Better Workouts and Exercise with the Help of Chiropractic Care

There are a lot of elements to being able to exercise your body AND to do it well and consistently.

Whether it’s the beginning of your fitness journey or you’re right in the middle of an exercise program, your body is likely to experience progressively harder loads and challenges. When you do an exercise routine, even if your goal is increasing your energy levels or experiencing a mental health boost, you’re going to be strengthening your soft tissues. In addition to this, it’s important to make sure that the structural foundation of your body is able to handle these progressive loads. If not, you’re at an increased risk to suffer from neck and shoulder pain, extremity pain, chronic or acute lower back pain, and more. This is where chiropractic care can play a huge role in helping you get the most out of your workouts!

How structure and nerve function can support your workouts:

Structure:

When we consistently provide someone with a chiropractic adjustment, we’re working hard to correct any structural imbalances in their body. Today we’ll use an imbalance through the hips as an example to explain why it’s so important to focus on correcting structural misalignments and not just focusing on reducing pain:

You see, the pelvis is the foundation of our body. It takes on the weight of our body and the brunt of our activities and movements. Through regular exercise, if one hip is significantly higher than the other, your foundation is compromised. This means that your pelvis has to relay some of the load to other regions: usually the knees, ankles, or shoulders. If this were the case while you’re trying to squat with heavy weights or run for long distances, over time your body’s compensation can lead to excessive stress on the joints, quicker degeneration, pain, muscle numbness or weakness, and even future injuries. Think of your body like a game of Jenga: if your structure is out of alignment, it’s also a lot less stable and much more vulnerable to crumbling down!

By correcting imbalances in your structure, we better distribute the physical load of exercising so that you’re able to workout better, harder, and longer with a decreased chance of pain and injury. It’s not that you won’t be able to exercise or work out without chiropractic care, it’s all about making sure that you’re safely able to exercise, while maximizing exercise results.

Nerve function:

As nerves exit through your spinal cord, they travel to all the muscles and work as the messaging system that signals these muscles to contract and relax. They are what allow voluntary movement and contractile strength. Because of this, pressure or damage to the nervous system can cause pain, muscle spasms or muscle weakness, which is why nerve interference can limit and hinder you while exercising. The goal of chiropractic treatment is then to remove nerve interference and regain proper nerve communication to soft tissues so that you can improve your strength, range of motion and reflexes while also experiencing pain reduction. This is huge not only for working out, but for any day-to-day activities you partake in as well.

When it comes to your fitness journey, whether it’s hitting the gym, doing outdoor activities, or simple warm up exercises, if you feel like your body is holding you back, reach out to your local chiropractor!