Chiropractic Helps Prevent Lower Limb Injuries for Athletes

When playing sports that demand a lot of lower body motion, like football, soccer, and basketball, it's not at all uncommon to suffer some type of injury to your lower extremities. Between pulled hamstrings, sprained ankles, knee injuries, and more, many players have found themselves sidelined. Dr. Gugerli has seen all of these problems in our Cary patients. The good news is, chiropractic adjustments can help prevent some of these injuries from developing and research proves it.

Dr. Gugerli keeps up-to-date with all of the latest 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 others were put in a treatment group that received sports chiropractic care at regular intervals. During the first six weeks, this meant receiving care once per week. The following three months consisted of an adjustment every two weeks before decreasing 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 leg strains the players received in the treatment group when compared to the control. In addition, 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 conclude that sports chiropractic treatment should be added to "the current best practice management."

Every major sports team in the US and the US Olympic Team has chiropractors on staff for their players, because they know that chiropractic really works. If you live near our office in Cary and would like to see if Dr. Gugerli can help you boost your performance or reduce sports injuries, give our office a call today at (919) 589-0909 for an appointment.

Reference

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).