In recent years, we have increasingly seen professional sports teams utilize chiropractors as part of their training staff. Legendary athletes like Tiger Woods, Tom Brady, Michael Jordan, and even Arnold Schwarzenegger have attributed some of their success to Chiropractic care. I’m not making any claims that chiropractic care will turn you into a professional athlete, but it clearly can help you perform to your fullest potential. I will highlight three main benefits of chiropractic that can enhance athletic performance.
One of the fundamental benefits of chiropractic care is that it improves range of motion. Chiropractic manipulation guides joints into the paraphysiological space, a joint position that cannot be accessed with active motion. This helps to loosen stiff joints, recycle nutrients into the joint capsule, and reset tense muscles. Patients often report feeling lighter and less restricted wherever this treatment was applied. At Chiropractic Health Center, our doctors are highly trained in the delivery of joint manipulation. This effect lasts a variable amount of time after treatment, but we also combine soft tissue mobilization, which is synergistic with manipulation, to enhance results and lengthen the relief of symptoms. Chiropractic manipulation also enhances one of the body’s primary senses, proprioception. Proprioception is the ability to detect your position in space. It is why you can close your eyes and still be able to touch your nose with your finger. This is crucially important for athletes and enhances their ability to perform in any sport.
Soft tissue mobilization is a phrase applied to any technique that primarily loosens soft tissues: muscles and fascia. Techniques used at Chiropractic Health Center include muscle scraping, cupping, percussive massage, and trigger point therapy. This dramatically improves outcomes when combined with manipulation, enhancing the increased range of motion. Furthermore, one of the barriers to athletic development is injury/soreness that prevents effective training sessions. Soft tissue mobilization is one of the most effective techniques to prevent and treat DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness). This helps athletes to feel healthy and pain-free so they can bring maximum effort to daily training. If an athlete gets injured, chiropractic care can provide pain relief to damaged tissues, which will make it easier to begin rehab of their injury, ultimately getting them back on the field as soon as possible.
Rehabilitation of an injury is a natural part of athletics, but at Chiropractic Health Center, we like to use a different approach termed “prehab”. Our doctors are specially trained to assess movement and muscular imbalances that could lead to injury over time. Certain sports tend to exacerbate muscular imbalances due to their unilateral nature. Throwing sports like discus, shotput, baseball, or football have constant repetitive motions that overdevelop the athlete’s dominant side. Overhead sports like volleyball or swimming disproportionately develop the shoulders but neglect crucial midback muscles that provide shoulder stability. Even golfers develop these imbalances from their swing. By addressing these imbalances, our athletes not only improve performance, but they also actively prevent overuse injuries.
In conclusion, if you were hoping chiropractic care would drop your 100-meter dash time by a few seconds or improve your free-throw accuracy, we are sorry to disappoint. However, chiropractic care can help remove barriers that prevent effective training, develop an injury prevention protocol, and help to bounce back from injuries if they do occur. When utilized regularly, care at Chiropractic Health Center can help all athletes stay at the top of their game.