Injuries present a unique challenge for everyone from kids to athletes to working professionals and stay-at-home moms. They cause pain and discomfort, interrupting the daily function of life. They also have a tendency to impact your life over time, being they don’t tend to heal overnight. However, with the right care, you can minimize both your physical discomfort and the time needed to recover your function and strength. Consider these seven ways a sports chiropractor can help with an injury.

1. Relieve Pain

Pain is one of the most common symptoms people associate with an injury. Keep in mind that pain has a function in the healing process, helping to prevent re-injury to the area. However, that pain can also inhibit healing because of how it affects the body.

When you’re in pain, you change how you move, which then affects your spinal alignment and how your joints function. That’s why addressing pain appropriately is so important. A sports chiropractor works to ensure that you’re not experiencing additional pain caused by the natural guarding that happens because of the original injury.

Further, they’ll work to alleviate as much discomfort as possible while you’re healing. Approaches to managing your pain may include:

  • Spinal and extremity realignment and adjustment
  • Hot or cold therapy
  • Massage therapy
  • Infrared sauna therapy

2. Restore Range of Motion

One of the challenges of any is how tight your joints become during the healing process. This tightness often happens from a lack of use combined with inflammation. Restricted blood flow due to spinal misalignments also contributes to tight muscles, further aggravating tight muscles.

By working to ensure the body has proper alignment, your sports chiropractor encourages proper blood flow throughout the body. This helps improve range of motion by helping transport the oxygen your tissues need to facilitate healing.

3. Accelerates the Healing Process

The human body is an amazing organism, with the capability of healing when given the right support. Sports chiropractic care isn’t normally offered as a single modality for healing an injury. However, in conjunction with other treatments, sports chiropractic care can help accelerate your body’s natural healing process.

Chiropractic care accomplishes a few things in the body. It correctly aligns the spine, reestablishing joint mobility and reducing or removing nerve interference. It also improves blood circulation, reduces inflammation, and releases muscle tension.

4. Help Control Stress

Stress is one of the worst things your body can experience while trying to heal. The stress response slows some normal functions so that you’re prepared to deal with a perceived threat. Injury and pain increase stress, releasing more cortisol into your body. Additionally, injury can bring psychological stress, with concern over healing and the impact on your daily function and life.

By helping relieve your pain, a sports chiropractor can help reduce your stress. Further, some massage therapy techniques help control stress. This is why massage goes hand-in-hand with sports chiropractic care.

5. Improve Sleep Quality

There’s a reason why doctors recommend resting and sleeping when you’re recovering from an injury. In order to heal, your body needs additional human growth hormone, or HGH, and testosterone to heal. These hormones are responsible for building new proteins, which replace damaged muscle, bone, tendons, and ligaments. The body only produces these hormones during sleep, specifically during deep and REM sleep.

The paradox is the discomfort from your injury can inhibit quality sleep patterns. Depending on your injury, inflammation and pain associated with it may make sleeping uncomfortable. Further, your injury may prevent you from moving naturally while you’re sleeping, preventing you from reaching the deepest stages of sleep.

Seeing a sports chiropractor can help alleviate many of the problems that’ll inhibit deep sleep. By focusing on treatments that help improve spinal alignment and reduce inflammation, your chiropractic treatment will help give your body some much-needed rest.

6. Muscle Function and Strength Improvement

Most people associate chiropractors with musculoskeletal alignments and adjustments. While this is true, it’s a gross underestimation of how human physiology works, and the broader picture of how chiropractic treatment works.

Your muscles and ligaments hold together your entire musculoskeletal structure. When one of these sustains an injury, it adds unusual pressure to your system, pulling it out of alignment.

A sports chiropractor works to correct muscle imbalances in addition to correcting misalignments. We can tailor specific physical therapy, including exercises and stretches, to help restore function. They also help strengthen the muscles, improving the chiropractic adjustments’ effectiveness.

7. Make The Body More Resilient Against Repeat Injury

When you get injured, one of the biggest concerns as you heal is preventing a repeat injury. After all, if you continue reinjuring the same area, it’ll never actually heal, and the damage compounds through scar tissue.

Injury to the body can cause asymmetry in the spine, causing some muscles to overcompensate to equalize the pressure distribution across the body. This overcompensation leads to muscle spasms, pinched nerves, and cramps that can further strain the body.

A sports chiropractor helps alleviate these issues, working to equalize pressure throughout the body through spinal manipulation. Soft tissue massage can reduce pain and tension, allowing the body to return to homeostasis. As the injury gradually heals, continued sports chiropractic treatment ensures there’s enough strength and stability for the body to return to its natural function.

Recovering from an injury shouldn’t feel like torture or seem like it’s taking forever. A skilled sports chiropractor will help relieve the discomfort and accelerate the healing process, helping you get back to enjoying life.

Call (720) 328-1790 to schedule your appointment with one of the sports chiropractors at Apex Chiropractic, and get your injury on a better path to healing.