A conversation with Dr. Jacob “Coby” Shecter, DC, on what recovery actually requires and why alignment isn’t just a chiropractic concept.
This is part of Performance Rewritten, conversations with the people and communities changing what it means to move. Each installment looks at the same questions from a different angle: What is performance? What keeps people consistent? And what does it mean to build something that lasts?
Recovery has a reputation problem.
For most active people, it means stopping. Stepping back. Waiting out an injury until the body is ready to go again. The implicit message: healing and moving are two different things, and you can only do one at a time.
Coby Shecter doesn’t see it that way.
As a Doctor of Chiropractic and owner of Colorado Spine & Joint Center, Coby works with a wide range of patients, from Olympic gold medalists to everyday athletes trying to stay consistent. What he’s found, across all of them, is that the people who recover best are the ones who never fully stop. They adjust. They stay engaged. They stay informed.
We sat down with Coby to talk about what recovery actually looks like when it’s working, why spinal health matters far beyond back pain, and what it means to build a system where all the parts are working toward the same thing.
Recovery Is Not a Stop Sign
The first thing Coby pushes back on is the idea that recovery is passive.
“Recovery gets treated like a stop sign way too often, especially for active people, and that’s usually where things go sideways.”
A well-managed recovery process, in his view, is one that keeps people moving throughout it. The goal isn’t to pause until things feel better. It’s to keep the person engaged, adjust based on how their body is actually responding, and address the real issue rather than just managing symptoms.
The patients who do best, he says, are the ones who stay informed and involved the whole way through. Not passive recipients of treatment, but active participants in their own process.
That distinction matters more than it might seem. When recovery is something that happens to you, it’s easy to disengage, to wait, get frustrated, lose the thread. When it’s something you’re doing, consistency follows naturally.
Why Spinal Health Is About More Than Your Back
Ask most people what chiropractic care is for and they’ll say back pain. Coby’s answer is considerably broader.
“Spinal and joint health is really the foundation everything else is built on.”
When there’s dysfunction or restriction in those areas, the body compensates. And those compensations have a way of surfacing somewhere else down the line, as injury, as inconsistency in training, as a shoulder problem that doesn’t respond to treatment because the real issue is thoracic restriction that’s been there for years.
But it goes deeper than mechanics. Spinal health affects how well the nervous system communicates with the rest of the body. It shapes how efficiently someone moves. It influences how quickly they can adapt to new demands being placed on them.
For athletes and active people especially, that has real implications. It’s not just about pain management. It’s about capacity, the ability to train consistently, absorb load, and keep showing up over time.
Where Radial Pressure Wave Therapy Fits In
One of the tools Coby is most enthusiastic about right now is Radial Pressure Wave (RPW) therapy, a modality that uses acoustic waves to reach tissue at a depth that most other approaches can’t access, particularly with chronic or stubborn soft tissue issues.
But he’s careful about how he frames it.
“By itself any single tool has limits. When you’re combining pressure wave work with rehab and manipulation and also talking to someone about their sleep and stress and what they’re eating, that’s when you start seeing changes that actually hold.”
RPW, in his view, works best as part of a layered approach. You use it to address the restriction and kick-start the healing response, but then you have to back it up with movement and load to actually guide that tissue into better function. The modality opens a door. The rehab work walks through it.
What he’s describing is a shift that’s happening more broadly in performance and recovery care: away from isolated treatments toward genuinely integrative approaches that account for the whole person. Sleep. Stress. Nutrition. Movement. Manual work. All of it in conversation with each other.
Alignment in Practice
At Floyd’s, we talk a lot about alignment, the idea that all inputs in a system should be working in the same direction toward a consistent outcome. It turns out Coby thinks about clinical care the same way.
“The plan has to actually reflect who that person is, what their training looks like, and what they’re trying to accomplish rather than just running a generic protocol.”
Real alignment, in his practice, means everyone involved is working toward the same thing, and that includes the patient. It means the manual work he’s doing in the clinic is supporting what someone is doing in the gym, not working against it. It means being honest about what’s realistic so progress is actually trackable.
When all of those pieces are communicating with each other, outcomes become more predictable. When they’re not, when effort is going in but the inputs aren’t aligned, nothing really adds up.
It’s a simple framework, but it cuts to something most people have experienced on both sides: the treatment that never quite worked because something was always missing, and the one that did because everything was pointing the same direction.
About Coby
Jacob “Coby” Shecter, DC, is the owner of Colorado Spine & Joint Center. He holds a BSc in Kinesiology from Michigan State University and a Doctorate of Chiropractic from the University of Western States. His background spans kinesiology, personal training, alignment-based yoga, sports medicine, spinal correction, peripheral neuropathy, and regenerative medicine. He has worked with patients ranging from Olympic gold medalists to infants, all in pursuit of helping people move better and feel more themselves. When he’s not in the clinic, you’ll find him snowboarding, camping, hiking, or spending time with his dog, Reggie.
