Whether you play golf, football, rugby, or train in martial arts or dance, every athlete aspires to achieve peak physical condition. They might have a focus area that they train extensively and try to improve, but overall health and physicality are just as important. Here are 4 ways that chiropractic care benefits athletes.
Treating Sports Injuries
Sports injuries are the most commonly assumed reason to go in for chiropractic treatment. Such injuries include headaches, shoulder/neck/back pain, sprains and ankle injuries. They can happen anywhere, anytime and from any sport. They are usually caused by excessive repetitive motion, forceful contact, improper training or equipment use, or accident. Chiropractors help by providing a physical examination, diagnosis of the cause of pain and dysfunction, and recommendation and implementation of injury management. We’re not simply here to ease the pain but to heal and restore your physicality.
Injury Prevention
Aside from helping heal injuries, chiropractic treatment is also used to prevent injuries. This involves a look into your history with sports, exercise and fitness, a physical examination, a diagnosis of injury-prone areas, and a look into what kind of treatments and habits would help you minimize the risk of future injury.
Enhance Athletic Performance
When patients come in, they often have a focus area for where they think they need chiropractic treatment. But when it comes to athletes and fitness enthusiasts, an overall chiropractic assessment and plan is beneficial to have in place. After all, you might not know you have an issue until you’re properly examined.
An athlete’s body should be viewed as a well-oiled machine of excellent working parts, not a few good parts and a damaged part or two. Every component in the body needs to work well together in order to achieve peak physical performance. That’s why chiropractors look at the overall function of the body. We examine the spine to ensure that it’s balanced and aligned, that there aren’t misalignments, and that there isn’t any sort of structural stress in the body that might inhibit an athlete from top performance. This includes focusing on the nervous system to ensure that nerve signals are being properly delivered and received throughout the body.
If the nervous system is dysfunctional in any way, it can interfere with the body’s natural healing process, which can mean bad news for an injured athlete. Nerve function also plays a role in sensory processing. If there is an issue with how nerve signals communicate, then it can affect an athlete’s reaction time or general response to outside stimuli. In this sense, chiropractic care helps work out all the kinks in the body that might inhibit an athlete’s physical capability, their healing ability and sensory processing function.
The Drug-Free Approach
The great thing about chiropractic care is that it provides a drug-free alternative to treating injury, pain and enhancing athletic performance. That may mean a significant reduction (or complete elimination) of painkillers or invasive surgery. This also means that it cuts the risk of drug-use side-effects and keeps the body naturally rejuvenated. Through chiropractic care, your body learns to sustain and maintain its own health without the aid of drugs.
A chiropractor’s job is to ensure that the spinal column and joints are balanced and aligned, that they are free from structural stress and nerve interference and that the nervous system and body’s biomechanics (meaning its movement and posture) are at their optimal state. These are all important factors for athletes or anyone who does fitness training. It’s all about making sure that your body is in its best shape to perform. Chiropractic care is a great method of healing, but it’s also a great lifestyle practice for athletes.
Do you think you can benefit from Chiropractic Care? Contact us today to for more information. (302) 600-1198