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Enhancing Sports Performance with Chiropractic
The role of motor control
You can think of motor control as you can think of what it means to be human. In a mostly subconscious process, your body interprets sensory information, processes it and then determines what action it will take. If all is working properly, your body will select a set of muscles and joints for activation and the appropriate motion or action will occur. So what are the crucial systems involved in such an essential action?
- Central nervous system
- Musculoskeletal system
These are the same two systems that chiropractic seeks to optimize. So how can our natural modalities improve motor control? And how important is this from a sport performance perspective?
Chiropractic for Spring Skiiing
Spring skiing is right around the corner
With spring conditions looming ever closer, the slopes start to become busier with fair-weather skiers who come from further afield to get in turns on bluebird days. If you have been resting on your laurels during the deep winter, then you hit the spring slopes with maximum enthusiasm, the risk for injury is inherently greater. Many skiers return from the slopes with bumps and bruises from simple falls that they think nothing of; they do nothing about them, allowing the injury to compound, eventually causing long-lasting undesirable effects. At Scorca Chiropractic, we are standing by to help you take a proactive approach to spinal injuries, however small, that occur during skiing.
Computer Versus Spine: Back Pain in the Information Age
The tenuous relationship between your device and your spine
The computer may be a tool of information efficiency but it is certainly not a friend to your spine. While we debate the merits of the information age from a mental health perspective, it is important to not lose sight of what your devices are doing to your spine. Chances are, if you‘ve worked in an office setting, you are familiar with the back pain and neck stiffness that is so ubiquitous in the white collar world. These symptoms, while annoying and uncomfortable in the here and now, are also signs of things to come, namely: spinal degeneration.
Productivity Benefits When We Turn Up the Comfort Factor
Why we tend to work in the most unfavorable of conditions
It’s down to stress: because of stress, we often seek out conditions that harm rather than assist productivity. We forget about the things that make us feel, and work, better; things that matter for productivity including comfort, circulation and hydration; everything is subsumed by the approaching deadline. In order approach this problem from a natural health perspective, we have to be proactive about keeping ourselves comfortable. In this respect, comfortable means: low on the pain and muscle tension, and high on factors such as circulation, hydration and happiness. Our environment sets us up for success.
Three Moves a Day for Back Pain Relief
Take the time for your spine
At Scorca Chiropractic, the health of your spine is our top priority, but is it yours? We know that the best way to encourage spinal longevity and increase your chances of an old age (or any age) free of back pain, is to practice daily maintenance. Whether you have chronic pain or no pain, the time is now to start providing your back with the assistance it needs to stay upright and stable!
Kyphosis: the Problems of Exaggerated Spinal Curvature
Kyphosis: understanding the term
When viewed from the side, your spine‘s normal curvature is described according to the different segments: cervical, thoracic and lumbar. The thoracic segment has a forward curvature of between 20 and 50 degrees while the cervical and lumbar spines are defined as having lordosis, a complementary reverse curvature. Put together, they allow for an amazing range of motion in the upper body, while also stabilizing the moving parts and preventing injury. In scientific terms, we use kyphosis to refer to curvatures that are beyond the normal range- that is beyond 50 degrees- and cause postural deficiencies, back pain and dysfunction.
Staying Ahead of Injury with Chiropractic
Chiropractic’s role in wellness is well known- but what does it mean to you?
At Scorca Chiropractic, we are dedicated to providing you with natural therapies that fit in with a preventive healthcare lifestyle. Spinal adjustments, mobilization, decompression, trigger point, massage and physical therapy all seek to improve your body’s natural ability to overcome injury, or prevent it from occuring in the first place. When looking for pain relief, it is important to envision a future with less pain. The purpose of this blog is to show how the researched benefits of chiropractic actually impact your life.
Medication-Free Pain Control
Before popping pills…
…it is worth considering a more natural approach to healthcare. So many people resign themselves to the idea that pain relief is a choice between medication and ”grinning and bearing it,” until the pain retreats. Depending on the severity of your pain, some level of medication may be unavoidable, but you certainly don‘t have to tough it out alone. There are many natural pain relievers, some of which are just as effective as pain medication. As an office of chiropractic, it is our job to educate people on natural pain relief. The truth is, pain medication lets many people down because it fails to do anything about the underlying cause of the pain.
Deskercise: Welcome to 21st Century Fitness
Remember when work meant toiling away in a field sewing and reaping crops?
Neither do we. As we move further and further away from our ancestral past, it seems that more professions are shifting into the office chair. This transition toward white collar labor is making us more sedentary as a society, partly because we have to spend 8 hours in an office and partly because after our work, we are too tired and mentally exhausted to do anything else besides sit on the couch and watch television. While this is a generalization that hardly applies to everyone, it is a symptom of our society that is causing the early onset of spinal degeneration. If you are going to spend all day in front of your desk, it behooves you to deskercise!
Chiropractic a Central Part of Weight Loss
Back pain causes weight gain; weight gain causes back pain
What are we to do in this situation? Let’s start by focusing on the relationship between the two: how do weight gain and back pain perpetuate each other? Very simply:
- Weight gain creates an additional burden on the spine, straining muscles and causing problems including subluxation, disc herniation and spinal degeneration.
- Back pain creates mental stress, which further tightens muscles in the back, causing more pain and reducing the likelihood for exercise. This directly leads to weight gain.
At Scorca Chiropractic, we see that reducing one factor (weight gain or back pain) is necessarily going to reduce the other. So where do we start?