What’s holding you back from reaching your sporting goals?
Whatever the sport, keeping your body in peak condition is the key to success!
Chiropractic care can both treat your sports injuries and help you to avoid getting any in the future! So whether you suffer from an ongoing/recurring injury or are pushing to get the most out of your body, you should consider chiropractic care as part of your training and recovery.
Recurring injuries commonly result from a repetitive and/or faulty movement pattern. This comes from ongoing alterations in your body’s mechanics that have not been detected or treated. Joint restrictions in the spine and extremities can restrict range of motion, reduce strength, flexibility, limit endurance, decrease performance and cause further injuries if allowed to persist.
Chiropractors work using specific skilled manual adjustments to the spine ensuring that you are properly aligned and balanced.
Chiropractic care aims to restore the full ranges of joint motion, flexibility, muscular function and control. Besides relieving pain, chiropractic care also helps to reduce inflammation therefore promoting early healing. This allows the body to function better and become less susceptible to injury.
In order to free yourself of sports injuries the key is to identify and correct the faulty movement pattern that’s repetition is causing stresses on your joints, ligaments and muscles.
Lets look at a few common injuries and their likely causes…
Achillies Tendonitis – inflammation of the Achilles tendon is common in many sports such as road running. The achillies tendon attaches the gastrocmenius (calf) muscle to the heel bone, tension in the calf pulls on the tendon and causes it to become irritated and inflamed. The key to staying pain free is to not only loosen this muscle but look for the cause of that calf tightening in the first place, commonly to do with foot mechanics or running style.
Plantar Fasciitis – the mechanisms that cause the plantar fascia to become inflamed are very often the same as for achillies tendonitis as they are closely connected and work together during running and walking.
Muscle Tears – unless there has been a dramatic accident that caused your muscle to tear, the muscle was probably tight before it tore and was one of those injuries that with preventative treatment you could have avoided in the first place! However if it has already happened the key now is proper rehabilitation before you go back to training. Your chiropractor can advise you on a strategy to get you back to your best.
Identifying the underlying cause is the key to avoidance, this is likely to be a joint restriction, misalignment or muscle imbalance.
RSI – repetitive strain injuries are caused by incorrect movement patterns, over-training and failure to warm up/cool down properly. Your chiropractor can help you get back to training by relieving the pain and speeding up your healing process as well as correcting the mechanics that got you in trouble in the first place.
Natasha, one of our chiropractors here at Essential Chiropactic, is a registered RocDoc which means she has trained in the use of RockTape for a range of sporting applications from injury recovery/prevention and mechanical correction to performance enhancement.
RockTape is lightweight, comfortable to wear, and can be used for lots of common injuries such as lower back pain, knee pain, shin splints, carpal tunnel syndrome and tennis elbow, just to name a few.
A lot of professional sports teams now employ a chiropractor to prevent injuries. So whether you run, swim, cycle, play golf or tennis the best treatment for your sports injuries is prevention!
To book an an appointment and start the journey to your personal best call Essential Chiropractic.
