If you’ve played sports long enough, you’ve likely gotten injured. When you get injured, pain is actually the last symptom to present and the first to dissipate. During recovery, you may no longer feel pain but that does not mean you are healed.
Unfortunately, we see athletes use a “lack of pain” as an indicator to begin training and again, but pushing performance too soon can lead to development of:
While you may feel like you’re making post-injury progress, these temporary improvements can predispose you to recurring injuries in the future.
The cumulative injury cycle manifests when altered movement creates weak, tense, and tight muscles. Weak muscles tighten, tight muscles weaken and become more inhibited, and the cycle continues, increasing the likelihood for re-injury or a more serious injury.
Without correcting the quality, tone and texture of the musculature, restoring movement to the affected joints, and retraining firing patterns, the injury perpetuates a domino effect of body compensation patterns that can develop into permanent structural changes. Early intervention is key to preventing such changes. Additionally, maintaining balance, range of motion, strength, and firing order allows your performance to improve in the long and short term.
As a sports injury chiropractor, we’re dedicated to helping athletes and weekend warriors by diagnosing, caring for, and preventing sports-related injuries. With a focus on the musculoskeletal system, soft tissue and addressing root causes, we employ a holistic approach to promote proper healing, alleviate pain, and enhance performance for athletes of all levels.
We start by conducting detailed assessments to pinpoint biomechanical issues, misalignments, and muscle tension contributing to the injury. After the assessment, we’ll outline a plan and utilize a combination of manual adjustments, rehabilitative exercises, and tailored treatment plans to address specific sports-related injuries such as sprains, strains, joint issues, and more. We promote using your body’s natural healing ability and speed-up your recovery.
We help our athletes understand the biomechanics of their sport and train accordingly so they can enhance their overall mobility. Proper training techniques not only improve their performance but it fosters resilience and prevent future injuries from occurring.
Embark on your sports injury rehabilitation journey with Active Edge with a personal assessment – the first step towards tailored and effective recovery strategies designed just for you.
Our performance enhancement strategies are a fusion of chiropractic care and functional medicine aimed at unlocking your body’s full potential. It’s a personalized approach to optimize physical and mental capabilities, whether you’re an athlete seeking peak performance or an individual looking to excel in daily activities. Our programs address the underlying factors that impact performance, fostering strength, flexibility, and sustained energy. Through a holistic perspective, we empower you to achieve your health goals and elevate your overall performance.
Peak performance requires optimal function, and that can’t be achieved until you’ve undergone a full physical assessment and set the right performance goals.
We at Active Edge will customize programs designed to meet your unique goals and maximize potential. We will help you create the most efficient stretching and weightlifting programs coupled with the proper diet and supplements that will boost the efficiency of your training.
Whether you’re a professional athlete or a weekend warrior, Active Edge doctors and therapy team have what it takes to get you moving more efficiently so you can work smarter, not harder. Expect to be surprised by how easily you’re able to set a new personal best.
We’ll assess your form, function, and firing patterns to design a program specifically tailored to the areas you need to align, balance, and retrain. Schedule an assessment today to see how you can achieve your peak performance.
As Doctors of Chiropractic, we have some of the most in depth training regarding movement efficiency and retraining. Additionally, many of our physicians and support staff were athletes, had experience with exercise training, performance, injuries, and rehabilitation prior to joining our team.
Our sports focus staff incorporates a hard to find combination of philosophies and techniques to make each patient’s experience as effective as possible. Applying our knowledge and sharing it with our athletes has successfully helped them understand their bodies better, how to train more effectively, how to preventing future injuries, and increase performance so you can be the best athlete you can be for your team.
Patient’s often feel positive improvements in pain reduction, increased range of motion, enhanced energy, and more, as they implement the tools they need for healing naturally and holistically.
An acute injury is new and generally happens quickly, like when you roll your ankle. Generally the sooner you treat an acute injury, the faster and more completely it resolves. Treating an acute injury quickly also prevents compensation patterns from forming.
A chronic injury is an injury that keeps showing back up, is frequently present, or has become your “normal.” Chronic or recurring injuries have roots that are unaddressed and are often side affects of old injuries and their compensation patterns. Most commonly, chronic injuries are due to overuse or repetitive movement through poor, inefficient movement patterns.
Shin splints and plantar fasciitis are common examples of chronic/overuse injuries, but things like repetitive sprain strains or general soreness/stiffness/pain can be chronic as well.
Chronic and recurring sprain strains or similar injuries often manifest at the site of an old acute injury. If the injury is recurring at the same site as an old injury, it indicates that 1. The old injury wasn’t/isn’t healed well enough and 2. That there is a deeper root making that area more vulnerable to reinjury.
Things like shins splints that come on over time are generally rooted in an acute injury that appeared to heal, but really hid its dysfunction in compensation pattern(s) over time. The body will create altered movement (compensation) patterns to work around injury within about 2 weeks. One compensation pattern can lead to another and eventually run out of ways to adapt, leaving you with a chronic use injury.
In order to properly heal either type of chronic injury, identifying the root of recurrence is essential. Roots could be in older injuries and their associated compensation patterns, organ dysfunction, unreleased emotions, or other physical/chemical/emotional stressor(s) that needs to be addressed. Whatever comes up, we’ll walk through it together.
Your body is an amazing machine. Preventing injury in your body is a little like taking care of a super valuable machine.
Traditionally, the recommendation post recovery is R.I.C.E however when pain is not prohibitive, or a break is not suspected, we actually recommend R.A.C.E. for most efficient healing. Both approaches are described below for your reference.
In either case, its important to supplement healing nutrients and natural anti-inflammatories ASAP after an injury. The first 72 hours after an injury are when you have the greatest capacity for nutrient availability to the injured area. It’s important that you have those items available, so we recommend supplementing even for those with amazing diets. We’ve included those specific recommendations below as well.
Boost healing with therapies such as PEMF, red light, infrared heat therapy, ultrasound, EMS, and TENS. Depending on the location and type of injury, the correct use of these therapies can be helpful for healing and decreasing pain.
Athletic performance can be greatly enhanced or diminished based on the fuel you put into your body. Consuming enough vitamins, minerals, proteins and fats while simultaneously avoiding toxic and processed junk can mean the difference between having enough left in the tank to finish strong or puttering out and being left in the dust.
Nutrition is important for training, performance during competition, and for recovery. Having the right balance of nutrients can allow greater muscle growth and strength increases, reduced injury, decreased fatigue, and increased performance.
Pro tip: you have the greatest ability to absorb nutrients with 30 minutes after a workout. Generally the harder the exertion, the greater your body’s desire for nutrients.
For your muscles to grow and your body to heal, it needs recovery time to repair itself. There are two types of recovery, short-term and long-term recovery.
Short-term recovery begins during your cool down activities like walking or stretching, directly after exercising. Getting the right macronutrients during this time is very important to promote healing.
Long-term recovery can be considered a few days or weeks of rest. During this time when you are not training, your body is replenishing glycogen, allowing your muscles to recover and repair.
Your body heals best when you are sleeping so getting good sleep is a positive recovery activity as well.
The most common cause of injury is generally old injury. That can mean an old injury where scar tissue still remains and is keeping the area more brittle and prone to soft tissue reinjury, or it can mean injury to a new area due to compensation patterns formed during the healing of a previous injury. The body is so cool.
At this point, you are feeling better than you ever thought you could as you are feeling energized and thriving. You have learned a lot about your body, you are moving more efficiently, you understand your body’s cues, and you have a good idea of what to do with these cues. This means you get to try new things, achieve new goals, and conquer new challenges! As you do, we will be here as your resource, as needed, to help you nourish, boost, and refresh your health.
Pain is generally the last symptom to show up and the first to go away. This means that by the time you realize there is a problem, there has been a problem for a long time. Especially for chronic or recurring issues, understanding how you got to where you are is so important for getting to where you want to go. In this stage of your journey, you will resolve underlying dysfunction, remove cheats, and retrain habits. As we aid you in activating your body’s natural healing potential, we will help you regain movement, energy, and body function both inside and outside. Throughout this process, you will start to feel greater ease and inspiration as you restore communication and efficiency in your body. Together, we will constantly assess, observe, and reassess your body’s responses to boost your results.
You are your own person, with your own collection of life events which brought you to where you are today. You deserve to be heard, seen, and treated as the individual you are. Your journey begins with your Discovery Evaluation. This first visit includes your exam which works to uncover the root of your issue(s), new patient diagnostics, and, of course, your first treatment. This is how we will help you begin connecting the dots and feeling better. After your first treatment, we will ask you to observe your body’s responses– good, bad, or indifferent. There is no wrong answer as this is just starting point information and direction for moving forward. In your second visit, we will review this feedback and your diagnostics to further identify potential underlying causes and compensations. We will combine everything we have learned about you, consider your goals, and together create a plan to resolve your concerns from the roots up.
