The answer is pretty easy. Your spinal joints, in various places, have LOCKED UP. This happens after an old injury heals, but the joint heals frozen. An example is, you sprain your wrist, tape it up, and after a couple of weeks you remove the tape and the joint is very stiff.
If you didn’t do something to restore the lost range of motion, the wrist would develop fixation, and arthritis would begin to form. The same happens in the spine if you hurt it. Fixation begins the process of arthritic changes, stalls the action of the disc from pumping on motion, and even the disc starts to degenerate. Do an MRI, and you see the report say “Degenerative Disc”.
Your spine is a motion based system. Spinal joints don’t go IN and OUT of place, they are either IN and OUT of motion.
So: Fixation, that is, Locking , OVER TIME, caused your problem.
Scheduled treatment that restores motion OVER TIME, will correct the problem and stop the degeneration.
So, Rule Number One is: You can have a locked joint form after the intial event and NOT HAVE PAIN, that is, until the joint “snaps” after making a seemingly innocent movement, usually right before you leave on a vacation. That’s what you see on Xray.
That’s how you got this way. Stick to the schedule and correct it, and you win, and Stuck Joints lose! (our motto!)
