Pain and injury are the number one risk to an athlete. Most coaches, trainers, and doctors work tirelessly with athletes to prevent injuries if they happen and speed up recovery should an athlete be injured. Chiropractors fill a specific space in the athlete’s care team that just might be the secret to their success.
Who is an athlete?
When you hear the term "athlete," you may think of someone who plays sports. While we agree with this thought, we would like to discuss it in greater detail. For this, we break down athletes into three main categories.
Professional Athlete
This type of athlete gets paid for their participation in a sport or is training to qualify for a large event in which they will get paid. In most cases, professional athletes can do just that: make a profession of being an athlete. This does not include the weekend runner who wins $1,000 for winning a 5K. These athletes usually have access to coaches and trainers that help manage their training and performance.
Non-Professional Athlete
This category of athletes is generally the larger of the sporting athlete group: student-athletes, weekend warriors, CrossFit athletes, and those who participate in yoga, pilates, boxing, martial arts, and many more sports. These athletes generally lack access to a high-level coach or training program to ensure their safety.
Non-Sporting Athlete
This one’s for all the moms and dads chasing toddlers around and those desk jockeys who spend their day in an office chair. Just because you are not competing against someone else to win a game doesn’t mean you are not doing athletic activities all day. There is little difference in the movement to swinging an axe to cut down a tree and swinging a baseball bat to hit a ball. The 7 foundational movements of the human body occur in most activities. The body doesn’t care if you are keeping score or not.
What do chiropractors do?
Chiropractors are trained to treat injuries that occur to joints as well as the tissues that stabilize those joints and help them move. These tissues primarily include nerves, ligaments, tendons, muscles, and fascia. A properly trained doctor of chiropractic has experience working with a sports team and has additional training above and beyond the basic doctoral program to work with athletes. If you are searching for a chiropractor near me, you will likely see a number of chiropractic doctors, but only a handful are trained to work with athletes and injuries.
Chiropractor assesses neck movement.
If you are an athlete, having a chiropractor on your care team is a vital piece of your training and performance. Chiropractors can quickly assess your injuries and determine the correct course of treatment. Doctors of chiropractic use their hands and several orthopedic and functional tests to determine what is causing your symptoms. If needed, chiropractors can order advanced imaging like an X-ray or MRI to further diagnose your condition.
Our Saratoga Springs chiropractor, Dr. Adam Favro, has spent many hours doing post-doctoral training and continues to study and learn about the most effective ways to diagnose and treat sports injuries quickly. Having a chiropractor who can make a quick and accurate diagnosis of your sports injury can make treatment more effective and focused on your condition, which means you can return to training and competition faster.
How our chiropractors treat athletes
Regardless of which type of athlete you are, your treatment goal will always be to get you healthy as fast as possible and keep you healthy. To do this, our chiropractic office has created a four-phase treatment protocol.
Phase 1: Reduce Pain
While pain is a terrible indicator of health (scroll down for more), we can not make much progress if you are in so much pain that you can’t move your body. To reduce pain, we use various techniques, including muscle stimulation, cupping, kinesiology taping, A.R.T., and, in some cases, a referral to pain management or your primary care provider to consult about pain medication.
Phase 2: Mobilize
Now that we have reduced your pain to a point where you can withstand treatment, we begin to assess any areas that are no moving well. Once a diagnostic algorithm is in place, you will be given exercises to help improve mobility and control of the joint(s) that appear to be problematic.
Phase 3: Stabilize
After you have regained your full motion of the joint(s) and area that is causing your symptoms it is time to stabilize the area and get it ready to withstand future stress. To do this your chiropractor may give you exercises to help improve strength, endurance, and/or balance/coordination of an area. Our chiropractors used a stepped approach giving you one to two exercises at a time until you have mastered that. Each exercises will build on the one before it. Think of this as learning to walk before you run.
Phase 4: Maintain
You made it! You have recovered, and your chiropractor feels you are prepared to return to your activity. The question is, what do you do to prevent this from happening again? First, you will be armed with exercises and the knowledge of how and when to perform them. Second, maintenance visits will be suggested as a way to prevent joint inflammation from limiting joint range of motion and stressing the tissues around the joint. You and your chiropractor will create a treatment plan based on your activity level and lifestyle.
If you have recovered from an injury, it doesn’t mean you will never get injured again. This concept is challenging for many athletes seen in our Saratoga Springs chiropractic office. Recovery is a small piece of the equation; prevention and maintenance are just as crucial in your athletic journey. In our chiropractic office, we offer chiropractic treatments that are focused on maintaining your healthy status and keeping you active. We work with each athlete to make sure they have a program in place that works with their training, practice, and game schedule but helps them stay healthy at the same time. This ends up being an essential part of the athlete’s schedule.
In the unfortunate event that you are injured while under a maintenance chiropractic treatment program, you already have a relationship with your chiropractor and treatment can easily shift to be more of an acute focus program. This program helps to deal with the direct issue of what is going on and the symptoms that are caused by the injury.
Where most athletes fail
The human body is a fantastic machine. It has an incredible ability to adapt to stressors, enabling us to not only survive but thrive. In the case of an injury, our first signal is usually pain. Pain can be a mild annoyance or cause us to stop what we are doing immediately. The trouble with pain is that it is a very poor indicator of health. There may be times it is okay to push through pain and other times where pain is a giant flashing red light that is telling you to stop.
“Pain is just your brain’s opinion of what is going on in the body. ”
The “Period of Vulnerability”
This graph shows the relationship between pain and health during the chiropractic treatment.
The pain signal often causes confusion when an athlete is being treated. In most cases, pain can be decreased fairly quickly while the recovery and healing of the tissues that were injured may take much longer. This causes a problem when chiropractic patients start to feel better and return to activity too quickly. This time between reduced pain and optimal tissue health is what we call the period of vulnerability.
Functional Testing
One way to avoid any mistakes between pain and tissue health is by having a qualified and adequately trained sports chiropractor. Your chiropractic doctor will use functional, orthopedic, and other objective testing to determine if the tissues are healed enough for you to return to activity. In addition, your sports chiropractor will create a “Return to Activity” plan with you. This plan will have milestones and more testing to gauge your progress.
Chiropractic Treatments
The majority of the treatments we perform are hands-on. This allows the doctor to evaluate range of motion, tissue tone and texture, and hesitation from the athlete during movement that would indicate pain and joint instability.
Active Release Techniques
Widely considered the gold standard of soft tissue injuries, ART combines principles from myofascial release and massage therapy with movement. This patented technique can only be performed by certified providers who have passed the practical exam.
IASTM – Instrument-Assisted Soft Tissue Mobilization (GRASTON)
This is commonly known by the name Graston or “scraping”. While anyone can technically perform his technique, it is highly recommended that you seek a trained professional. The chiropractor uses a stainless steel instrument and a special lotion and gently scrapes along the skin to remove adhesions between the layers of fascia. This in turn will help your muscles and skin glide more easily over one another and improve athletic performance.
Cupping
Cupping has been around more centuries and involves the use of suction to help break up adhesions between tissues. This is similar to ART and IASTM except cupping is decompression therapy whereas ART and IASTM are compression therapies. There are many uses an indications to use cupping over ART and IASTM and your chiropractor can decided what therapy is best for you.
Athletes get injured, and depending on the sport, some typical injury patterns can be used to quickly diagnose your condition and create a chiropractic treatment that works for you. If you are an athlete (occupational or sporting), we welcome you to make an appointment at our Saratoga Springs chiropractic office. We offer free consultations and convenient online scheduling. We also participate with most insurance plans and are happy to look up your benefits for you.
