Your body is an incredibly complex machine that, when working properly, allows you to enjoy a wonderfully active lifestyle. Sports are a great way to spend time with friends, keep fit, and optimize your health for a long and happy life. But when an injury takes you out of the game, you’re left wondering whether there was anything you could have done to avoid the forced time-out.
Here at Carley Family Care, we encourage our Kings Mountain, North Carolina, patients of all ages to get active in order to reap the benefits of a healthy, athletic lifestyle. But we also want to make sure that you participate in your sport(s) of choice wisely.
As specialists in osteopathic medicine, we can help you stay in the game with a few preventive measures that safeguard the health of your musculoskeletal structure. Here’s a look at how osteopathy can help prevent sports injuries.
Osteopathy 101
As osteopathic specialists, we believe in a holistic approach to your health that recognizes your body is a highly complex, and interconnected, biomechanical structure that thrives on balance. Every one of your body parts plays an integral role in your overall function and even the most minor disruption or injury can have a cascading effect throughout your body.
We believe the best way to correct and optimize your musculoskeletal system is to work with your body rather than bypass it using medical interventions that provide quick fixes, but don’t necessarily deliver long-term results. This means, whenever possible, we look for solutions that don’t rely on medications or surgeries.
Instead, osteopathy is a noninvasive approach that’s designed to improve the function of your joints, muscles, and spine through manual therapies. These techniques work with your nervous, lymphatic, and circulatory systems to improve the flow of natural resources to help your body strengthen and heal from the inside out.
Bringing osteopathy to sports
The practices of osteopathy and sports medicine go hand in hand as both aim to keep your body moving freely, without pain, allowing you to maintain an active lifestyle. That said, sports injuries can’t always be prevented, and injuries like sprained ankles, ACL tears, and groin pulls are not at all uncommon. These conditions are often the result of acute injuries, which osteopathy and sports medicine can address on a case-by-case basis.
The more common injuries are those caused by overuse and they’re the result of ongoing stresses that your body is no longer able to handle. Classic examples of overuse problems are rotator cuff tears, tennis elbow, or Achilles tendinitis. These examples are often brought about by an imbalance in your biomechanics that places too much stress on any one area, until it gives way under the pressure.
With osteopathy, we can prevent many of these injuries by ensuring that your musculoskeletal structure is aligned, starting with your spine. Your spine is the foundational structure for your entire body and its alignment is paramount to the function of everything else.
For example, a misalignment in your spine can throw your hips off, which creates problems in your knees, and so on. As another example, if you’ve got a problem in your neck, you may begin to have issues that affect your shoulders, elbows, wrists, and hands.
Through osteopathic manipulative medicine, we can make sure your joints have the resources and balance they need to provide you with injury-free performance.
Speaking of performance
Not only does osteopathy help you prevent sports injuries, it can also greatly improve your performance. When you come in, we sit down with you to review your athletic goals and then we align them with your particular musculoskeletal structure.
Through strengthening, stretching, and conditioning, we tailor a program to your unique needs that will have you shining on the field, on the track, or wherever you choose to play.
If you’d like to learn more about preventing sports injuries through osteopathy, please give us a call or use the online scheduling tool on this website to set up an appointment.