to just note that I was running, yes, but very carefully and definitely not on any hills, but still running and very happy about it. Typical runner, am I right? Little did I know that I would go through this another two times over the next 2 years. Each time I would get dry needled, rest, and I’d be good to go. Somehow my body just compensated and the stronger I got in my running the better the leg felt. But in time, my body could no longer hide my imbalances and other areas started to complain more frequently.

The Assessment

This is what led me to get a running assessment with a biokineticist. I have to say, I did not expect to receive a 28 page report on exactly why I am repeating this injury. Running assessments I’d done in the past were “eyeballed” assessments that resulted in about five exercises given to me to try “change” my running style to a ‘forefoot runner’ and that would solve all my problems (?). So this was quite the surprise.

Overall, it was determined that my body adapts well and compensates efficiently where it needs to. But as training volumes increase and fatigue racks up, the pressure on my achilles mounts until the previously torn tissues and scar tissue can’t handle the load anymore and it re-injures.

The ACTUAL Original Injury

So where does the overload come from? Well, this was even more interesting for me. A few years prior, I had fallen off a jet-ski and my RIGHT foot had ripped out of the floorwell as I fell, creating a grade 2 tear in my peroneal tendon and spraining my lateral ankle ligaments. As this healed over time, it created a restriction in my ability to dorsiflex (bend my foot upwards at the ankle). But wait, there’s more- bunions run in my family. I have the beginnings of this in my big toes but they do not cause me any pain or issue, or so I thought. The assessment also found that my big toe loves to hang out in extension constantly (it sticks up straight to the sky on every step that I take). It does this to try and make up for the lack of movement at my ankle. It sticking up in extension the whole time makes it really bad at pushing into the ground when it’s supposed to push my foot off at toe-off. This means that my right foot spends a shorter time in contact with the ground while running because it doesn’t have the ability to flex at the ankle as much as it needs to or get sufficient propulsion from my big toe. The outcome is that I instinctively transfer my weight to my LEFT foot for a longer time period and spring off the ground during toe-off with greater force.

A Double Act

This is a greatly oversimplified version of that 28 page assessment which includes measurements that are unequal, muscles that are weak or not firing, other muscles that are too strong and stealing the spotlight. If I had not injured my achilles that day at Sun City, it is possible that I would have still ended up in the same position. It’s a chicken or the egg scenario- was the area already compromised because it was already under greater load than the right? Probably. And why could I get by each time I got treated and made my way back to running? The answer is easy-chiropractic and physical therapy unloads and unwinds all those little biomechanical tightnesses to give all the joints, muscles and soft tissues the capacity to bear the load again. It’s important to remove inflammation, tension and pain from the area so that you have tissue that's capable of functioning as you begin your strengthening journey. Like resetting to zero and then allowing the build up to start from the bottom again. But eventually it WILL build up again. And again. Until you address the underlying imbalance with targeted strengthening.

A BIG THANKS

So there is a lot for me to work on to prevent myself from further injury and it’s exciting because I can potentially achieve a real ‘fix’ to my injury. Having a multi-modal approach to treating a condition is so important in the long-term. Shout out to Alexandra Ennis (Biokineticist) for being so thorough in what she does and for helping me to ‘prove’ what I tell my patients daily- there is a reason they are in my room with pain. There always is. That functionality, strength and mobility is crucial to a happy, pain-free body.