From Court to Chiropractor: Sports Chiropractor for Basketball Players

Many of the top athletes in the world from all types of sports rely on sports chiropractic care to optimize performance and to heal and prevent injuries.

This includes basketball players.

As the season approaches, many ballers are looking to improve joint stability and flexibility in a demanding sport that requires a specific combination of strength, agility, and precision.

The dramatic stop/start/pivot motions required in competitive basketball mean that players need to be flexible and enjoy full range of motion across the whole body. This can only be achieved through the right blend of balance, strength and flexibility. Lacking any of these components can lead to inefficient play and result in injury.

The most common basketball-related injuries include knee and ankle sprains, calf strains, and Achilles tears, due to the large amounts of running, jumping, twisting, and turning required in the sport. There are a number of ways sports chiropractic aims to prevent these and other types of sports injuries.

Ensure Proper Conditioning of the Athlete

Even with a rigorous training program, players are often unaware of muscle imbalances, spinal misalignments, and range-of-motion issues affecting their play. A sports chiropractic evaluation can provide a detailed assessment of all of these things along with how they affect an individual player’s biomechanics.

Once evaluated, targeted stretch and strengthening exercises can address deficiencies to improve range of motion and overall movement quality.

Evaluate Technique

A thorough biomechanics assessment can look at sports-specific motion to identify whether or not an athlete is moving in inefficient ways that affect performance and can lead to pain or injury. For example, is the player twisting and turning the torso rather than pivoting the whole body?

Ensuring basketball players can achieve pain-free, quality movement through all fundamental footwork, ball handling, shooting, passing and defensive drills, not only helps prevent injury, it assists with muscle memory during play, making quick and limber on-court motions come more naturally.

Heal From Injury

Sports chiropractic care has a variety of techniques to help players heal from injury faster. Treatment modalities such as myofascial release, alignment correction, dry needling, and pulsed electromagnetic frequency therapy, among others, can reduce inflammation, promote better blood flow, encourage tissue regeneration, and activate the body’s own natural healing responses. In addition, specially trained therapists can assist with strengthening and mobilizing injured joints, ligaments, and tendons while they heal, so your return to the court is not further delayed.

The treatments and techniques available through sports chiropractic care can benefit basketball players of all levels, including high school and club players, recreational sports enthusiasts, league players, and weekend warriors.

Sports chiropractic is also effective in helping multi-sport athletes recover and shift from one season or sport to another.

If you’re interested in how sports chiropractic care can help you improve your performance on the court, contact DTX Sports Medicine today.