Whether you have a student-athlete, participate in amateur league sports, or simply like to push your body to perform at its highest potential, getting the right chiropractic care is critical. Discover the benefits working with a qualified sports chiropractor can bring to help improve your A-game.

What Is Sports Chiropractic Care?

Before jumping into the benefits a sports chiropractor offers, it’s important to step back and explore what a sports chiropractor does. Chiropractic doctors are the third largest group of doctorate-level health care practitioners, indicating how many people are now seeking alternative treatments.

All chiropractors address restrictions in the musculoskeletal and nervous systems. The main goal of chiropractic care is to improve your overall well-being. Through the use of spinal manipulation and adjustments, traditional chiropractors can treat headaches, back pain, disc injury, whiplash, and many other problems.

Sports chiropractors apply this same type of medicine but tailored specifically toward professional and recreational athletes. Some athletes seek treatment for specific sports-related injuries. More broadly, athletes of all kinds are turning to chiropractic care to improve their performance. Sports chiropractors commonly use the active release technique, selective functional movement assessment, and the Graston technique to treat athletes. Athletes reap a multitude of benefits from this treatment, including the following.

Prevent Sports-Related Injuries

Nothing gets in the way of an athletic season more than an injury. Depending on your sport, the wrong injury could end your season, if not your participation in the sport altogether. This is why many athletes look to sports chiropractic care to help prevent these serious injuries in the first place.

One of the leading causes of sports injuries is repeated movement. You repeat the same motion so often for so long that you become unaware of small ways you’re moving that may cause an injury. A sports chiropractor really shines here because they are familiar with all the ways you repeatedly move your body in your sport. They can use this knowledge to evaluate how you move and spot weak areas.

They can then evaluate the cause of the weakness, whether it’s training or structurally related, and help you address it. If it’s a structural issue, which happens when something like a vertebra is out of place, they can help correct that issue. They can also offer specific exercises you can use to then strengthen that area. The stronger and better balanced your entire body is, the less prone you are to injury.

Less Recovery Time

One of the biggest questions on every injured athlete’s mind is how long it’s going to take to recover and get back in the game. When you look at surgical correction for sports injuries, they come with an extended recovery time, making you miss more of what you enjoy.

For some injuries, sports chiropractic care is the fastest way to help your body heal and get you back to playing. Chiropractic care generally reduces inflammation in the injured area and improves blood and synovial fluid flow back to the affected tissues and joints. This helps speed the delivery of oxygen and other nutrients to the area, which encourages healing.

Further, there’s very little risk compared to most sports injury surgeries. This means that you can get back to some form of training sooner, which means you need less rehabilitation to recover your previous performance before returning to competition. Keep in mind that your body does need time to heal, but chiropractic care can help get you on the road to recovery more quickly.

Improved Range of Motion

Your body changes as you get older, and some motions that were easy earlier in life can become more difficult. Those changes can create minor pain, but pain that alters how you move and perform in your sport.

A sports chiropractor is skilled in identifying these initially imperceptible changes and helping correct them. Regardless of what sport you enjoy, a sports chiropractor can identify where your body isn’t moving properly. Through a series of varying techniques, the chiropractor can unlock these areas, helping to improve the range of motion, that area’s strength, and your overall performance.

Improve Athletic Performance

As a competitive athlete, you don’t rely on a single practice to improve your overall performance. You’ve likely looked at various changes to your strength training regimen, plus your overall diet and supplementation options. You may also look at other options like massage, cryotherapy, and many more options. All of this together can make it difficult to identify one factor and its individual contribution to performance improvement.

However, that doesn’t mean there’s no evidence, especially when it comes to sports chiropractic treatment. What would it look like if you could improve your overall grip strength, would that help in your sport? There’s a small study from 2012 that looked at this particular topic in Judo athletes. In it, scientists looked at the difference between a group of athletes receiving a legitimate spinal manipulation therapy compared to a group receiving a sham treatment.

That study found a statistically significant improvement in the group receiving legitimate adjustments compared to those receiving the sham treatments. Keep in mind that this was conducted on a national top 10 team, so they were all athletes already doing many things to improve overall strength across their bodies.

Specialized Expertise In Overuse Injuries

Every staunch athlete, from amateur to professional, who works to master their game is at risk of an overuse injury. These kinds of injuries are especially common in the shoulder, elbow, and knee joints. Many times, these injuries happen not only because of continually repeated movements but also because of slight imperfections in how they move and weaknesses in supporting muscles and tendons.

This is an area where sports chiropractors shine. By addressing the minor structural shifts that affects how a joint moves and how muscles work, sports chiropractors help prevent many of these overuse injuries.

Give your best performance by attending to all the needs your body has and supporting your body’s natural healing mechanisms. If you’re in the Redmond area, call (425) 636-0303 to schedule your sports chiropractic consultation with the experts at Structural Chiropractic today.