This is a really interesting article that will change the way you think about injuries and injury prevention… whether it’s in sports, on the job, at home, or anywhere else.
We often don’t think about the complex system that allows our bodies to move and function properly.
The system that does this for us is, of course, our nervous system.
It does not stand alone though. It relies on information from our bodies to make the right decisions.
“How does the brain prevent an injury while playing/practicing sports?”
Good question!
It’s much more complex than you may imagine.
What happens is that our brain is constantly getting and processing information from our bodies.
This allows us to adjust to our position as we move… changing muscle tone, coordination, and anticipating what is going to happen.
This allows us to continuously change our muscle tone appropriately and prevent injuries from occurring while playing or practicing.🤾🏻♂️
A recent study looked at the connections in the brain between athletes who later sustained ACL injuries and those who did not. 📚
The researchers found that those athletes who did end up with injuries had fewer connections between the sensory and motor areas in the brain and in the cerebellum than those who did not get injured.
This basically means that there was a lack of connections between what the brain received from the body’s input to the brain’s muscle output.
This was also seen in the cerebellum that is involved in a huge amount of things including posture, coordination, an more.
We know that the brain is dependent on sensory information from the environment to drive it’s activity
It’s absolutely critical for everyone from babies through elderly.
We also know that the strongest stimulus to the brain is through muscle receptors. This allows us to take advantage of the most constant source of environmental energy, gravity.
This is a fascinating area that is rapidly increasing a large body of evidence that how we may think the brain works is different than how it actually works.
We already know that chiropractic treatment can change the input into the cerebellum and brain.
The chiropractic adjustment has been shown in research to improve our brain’s ability to essentially know where we are in space.
We’ve seen other studies showing chiropractic can improve coordinated movement.
Of course, this is important for athletes, but it’s also important for everyone else.
We need to be able to move in a coordinated fashion to reduce the chances we’ll get injured.
We need to be able to anticipate movements and weight shifts so that we’re in the right position when doing anything from walking to tying your shoe to picking up a bag of groceries and much more!
Preventing Knee and Other Injuries
The study referenced above about knee injuries (ACL)essentially shows that there is a greater risk of injury if we can not do these things as accurately because there is a breakdown in the communication between our bodies and our brain.
Chiropractic Showing Much More Potential To Help Athletes and People Beyond Injury Prevention…
Another study demonstrated amazing improvement in strength and reductions in muscle fatigue with chiropractic treatment.
Check Out This Next Video…
Amazing stuff!
Reference: Does brain functional connectivity contribute to musculoskeletal injury?
A preliminary prospective analysis of a neural biomarker of ACL injury risk
Diekfuss, Jed A. et al.
Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , 169 – 174
Protected by Patchstack
Leave a Reply