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Chiropractic Care for Athletic Injury Prevention
Are you a seasoned athlete? A weekend warrior? A gym junkie? No matter your training, sport, or fitness level, chiropractic care can help you rehab existing aches and pains.
At Team Elite, we work with you to reduce the risk of future injury by getting you moving optimally — so that exercise builds you up rather than wearing you down!
Movement Assessment
At Team Elite, we screen every athlete using the Selective Functional Movement Assessment (SFMA) — a comprehensive clinical tool that enables us to objectively evaluate your movement, your restrictions, and your required focus areas. Rather than focusing on individual joints in isolation, we evaluate the entire system of bones, muscles, soft tissue, and fascia.
As a result, we can determine the quality, quantity, and symmetry of movement and build our treatments around these observations. For example, how much you can flex your hip while on a treatment table is not nearly as important as observing how well you can squat, touch your toes, rotate your trunk, and balance on one leg. Such tests indicate your movement proficiency when you play your sport, and they help us address any vulnerabilities you might have.
Rehab and Prehab
For an injured athlete seeking rehabilitation, we first aim to alleviate pain and reduce inflammation around the injured area. Once the healing process begins, we address the underlying issues that led to the injury. For example, we may focus on stabilizing hyper-mobile joints like the knee or lower back or mobilizing stiff, restricted joints like the hips and mid-back.
To accomplish this, we utilize an array of tools in our clinical toolbox. For instance, we stabilize joints by prescribing core exercises and movements designed to activate stabilizer muscles; we mobilize joints by employing joint manipulations, cupping, instrument assisted soft tissue mobilization, active release technique, and trigger point massage, that treat surrounding muscles, soft tissue, and joints.
We select these treatments based on the SFMA, the client's preferences, and clinical judgment. Generally, we prefer to use multiple approaches as each method has a unique mechanism and benefits.
Can we help an uninjured athlete? Absolutely! Often referred to as prehab, or before rehab, a prudent athlete can seek preventative treatment to avoid devastating injuries.
By taking a pain-free athlete through SFMA screening and addressing any underlying asymmetries, hypermobility, and joint restrictions, we can relieve tension on stressed tissues, improve movement, and significantly reduce the odds of sustaining athletic injuries. While we certainly cannot prevent all injuries, chiropractic prehab can help you to train competitively while getting injured less!