NFL Football and Sports Chiropractic

By Robert M. Cohl, DC

The Green Bay Packers won the 2011 NFL Championship, beating the Pittsburgh Steelers. They persevered through numerous challenges during the game to achieve their goal. Over the course of the season, the Packers endured many injuries to their players, and their quarterback, Aaron Rogers, was no exception. He suffered multiple concussions, in both October and again in December. He was hit many times during Superbowl XLV, the culminating game of the season.

In spite of his numerous injuries, Aaron Rogers came back with little evidence of being injured. It turns out that he has had sports chiropractic care alongside traditional medical treatment on and off the field. His father is a chiropractor, and his history with our profession goes back to his teenage years. In fact, it is now the norm for every NFL team to have a sports chiropractor working with its pro teams.

Chiropractors can take a post-graduate course over one to three years to become a Board Certified Chiropractic Sports Physician. They can apply their unique education and specialized skills to sports performance and injury rehabilitation. Chiropractors are now seen as an integral part of the sports medicine team by many elite athletes and coaches.

Sports chiropractors have broad diagnostic capabilities for assessing injuries in both spinal and extremity sports problems, and they work closely with the head athletic trainer and strength and conditioning coaches. Manual adjusting is their primary therapeutic technique, using other physical therapy modalities and rehabilitation protocols appropriately as each case dictates. There are three areas of importance that the chiropractor will address

1. Managing injury using the fastest possible recovery and rehabilitation protocol.

2. Prevention of injury making biomechanical and neuromuscular assessments to help prevent subclinical problems from arising. Most problems occur from repetitive stressors and/or the accumulation of minor soft tissue trauma and overload which reaches a breaking point. Typical examples include tendinitis, bursitis, neuritis, and myofascitis.

3. Improved performance keeping the athlete in balance structurally helps him/her perform optimally and with less susceptibility to injury. This is where sports chiropractors truly excel.

So, did Aaron Rogers and his fellow teammates have a competitive edge in Superbowl XLV? Anyone watching the game might have noticed how fast they were, both defensively and offensively. It appears that sports chiropractic care is sought out by the players who want optimum performance. Hopefully they are the ones that walk away with the winning score.