Have you ever been injured while playing a sport? Did you continue to have problems after you thought the injury was healed? Or have you had the same injury more than once?
Strains, sprains and other painful physical ailments are common in active people of all levels, from weekend warriors to professional athletes. After a sports injury many people seek chiropractic care knowing that it can be extremely beneficial in recovery and healing, both relieving pain and getting them back to their sport of choice more quickly. But aside from just providing treatment after the fact, regular visits to the chiropractor can be instrumental in reducing the reccurrence of injuries, as well as preventing many common sports injuries from happening in the first place.
Prep
Injury prevention is very important and often starts with proper preparation of the body for the training to which you’re about to subject it. Adequate stretching or other time spent warming up is vital to ensuring your muscles are ready to be pushed and tested through exercise, especially if you’ve had previous injuries or are prone to them.
Healthy lifestyle habits — monitoring diet, limiting alcohol and not smoking — also keep the body better able to perform at higher levels and respond to demands placed on it by exercise.
But mechanical maintenance is also vital. Chiropractors are experts in the field of human biomechanics, understanding the relationship between spinal alignment, and the body’s muscular and neurological systems and the way they all work together in human movement. Maintaining the biomechanics of the body allows an athlete to train more effectively, with proper form, reducing the chance of injuries associated with training, repetitive movement and overuse.
Keeping the spine balanced and free from structural stress helps maximize the potential for achieving optimal performance and remaining injury free.
Recover
Training requires recovery. Whether it’s hard core Ironman type stuff, organized club or high school sports, or even work outs associated with classes offered by gyms (think Zumba, HIIT and Tabata) your body needs rest and recovery. Depending on the intensity, exercise and training can often result in misalignment of the spinal column. After all, the “leg bone’s connected to the hip bone,” so twisting, turning, lifting, as well as quick stops and starts experienced by runners, cyclists and circuit trainers can affect legs, feet, neck and shoulders, and often jar the spine.
Even if your spine was aligned at your last visit, intense exercise can place structural stress on body systems and impair the body’s ability to function at optimal levels. The chiropractor can detect and correct spinal misalignments, and often other soft tissue weakness in ankles, hips and knees, before they become a problem that could result in serious injury. That’s because unlike traditional medical doctors that favor treatment specific to the injured area, chiropractors focus on the body as a whole. In doing so, chiropractors can detect problems that could lead to injury or impaired performance and address them before they arise.
Treatment of Sport Injuries
Dr. Amanda Massey at Infinity Wellness Center always likes to get her athletes back to doing what they like to do, so for her it’s not simply fixing the injury, it’s about correcting the underlying cause to make sure you are training right and injury free.
