Preventing Leg Injuries with Chiropractic

When playing sports activities that require 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 athletes have found themselves sidelined. Frank Bendiks, DC, PC has seen all of these problems in our Naperville, IL patients. The good news is, chiropractic adjustments can help prevent some of these injuries from developing and research proves it.

Frank Bendiks, DC, PC keeps up-to-date with all of the recent scientific research, and in a report published in BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders, researchers from Macquarie University in Australia studied 59 semi-elite Australian Rules footballers. Roughly one-half were placed in a control group and the other half were put in a treatment group that received sports chiropractic care at regular intervals. During the first six weeks, this meant getting care once per week. The following three months consisted of an adjustment every two weeks before reducing 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. Furthermore, they noticed 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 intervention should be added to "the current best practice management."

Every major sports organization in the United States and the US Olympic Team has chiropractors on staff for their players, because they know that chiropractic works. If you live near our office in Naperville, IL and would like to see if Frank Bendiks, DC, PC can help you boost your performance or reduce sports injuries, give our office a call today at (630) 301-0054 for an appointment.

Original Study

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).