Perform at Your Highest Level with Chiropractic Care

Many elite athletes rely on chiropractic care to keep them at peak performance. Most major-league teams employ an official sports chiropractor, and chiropractic care is also a fixture in the Olympics.

Clearly, there’s something to this.

As an athlete, how might you benefit from chiropractic care? Below, we take a look at the many ways chiropractic can improve your performance, help you heal from injuries more quickly, and prevent injuries in the future.

Improved Range of Motion

As an athlete, you put a lot of pressure on your body every time you train. Over time, physically intense activities can create problems with spinal alignment, and result in stiff and painful joints. This impairs your range of motion, decreasing your performance and making injuries more likely.

Chiropractic care can help undo the damage of chronic physical stressors, restoring your range of motion, or even improving it over your initial baseline. This will boost your athletic performance, and prevent injuries.

For example, if you’re a tennis player and have misalignments in your upper back, this will decrease the range of motion in your shoulders. Correcting these misalignments with chiropractic care will restore your range of motion, improving your game and preventing injuries in the future.

Faster Healing Time for Injuries

Injuries are a reality of all sports, and as an athlete, you’ve likely suffered an injury at one time or another. This is not only painful but also keeps you out of the game until the injury is healed. After healing, you may be left with decreased functionality in the affected region.

Chiropractic care can shorten the healing time for many injuries, such as strains and sprains, dislocations, and even fractures and breaks.

Your chiropractor can speed the healing time of soft tissue damage using techniques such as hydrotherapy, massage, and ultrasound. These treatments help ensure your injuries heal correctly, preventing loss in flexibility and strength. They can also successfully relieve pain.

For fractures and breaks, your chiropractor can help make sure that the fracture is healing correctly, and prevent compensatory misalignments that often result from them.

Many chiropractors also offer physical therapy in order to rebuild strength and flexibility as your injury heals.

For common performance-related back injuries, physical therapy in combination with treatments such as electric stim therapy can help strengthen back muscles, stabilizing the spinal joints. This will help relieve ongoing back pain and prevent future injuries.

Injury Prevention

Before you suffer an injury, understand that when you’re out of alignment, it places unnecessary stress on your body and often leads to injury, especially if you’re an athlete and have increased physical demand on your body.

Regular chiropractic care can correct misalignments, decreasing the amount of stress placed on your body during training and preventing injuries.

For example, if you’re a golfer, poor posture can lead to an imbalance in your swing, and make overextension injuries more likely. Correcting this imbalance will both improve your swing and decrease the risk of injury.

Pain Reduction

Many athletes suffer from chronic pain, either as a result of old injuries or simply due to the stress that training places on the body. Lower back pain, in particular, is common in many athletes.

Spinal manipulation can help relieve chronic pain in the back or extremities by taking the pressure off of spinal nerve roots that become compressed by misalignment. Other treatment modalities such as electric stim therapy, ultrasound and massage can also decrease pain and relieve muscle tension in the soft tissues.

Equestrians for example experience repeated impact during riding, which can lead to spinal misalignment, particularly in the lower back.

Putting your spine back in alignment will prevent nerve compression and alleviate the lower back pain many riders typically suffer.

Chiropractic Care As A Non-Invasive and Drugless Treatment Option

Many conventional treatments are invasive and can lead to a long and painful recovery period. Chiropractic treatments, on the other hand, are non-invasive and don’t carry the same level of risk as surgical treatments.

Conventional treatments also frequently involve the use of pain medication, cortisone shots, and other drugs only meant to be short-term solutions. Invasive treatments also often carry significant adverse side effects, including a high risk of physical dependency.

Chiropractic care provides pain relief that’s both instant and long-lasting, so it decreases the need for painkillers and other drugs.

Whether you’re an avid athlete or a weekend warrior, chiropractic care can step up your game, and prevent debilitating injuries. In case you do happen to sustain an injury, a chiropractor can also help ensure a speedy and pain-free recovery without risky and invasive treatments.

About the Author:

Dr. Singer has been a practicing chiropractor for more than 20 years, and USA Health & Therapy has been around since 2004. Over the course of his career, Singer has helped tens of thousands of people with all kinds of issues by using a wide variety of treatment strategies. He has extensive knowledge of chiropractic modalities, including Gonstead, Diversified, Thompson Drop Table, and Activator, and in 1997 he earned a special adjunctive Chiropractic Certification in Spinal Trauma (CCST) to better provide care for car crash victims. Dr. Singer is licensed to practice chiropractic medicine in both Florida and New York.