Sports are a great way to stay in shape and have fun with friends. Unfortunately, sports injuries are relatively common. If you’re a parent of a budding athlete or are a weekend warrior, we’re here to help you through these challenging occurrences. The following guide will increase your understanding of sports injuries and how structural chiropractic can help reduce or prevent them.

What Are Some Common Sports Injuries?

Sports injuries include a broad range of issues. Sports injuries can involve any part of the body. They can also vary wildly in terms of severity and can even cause long-term issues.

While we advocate for helmets and other protective sports gear, such equipment doesn’t always prevent injury. Whether the skateboard flips from underneath your body or you sprain a wrist during a volleyball tournament, the resulting sports injuries are painful and can cause long-term dysfunction.

Although a sports injury can theoretically affect any body part, some injuries are more common than others. Muscle and tendon sprains happen all of the time. Overuse injuries such as tennis elbow or jumper’s knee are also reasonably common. Catastrophic injuries such as torn anterior cruciate ligaments (ACLs), concussions, and rotator cuff injuries aren’t as common but significantly impact function and have lengthy recovery times.

How Chiropractic Care Can Reduce Sports Injuries

There are many ways our team can help an athlete build a stronger body and achieve better health. The following are the top five ways we can help you reduce your risk of injury and stay in the game.

#1: New Insight Into Your Medical History

When you see us for a sports injury, you can expect comprehensive care that begins when you first enter our office. Before our initial appointment, you will complete a variety of detailed questionnaires. These help us learn about you and your medical history.

Topics such as your living arrangement or outside-of-work activities might not look important at first glance. When you consider what impact your family, friends, and recreational pursuits have on your well-being, you will begin to understand what we’ve known for decades: Health is a multi-faceted enterprise that is powerfully influenced by what you put into your mind and your body.

Expect us to scrutinize your medical records from other providers and the history you provide. To do anything less would be approaching malpractice. We look through your history and search for patterns in your health and events such as a forceps-assisted birth or car accidents that may impact your spinal alignment and overall health.

We also perform a detailed physical and take onsite digital X-rays to help us see what has happened to your body due to your sports injury or everyday life. This is one instance in which a picture is worth millions of words. Imaging allows us to see patterns of wear and use and spot potential challenges when they are relatively minor.

#2: Detailed Movement Analytics

If you’ve been interested in sports for a while, you are probably at least familiar with statistics and play-by-play analyses. Data makes us wild because it opens up a new world of possibilities for treatment.

In addition to carefully reading about your medical history, we perform a variety of functional movement assessments. We’ll watch as you sit, stand, and walk, but we’ll also watch as you perform everyday movements in your chosen sport. If you like, you can even bring in your equipment. This can help us get an even more accurate picture of your body moving when you’re wearing protective gear or grasping your sporting equipment.

While watching you move, we analyze how you run, squat, stoop, or whatever else you need to do while playing your sport. Combined with your medical history, our examination, and any X-rays, this information gives us some good insight into how your movement affects your body’s structure.

#3: A Stronger Body for Life

One of the recommendations we can make from analyzing your movement is prescriptive exercises. Whether you’re experiencing tight back muscles or painful shin splints, we can design a strategic movement program to make such sports micro-injuries less likely. You’re less likely to suffer from a full-blown sports injury when you can move with less pain.

We know that excellent nutrition is needed to renew your body at the cellular level and build healthy muscle. As a result, we offer both exercise and nutritional guidance to maximize any results you get from other chiropractic care. We help you learn to make better food choices within your existing preferences, and lifestyle constraints, so healthy eating is something you can sustain over the long run.

 

#4: A Healthy Start for Your Youngest Athletes

Children learn what we teach them. Unfortunately, sometimes this includes the poor posture or overzealous swing they see from us when we hit the miniature golf course together. No matter your bad habits, your children are watching and doing what you do.

Chiropractic care can help children develop better movement patterns through intentional practice. It can also help them build muscular bodies with more efficient neurological systems. When the brain, spinal nerves, and other nerves work as a team, your children are strong, graceful, and move, so they’re less likely to get injured on the field or court.

#5: Research-Based Care for Results You Can Trust

We don’t just offer sports chiropractic medicine services because our patients respond. We also rely on numerous research studies. From 1980 to 2019, chiropractic care reduced sports injury rates in three out of four research studies.

Get Back Into the Game With Chiropractic Care

Whether it’s a pulled hamstring or a concussion, a sports injury can make practice or even maintaining physical fitness a challenge. Our chiropractor encourages you to receive the best treatment possible to prevent such injuries in the first place. Our care is strategically designed to strengthen your body and reduce the risk of injury. Giving our Structural Chiropractic team a quick call at (425) 636-0303 or email at info@structuralchiro.com can help get you back into the game quickly.