If you walk into a lot of chiropractic offices, you’re going to get a similar experience. The doctor looks over your spine, tells you where the problem is, and cracks and adjusts things throughout your body. You pop a little and feel some relief and return for the next visit. It’s a pretty standard procedure and one that leads people to think that all techniques are basically the same.

The Ring Dinger could not be more opposite.

The differences, to say the least, are extreme. Standard adjustments usually involve one or two areas of your spine getting adjusted at a time. This technique is designed to decompress the entirety of your spine at once.

It’s exhilarating or terrifying (or both) and that’s okay when you hear what’s going on!

What Regular Adjustments Do

Regular adjustments work in a pretty straightforward manner. The chiropractor will find a joint that’s not moving like it’s supposed to. This is often called a subluxation or a restriction. They’ll position the body to isolate the joint and give it a quick push to get it moving again.

It takes only seconds.

Typically, adjustments are one or two joints at a time. Your chiropractor might pop your neck, adjust your midback, and then finish you off with your lower back. Each adjustment is treated as an isolated event.

This technique is all about being precise. Chiropractors spend years mastering where to put their hands, the right amount of force that each area of the body can take before it pops. Most of the time, they don’t even “feel” the adjustment. They just hear it pop and then feel relief when that newly adjusted area starts to move again.

The aftermath of this treatment is usually pretty short. You may be a little sore for around a day, similar to how you feel after a tough workout, but most people feel much looser after their adjustment.

How the Ring Dinger Works Instead

Things get a little more fun with this technique.

The Ring Dinger technique puts traction on your spine to decompress your entire spine while you lie on the table face up. Unlike regular adjustments, this technique looks at your spine as an entire unit.

Instead of focusing on one area at a time, Ring Dinger chiropractors want to decompress everything all at once.

To do this, the practitioner puts your head in the headpiece, secures your pelvis, and then gently pulls on your entire spine while you’re laying down. It creates space for your neck to your tailbone all at once instead of just one joint at a time.

This negative pressure that gets created in your disc causes your herniated areas to get sucked back into their proper spots on the whole tissue.

The force is much greater when it comes to the Ring Dinger technique than with standard adjustments. This is not a quick process but there’s also no focusing on other areas before you get your adjustments. As such, there are much bigger pops and cracks because multiple areas are getting decompressed at once instead of just one at a time.

For those who are considerably compressed in multiple areas, the ring dinger chiropractic technique is actually much more targeted than adjusting each area on an individual basis. It wants to treat your spine as an entire unit.

The experience is also much more visceral. People who go through this experience often feel their entire spines being decompressed in ways they’ve never felt in traditional practices before. Some people love this while others feel overwhelmed by the sheer intensity of what’s happening.

The Mechanical Differences Between Both Techniques

Adjustments typically work using a high-velocity, low-amplitude thrust. This means a quick movement over a small distance for the area being adjusted. Practitioners are trained to hit these areas with precision as force impacts the specific joints being adjusted.

Decompression techniques involve high-velocity traction, but with higher amplitude than these simple thrusts. The movement is quick but the entire column of your spine changes shape rather than just individual joints being adjusted at one time.

Adjustments also affect the intervertebral discs differently from decompression techniques. They specifically help with the mobility of the joint that’s being adjusted instead of the actual correction of the disc itself.

They relieve pressure in the joint that’s getting adjusted and also release tension in the muscles surrounding that area that might be impacted by this strain or restriction in movement.

The Ring Dinger technique impacts the disc and its pressure much more than anything else. It directly affects your mobility less than an actual adjustment. When pulled apart gently, patients can create negative pressure in their discs that suck the herniated areas back down to where they need to be.

Who Each Technique Works For

Routine adjustments work for all of the same complaints that individuals come into chiropractors offices with. If you’re feeling tight after sleeping funny or sitting too long, these standard techniques are efficient for most people. If you’re worried about chiropractic care, this is especially useful for those who have anxiety around trying it for the first time.

They’re often gentler than other techniques, especially since they only focus on one area at a time, and can be made less aggressive by the practitioner if needs be.

Older populations, as well as those who have osteoporosis or struggle with still getting adjustments, also often respond much better to traditional and routine forms of adjustment.

The Ring Dinger technique appeals more to those with chronic issues or inconsistencies in their spine they’re looking to get adjusted. While there’s no specific population that goes in for this treatment, patients have often tried something else before trying this technique.

Other decompression techniques may not always specifically target these patients but those with specific conditions may not be suited for this type of technique either. Sometimes it may also not be feasible depending on who has been trained in this method.

What Recovery Looks Like After Treatment

After receiving routine adjustments, patients are usually back to normal pretty quickly. They may feel some soreness after being adjusted but it’s usually pretty localized to the joint areas where they were adjusted. Most of the time, people feel like they’re back to normal within a couple of hours.

After being treated with Ring Dinger techniques, the recovery may feel a little more intense than after traditional adjustments alone due to the sheer number of cracks and pops that happen throughout this process.

People might feel sore for around one or two days simply because their entire spine was decompressed instead of just one area at a time. People often say they feel like they’ve completed a rigorous workout that targeted only their backs and necks but this soreness will wear off eventually.

As such, when this technique works, people often feel more dramatic results than after any other form of adjustment. The tradeoff with this technique, however, is knowing that it may take you longer to recover from this pain than it did to actually experience the treatment process!

The Realities of Each Technique in Practice

Most practitioners still focus on routine adjustments as they’re versatile forms of treatment that work for all patients who walk through their doors. They also have decades of experience through research behind them showing that they’re safe and efficient for treating these issues when they arise.

Ring Dinger treatment remains rare because it’s still not a technique that’s offered everywhere and isn’t used for all patients who walk in with issues in their spines.

That said, these do not indicate what treatment is necessarily better than another though both techniques do have different potential popping noises associated with them after the treatments have been completed.

The popping noise that is heard after these treatments happen because gas bubbles within your joints release when there are changes within pressure or volume.

Some adjustments may be silent but still be efficient while other might be incredibly loud yet be ineffective at treating those who receive them.

What truly matters is whether a treatment heals the injury or issue that caused you to visit these practitioners in the first place. Localized adjustments may adequately treat those who just need targeted assistance, but decompression techniques can target those wholistic issues that many patients have when walking through these doors.