Athletes and Chiropractic

Chiropractic is essential for athletes who want to perform at their very best.

In the world of athletic development, proper technique will often overshadow mere brute force and speed. The best way to improve overall speed and power is to improve your technique. This eliminates wasted energy and improves efficiency. Structurally focused chiropractic corrects abnormal spinal position and mobility, making it easier to have better technique. Helping athletes improve mobility and performance is “bread and butter” for a chiropractor. The entire premise of chiropractic is finding and diagnose specific segmental shifts (subluxations), and for structurally focused chiropractors global (multiple segments), abnormalities in the movement and placement of the spine.

Like most precision equipment, the human body often needs regular adjustments to allow for or restore proper motion and maintain its ideal structure.  The longer you go without these adjustments and the more slips, falls, car accidents, whiplash, repetitive motion, poor posture you subject your body to, the more chiropractic care you will need and the more likely you are to experience headaches, neck pain, back pain, low back pain, sciatica and other symptoms.

Many athletes understand this, which is why you will find that essentially every NFL team and most professional sports teams have a team chiropractor or multiple chiropractors. Football specifically has a greater need for chiropractic care just because of the nature of the sport. Each weekend the athletes undergo regular trauma consistent with multiple auto accidents. It’s no wonder why they would benefit from more regular chiropractic adjustments with so much traumatic force induced into their spines on a regular and often severe manner. Numerous high caliber professional athletes swear by chiropractic as a means to help them perform at a higher level.

Baseball
Barry Bonds
Wade Boggs
Jose Canseco

Basketball
Michael Jordan
John Stockton

Bodybuilding & Weightlifting
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Lou Ferrigno (aka the original Incredible Hulk)

Boxing
Evander Holyfield

Cycling
Lance Armstrong

Football
Emmitt Smith
Chris Carter
Irving Fryar
Joe Montana
Bill Romanowski
Jerry Rice

Golf
Tiger Woods

Soccer
US World Cup Team

Track & Field
Joe Greene
Dan O’Brien
Derek Parra

What do these athletes know that so much of the general public is missing?

Athletes understand that they are not invincible. You may not agree with this but you would be wrong. The best athletes will put their bodies under incredible stress in the form of exercise and reputation to perfect a skill and improve performance. These athletes know that they will not automatically get better just because they work HARDER.  If that was true any idiot who exercised to complete failure every day would win. They have to RECOVER faster and not over train. Chiropractic is essential to that process.

Athlete or not your body is going to undergo stress on a daily basis and how you treat your body will affect its ability to adapt to stress and maintain a homeostatic balance called health.  You may think that because you don’t play football every weekend or even because you don’t play at a higher level, you are less in need of regular chiropractic care. Again, you would be wrong. Athletes may have more bumps and bruise to be concerned with but they also are likely doing more to improve their health than you as well.  It’s really two steps forward and two steps back in many cases.

Having more muscle mass and eating healthy will certainly attribute to an overall healthier spine.

However, they are doing these things to be able to compete at a much higher level, much more often than you or I and as such will undergo more potential injuries. You on the other, if you’re like most Americans, will typically experience a different form of stress on your spine and health. A sedentary lifestyle or a weekend warrior routine will still put you at risk for injuries having less muscle mass and less exercise. The nature of being an athlete both helps you and puts you at risk. You know I’m right because you can talk to any 40 year old who played high school or college sports and more often than not they have an “old” injury that still bothers them. This is far less likely to happen if those ex-athletes were seeing and continue to see a structurally focused chiropractor.