How can chiropractic care improve my performance in athletics, leisure, and life?
Have you heard that chiropractic care is a wonderful therapeutic for poor posture, pain, and injury? Chiropractic care is well-known to help treat inflammation, pain, degeneration, misalignment, and a wide variety of neuromusculoskeletal-related conditions and disorders. But there is more to chiropractic care than is widely known. In addition to being a powerful transformative tool for those who are suffering from imbalances and disorders in the body, chiropractic care can also be a fantastic support for living an already active and thriving lifestyle. If you’re wondering “how can chiropractic care improve my performance in athletics, leisure, and life?” read on to discover exactly what chiropractic care can do for you—even if you already consider yourself to be healthy!
I’m already healthy. Do I need chiropractic care?
One of the biggest misconceptions about chiropractic care is that you don’t need it, or won’t benefit from it, if you’re already healthy. It’s hard to say where this misconception comes from, although many people feel the same way about medical care, massage therapy, laser therapy, and other forms of wellness care. The concept “I don’t need care, I’m already healthy” is a rampant one. As we know, however, that’s not always the case.
Sometimes, you think you’re healthy—but you’ve unknowingly adjusted to a lower baseline of health.
It’s common for people to think that they’re “healthy.” In fact, many people think they are healthy until they get a serious diagnosis of a disease or disorder. Suddenly, odd symptoms they were just ignoring make sense. The truth is that most people are ignoring symptoms all the time. Some of the most common symptoms being ignored are listed below. How many of these symptoms do we pass off as due to “part of aging,” stress, or “not enough sleep” every day?
Back Pain
One of the most commonly ignored symptoms, back pain can really put some discomfort into everyday life. Back pain can arise as a dull pain, aching pain, sharp pain, throbbing pain, cold or hot sensation pain, or shooting, erratic, electricity-like pain. If you have back pain, you may attribute it to an old injury, sleeping poorly, age, bad genes, or a host of other causes.
Neck Pain
Neck pain is another kind of pain that is commonly ignored, as it can be difficult to pin down and treat. Neck pain can be attributed to poor posture, having “a bad neck,” constantly sitting and hunching forward, excessive reading or texting, age and degeneration, and more.
Facial Pain
Do you ever have pain in your face? This may feel like soreness to the touch, throbbing pain in the cheeks or near the eyes or forehead, or sharp, shooting pains near the jaw. The most common cause that people attribute their facial pain to is sinus pain, and while this can be the case, it’s not the only cause of facial pain.
Headaches, Eye Aches, and Migraines
Headaches, eye aches, and migraines are often blamed on stress, tiredness, eye strain, computer exposure, excessive reading or phone use, and poor eyesight. While scientists don’t know exactly what causes migraines, they are in fact associated with stress—but there currently isn’t a known traditional “cure” for migraines. If you take painkillers for headaches, eye aches, and migraines, you may be used to considering these conditions part of your life.
Acid Reflux and Indigestion
Acid reflux and indigestion aren’t always the result of a poor diet. If you experience acid reflux or indigestion, you may be used to reaching for an antacid in order to help quell the pain and discomfort. Unfortunately, the prolonged use of antacids over time can be detrimental to your digestive health. There can be other causes of acid reflux and indigestion that are unrelated to digestion itself but to the nervous system and the enteric nervous system.
Stiffness and Immobility
It’s easy to blame stiffness and immobility on age, and it makes sense. What most people don’t realize, however, is that stiffness and immobility can be alleviated and prevented with proper care. Stiffness and immobility often set in when the body is not moved regularly in ways that challenge, gently warm, stretch, and stimulate the neuromusculoskeletal system. The neuromusculoskeletal system comprises the bones, joints, tendons, muscles, and nerves of the body.
Sciatica
Sciatica is a nerve pain that shoots from the lower back across the buttocks and rear side of the legs. Sometimes it affects two legs, someones it affects just one. Sciatica is often caused by an impact injury to the body, which causes the spinal joints to misalign. When the spinal joints are misaligned in the low back, they can cause local nerves to inflame. This can create the shooting pain that is so commonly associated with sciatica, as sciatic pain is one of the major nerves in the low back likely to become inflamed and irritated from spinal misalignment.
Fatigue
Where does fatigue come from? Is it as simple as saying we lose our capacity for energy as we get older? Not necessarily. Most people don’t understand why they have fatigue or attribute it to autoimmune diseases, other conditions and disorders, or lifestyle habits.
Poor Posture
Poor posture is not just a product of old age. If that were true, we wouldn’t see kids with hunched, rounded shoulders and forward-head posture (“text neck”) as often as we do. Instead, poor posture is typically the result of misalignment in the spine. This happens when the joints and bones in the spine shift out of proper alignment, either due to injury, lifestyle, or congenital factors (sometimes a combination of all of these factors).
Can chiropractic care help with my back pain (or other conditions)?
Yes! Chiropractic care may be able to help with your unique conditions, even conditions that you thought were “a normal part of aging,” or “because of an injury that never healed right.”
Chiropractic care addresses the neuromusculoskeletal system. The neuromusculoskeletal system is responsible for the health and interaction between the nervous system, the muscular system, and the skeletal system. When these systems are imbalanced, which they often are due to lifestyle, injury, or congenital factors, they can cause all kinds of exacerbated symptoms or conditions. Among these are back pain, neck pain, digestive issues, headaches, and a wide variety of other symptoms.
Why does the neuromusculoskeletal system affect so much?
The neuromusculoskeletal system affects so many parts of the body because it is made up of three major body systems. These body systems control and affect so many other systems, like a domino effect. If the skeletal system is not balanced, for example, then it is going to immediately affect nearly every other body system, given that the skeletal system has responsibilities that other body systems rely on in order to function normally.
Example:
A patient arrives at the clinic complaining of severe, frequent headaches. The headaches seem to occur whether the patient receives 8+ hours of sleep each night and irrespective of exposure to technology and blue light. After a series of adjustments based on the patient’s x-rays (corrective chiropractic), the patient describes not experiencing headaches anymore. The treating chiropractor concludes that misalignment in the joints of the patient’s cervical spine (the neck) was interfering with the flow of nerve energy and circulation, contributing to frequent headaches.
How Chiropractic Can Improve Athletic Performance, Sports, and Exercise
Whether you’re suffering from a condition or uncomfortable symptom, or you simply want to improve the quality of your life, chiropractic may be able to help you.
Chiropractic care can improve your athletic performance, sports performance, and exercise experience in several ways. Chiropractic care can enhance the way your body moves, the limberness of your joints, ligaments, and tendons, and the elasticity and flexibility of your muscles. Chiropractic is especially supportive of the nervous system, which can improve your response time, your speed, and your endurance in your respective sport.
Chiropractic is beloved by many professional athletes ranging from Lance Armstrong to Michael Jordan. Hikers, bikers, basketball players, football players, yoga asana practitioners, runners, boxers, wrestlers, bodybuilders, and many other sports practitioners uphold chiropractic as a fantastic way of improving their abilities and supporting their performance.
How Chiropractic Can Improve Leisure Time
Much of our leisure time is spent in a stationary position. This means we might spend leisure and recreational time laying down, sitting, or generally relaxing. While most people don’t think that this is work or requires effort from the body, it does. Sitting upright requires proper alignment of the spine. Laying down also requires that the skeletal structure and muscles of the body are functioning optimally, or else pain (for example, sciatic pain) and discomfort will result.
As people age, they often think that they’re experiencing decreased physical ability because of simple age-related degeneration. This can make even enjoyable, leisure activities difficult, bothersome, or less comfortable than they used to be.
Chiropractic care can help to restore the enjoyment of leisure time by making the body a more comfortable place to be. By experiencing chiropractic care, ideally at regular intervals, you can enhance every aspect of your life!
Book Your Appointment
Are you ready to see what chiropractic care can do for you, first-hand? Then it’s time to book your first appointment. At Advanced Spine & Posture in Henderson, Nevada, we provide only the highest quality, individualized chiropractic care. We offer Chiropractic BioPhysics®, a form of chiropractic care that focuses on geometry and physics, to help produce long-term changes in the shape of the spine. Call us today to start your journey to wellness with the help of chiropractic care.
