Chiropractic Helps Prevent Lower Limb Injuries for Athletes

When performing 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 J. Valente, DC, PC has seen all of these problems in our New York patients. Fortunately, chiropractic can help prevent some of these injuries from occurring and research proves it.

Frank J. Valente, DC, PC keeps up-to-date with all of the recent 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 other half were put in a therapy group that received sports chiropractic care at regular intervals. During the first six weeks, this meant engaging in care once every 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.

Researchers noted that there was a "significant" decrease in the number of lower limb 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 works. If you live near our office in New York and would like to see if Frank J. Valente, DC, PC can help you boost your performance or reduce sports injuries, give our office a call today at (917) 338-7917 for an appointment.

Study Information

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).