Introduction
Chiropractic care has been around since the 1890s with being known as a natural healing approach to healthcare and despite all the attempts in discrediting it over the years from various medical health organizations with alternate agendas, it has stood the test of time. It is continually becoming a well known alternative approach in the public's eyes for truly achieving optimal health. Outside of the daily activity of the everyday person, it is even being inserted into athletic sports worldwide. Did you know that chiropractors are even on staff for most professional sports teams? Every team in the NFL has a chiropractor on staff with also 30 MLB teams, majority of the NBA teams, 72% of golfers use chiropractic regularly, and it has even been part of the Olympic setting since the 1980s! So, it's safe to say there is a big relevance between chiropractic care and sports, so much so that elite athletes get it but for what? Is it to prevent injury or enhance performance? Or both? That's what we will get into today!
Injury management and recovery
Injury prevention can be a pretty loaded statement. The reality is that no single intervention can truly just completely prevent you from injury. HOWEVER, that shouldn’t deter you from trying your best at doing the small things in the right situations to achieve maximum resiliency. You get what you put into it. Chiropractic has been known in the sports world to be supportive in injury management and boosting recovery, especially in congruence with other health promoting specialties. One way it does this is by reducing the amount of pain in that area through stimulating the nerves/blood vessels in the area and igniting the healing process faster. Secondly, through restoring functional range of motion. When an injury occurs, it guards against motion to prevent further injury but when performed specifically with the right intentions. It can support the healing process. Lastly, it improves and maintains overall function of the body through clear nervous system communication and allows you to keep firing on all cylinders.
Biomechanics and optimized movement
With having better functional ROM from the start. This allows you to build off of the foundation towards optimizing your movements specifically for the sport. This is like clearing movement out in the hips and low back so a powerlifter can deepen their squat efficiently and add on weight to continue progression of the lift without injury, or a golfer is able to improve their swing efficiently because they can move their shoulder and hips fluidly. This lets them truly understand their deficits within their swing mechanics and improve instead of adapting to painful tendencies. You can’t build a strong house on top of a faulty foundation and elite athletes understand this.
Coordination and Proprioception
This is an element that not many people think about but it is just as important as any other factor to being injury free. These usually only get bunched in with balance but it is so much more. Coordination is how gracefully we move with various demands and proprioception is the awareness we have with space and time around us with things we can’t even see. As you can see from this picture, this ties into our vision with depth perception, determines how close something is to our skin through our hair, balance from our vestibular system (inner ear), and lastly how to efficiently move our joints and with what amount of force through our muscles. All these factors play an essential role in a normal life, imagine in an athlete's life. The information and feedback sent for all of this to the brain goes through the nervous system. Chiropractic care ensures a clear nervous system allowing your body to use all it was made to do at the highest level possible. Clear communication=better proprioception/coordination=less injuries/better results.
Nervous System performance
Like I mentioned before, the nervous system is the main highway that information is sent back and forth for literally everything we do in life. From an athletes perspective, this is very valuable information because if you are looking to improve, you want to ensure you always have true feedback. With nervous system communication being clear, you will have fluid personal movement, heightened proprioception, recovery at the max, and adaptability to its highest potential. This will not only assist and support injury free training because you will be constantly aware of abnormalities but you will also have a clear runway for growth due to all factors working and learning cohesively towards better performance. This is why elite athletes have chiropractors in their corner.
Conclusion
Completely preventing injury is impossible but being adequately prepared against injury is not. Preparing for injury is not one size fits all and no single prevention can do as much. It is a group effort from all professions to assist and ensure we are setting the athlete up on the best possible chance for being injury free and when an injury occurs. It is everyone's job to work together and do what they can to be the best support system in getting the athlete back on track. And chiropractic can most definitely play a major role in the realm of injury prevention. If it can help elite and olympic athletes, it can help you! I hope you learned something to take with you and thank you for reading! Live your best life and live Primal!💪