Enhancing Athletic Performance: The Benefits of Chiropractic Care

Chiropractic care has emerged as a valuable tool for athletes seeking to optimize their performance and maintain peak physical condition. By focusing on musculoskeletal health, alignment, and mobility, chiropractors offer a range of benefits to athletes. These include improved joint function and flexibility, aiding in pain management and injury prevention, enhancing nervous system function, and providing personalized treatment plans tailored to individual needs. Incorporating chiropractic care into their wellness routine enables athletes to move more freely, reduce the risk of injury, and unlock their full potential on and off the field. #healthy815 #icachiropractor #palmerproud

www.rockforddc.com

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Hello, Dr. Brant Hulsebus here and welcome to another edition of Ask the Chiropractor. Ask the Chiropractor is my little podcast that I do when someone has a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, I try to answer. I'm a chiropractor here in Rockford, Illinois. I'm a proud graduate of Palmer College of Chiropractic and I'm happy to be the team chiropractor of the Rockford Icehogs. Let's dive into it. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Dr. Hulsebus again. Thank you for joining us. So I was recently asked a question about why do athletes seek out chiropractic care so much? A lot of people know I've been the team chiropractor for the Rockford Icehogs for the last 20 years, both double A and triple A. They jump leagues after a couple of years. I've also worked with the CBA basketball team, the Rockford Lightning. For those of you who are old enough to remember the old CBA, I've also got to work with an indoor soccer team, and I've worked with multiple baseball teams. On top of that, I've also worked with Rock Valley College, the local community college here with their athletic department, and I've worked with different high schools, and I have several other athletes that come see me, whether it's a minor league hockey player, or whether it's a Division I, Division II, Division III athletes, whether it's basketball, everything. Bottom line is I've seen lots of athletes, all different levels, all different shapes and sizes, all different issues. But the number one reason why athletes take out chiropractic care isn't so much after the game. A lot of people are like, oh yeah, I bet it's the Ice Hogs chiropractor of the hockey team. I bet you they're long, long nights taking care of the players after the games. In reality, that's not true. We do 90 percent of our work before the game starts. The puck usually drops at 7 o'clock. I usually get there at 5. Because I adjust all the players before they put their pads on. The main reason they come to see me isn't because they're hurt or something's bothering them. It's because they want to skate a little bit faster. They want to move a little bit quicker. They want to have a little better reflexes. They want to just get that athletic edge that maybe the other team doesn't, the other player against them won't have, the team won't. And that's what I provide as the team chiropractor. We go in and we adjust all the players and we get them ready for the competition. I tell my golfers, I can see you once before a big weekend of golfing or I can see you six times afterwards. It's always better to go into athletic events as healthy and strong and tip top shape as you can. I know like before a boxing match or an MMA fight, which I've taken care of them too. But before one of the big events, they'll train and train to get ready to be in the best shape, the best condition they can be in before the events. Now obviously, if your spine isn't moving the way it's supposed to, if you've got limited range of motion, if you've got a hip that's not unlocking the way it's supposed to, and you're not moving the way you're supposed to, then you're not at your top physical peak performance level. We also know as chiropractors when two of the bones can misalign, that creates stress at that joint. And that stress at that joint spreads wherever that nerve goes. That tells that nerve that we're in fight and flight. There's panic and it needs to react. So what that nerve does is wherever that nerve goes, that body part goes into fight and flight. It believes it's under attack. So if the one between my shoulder blades is misaligned. That's the T6 vertebrae, that one goes to my stomach, and so if that one is misaligned it can cause the nerves leaving my T6 going to my stomach to set a fight or flight response which can give me an upset stomach or other problems. Now obviously as an athlete you don't want that. You don't want any neurological damage. problems going on while you're trying to train in condition. Base of your neck, the nerves that come out of there go down your arm to your fingertips into your hands. If you've got bad neck posture and we're training and exercising, we're going to continue to put stress on those nerves and you're not going to be able to build a muscle mass up that you should be able to build up. You're not going to be have the reflexes you should have on those arms. And not only that, but you're not going to have the full range of motion in your arms. I learned a long time ago from a chiropractor to take care of that. Tom Brady, one of the quarterbacks of that, won a couple of Super Bowls. He showed us the difference when you have good posture and your shoulders are back versus when your shoulders are rolled forward and your head's sticking forward. We call forward head posture. How much range of motion you lose. Even how much reach you lose. I go to the high schools and I show the kids all the time. I stick my fist out and I touch the board and I pull my shoulders back and I stick my fist out again and they can't believe how much closer my fist gets because I've got rid of that posture issue that's restricting my range of motion. You're only as strong as your weakest link. So if you've got a couple muscles in your shoulder and your neck not behaving right you're only going to be as powerful and strong as those are. Otherwise, you're going to limb it yourself. Not only that, but the bad posture and the misalignments, your risk of injury during competition go up tremendously. There's a whole study right now on female athletes that are having ACL, spontaneous ruptures, during non contact drills. What did I just say? Young female athletes are running, not even getting hit, or physically, and then that colliding with somebody maybe in soccer they collide, or there's an injury you can see a definite physical contact, hitting each other, this and that, they're just running, and their knees are giving out. And the research is showing that it's actually coming from a misaligned hip. Hip issues. Hip differentials. One hip's strong on the other, one hip's rotating this, one hip's doing that. So here in Rockford, we partnered up with our friends at Movement Fitness, and they're doing some of the evaluations, and together we're co carrying a lot of athletes to help prevent this. So imagine having a soccer player who's out there running competitively, and all of a sudden she's running, and all of a sudden he just gives out. And they're showing this because of the misalignments in the lower back and the hips, contributing to many other factors in the lower extremities and hip flexors. Now the good news is there's also a way to detect it to see if you're a candidate. Is this a possible injury you might have? And so we have a way of finding that out now. So that's what my friends do down the street. They do the testing and you come in here for some of the care and I work with them to help rebuild some of that. you So injury prevention is a huge thing that chiropractors specialize in. We talked a lot about the neck and shoulders. Let's hit the lower back for a moment. We just talked about that knee going out. The bottom nerves in your lower back, they come out, they innervate your legs, they go down your backside, the back of your leg into your knee and everything knee down. That's called the old sciatic nerve. So if you have a misalignment in your lower back, that's going to really hit the sciatic nerve and cause, like I said, weakness, decreased range of motion. But not only that, this is almost always seen with a pelvic rotation. Your hips are turned to twist to compensate for the problem above it. And now your hips are rotated. When your hip rotates, it goes up and goes forward. And when it does that the leg, the femur head has to adapt to that, so when your hips rotate up and forward, your femur turns, and we see what we call foot flare. So you'll see if somebody's standing up, their feet should be straight back and forth, but you'll see one toe will start to go outwards. Now think about that. If my toe is slightly pointing outwards, the other foot's face is straight, and I run on that. Let's just say I walk on it first. I just walk on it. Over time, is one knee getting more torque and force than the other knee? Absolutely. A lot of people have had one knee replaced, but not the other knee, and it wasn't because of trauma, it's because, oh, this knee's got arthritis, the other knee doesn't have arthritis, and what is that really from? That's from that torque on that knee, over and over again, it wears that knee out faster, or that hip out faster. That's where somebody has one hip replaced, but not the other hip. Sack, same story we're talking here. We got this irregular force on one side, not the other. So that's just the average person walking. Now, pretend you put on hockey skates, right? You're gonna go on the ice and you're gonna skate, you're gonna cut, and you're gonna use all your legs to compete. Boy, that amplifies it up really quick, doesn't it? It really makes it wear off faster than the other side, when you put that much more force on. Or let's say you're a basketball player, and you're running up and down and up and down the court. core. Can we see how we would get like lower back pain? A lot of time, right when they call the SI joint gets to be real sore and inflamed. When this hip rotates, that's where it jams up. That's where it locks up as an SI joint. The SI joint isn't always the problem. It's just, that's where the pivot point for all this twisting and turning goes. So imagine playing a game on that and the next day having leg and hip issues or ankle issues. So as a chiropractor, if you went and saw us first. And we laid you down and we saw this misalignment and we gave you a chiropractic adjustment before the game starts. Now you don't have that hip rotation. Now your range of motion is better. And that's what we really strive for with these athletes. Trying to get them under care first. We want to see them perform better first, right? That's awesome, right? If you can run faster, better reaction time, nervous system's better, you're stronger, bigger range of motion. That's great stuff. But we're even more excited about the possibility of injury prevention, right? Let's not have this person miss weeks because of an injury. Let's get them adjusted. Let's get them right where they're supposed to be, in tune, in shape, ready to go. Now, as chiropractors, do we work with other doctors and strength conditioning coaches? Yeah, absolutely. If you're going to a chiropractor that only wants to be the head honcho and not work with anybody else, for Pete's sake, find a new chiropractor. Same with if you have a sports doctor says don't ever work with that chiropractor find yourself a new sports doctor. It's 2024 we got to be talking to each other working together for the athlete not for us We have a really cool system in the locker room with the ice hogs. We have ourselves the chiropractors They have an on site massage therapist. They have a strength conditioning coach. They have two athletic trainers on top of that They have an ER doctor. They have a family physician So then general surgeon and orthopedic doctor and a dentist. And we're all there together working. And I do the chiropractic, the dentist does the dentistry, the orthopedic does the orthopedic. But we sit there and compare notes, and it's so much fun for me to have a guy with some hip flexor issues that's been bothering him. The massage therapist says, man, this is really tight. The strength coach says, I've noticed this issue. The orthopedic doctor told me I found this and this, and I measure their feet and do what we call a deer field check. And we see that misalignment, and I show them what's going on, and we do that adjustment. And then the strength coach takes them in and goes, hey, that range of motion has improved. And then the Massage therapist goes in wow that tension's gone, but you see how we can work together to do the best for you So today's sports world. There's no better place. I always say there's no better health care in my city Then the locker room with that team because that's where all the doctors are working together for the patient. There's no egos There's no politics. We're just all there for the athlete and we all work together So there you have it. Why does an athlete need chiropractic care? Why do they seek us out? It's just to be better and not get hurts It's not like we I'm at the after the game just in places He got crushed against the boards if they were tuned up before yeah, that crush is an issue But they're tuned up before they can do that much better. And by the way You Chiropractors do lots of concussions. Lots of concussions. Come back next week. We'll talk about that. All right, everybody. If you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, there's only one person qualified to answer. Chiropractor. Nobody else. You ask somebody else. They never studied chiropractic. They're just going to tell you something they think. They're not going to tell you something they know. So always talk with a chiropractor. And if you have a question for me, go to my website rockforddc. com. R O C K F O R D D C dot com. Leave me a message there or wherever you're watching or listening to this, leave a comment and i'll see it and next week, maybe you'll be the question of the week. Thanks everybody.