Chiropractic Helps Prevent Lower Limb Injuries for Athletes

When playing sports that demand a lot of lower body movement, like football, soccer, and basketball, it's common to suffer some type of injury to your lower extremities. Between pulled hamstrings, sprained ankles, knee injuries, and more, many athletes have found themselves out of commission. Alliance Chiropractic has seen all of these problems in our Tulsa patients. The good news is, chiropractic care can help prevent some of these injuries from developing and research proves it.

Alliance Chiropractic keeps up-to-date with all of the recent scientific research, and in a paper published in BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders, researchers from Macquarie University in Australia studied 59 semi-elite Australian Rules football players. Roughly one-half were placed in a control group and the other half were put in a treatment group that received sports chiropractic care at regular intervals. During the first six weeks, this meant engaging in care once every week. The following three months consisted of an adjustment every two weeks before reducing those to one visit monthly for the final three months of the study.

The authors noted that there was a "significant" difference in the number of lower limb strains the players received in the treatment group when compared to the control. Furthermore, they observed that the subjects who received chiropractic also had fewer weeks of missed practice and games as a result of non-contact knee injuries. This led them to determine that sports chiropractic treatment should be added to "the current best practice management."

Every major sports organization in the US and the US Olympic Team has chiropractors on staff for their players, because they know that chiropractic works. If you live near our office in Tulsa and would like to see if Alliance Chiropractic can help you boost your performance or reduce sports injuries, give our office a call today at (918) 832-7880 for an appointment.

Study Information

Hoskins W, Pollard H. The effect of a sports chiropractic manual therapy intervention on the prevention of back pain, hamstring and lower limb injuries in semi-elite Australian rules footballers: a randomized controlled trial. BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders 2010;11(64).