How to Avoid Low Back Pain During Football Season! | St. Johns Chiropractic & Performance

How to Avoid Low Back Pain During Football Season!

When we think of low back pain, we often think about adults and hardly consider the fact that many kids, teenagers, and youth athletes have low back pain as well. Many high school football players for example, suffer low back pain during football season and have aches and soreness in their low back throughout the season. We recently discussed the three best (yet simple) tips for getting proper recovery and recharging your body during the season for high school football player.

In this blog, we will discuss the most common causes of low back pain during the football season, what diagnosis that typically is, and how high school football players can try to avoid low back pain during their season. Here in Saint Johns, Florida, we have many local high schools that take football very seriously including Bartram Trail, Creekside, Mandarin, Ponte Vedra, Nease, and the newer schools – Tocoi and Beachside!

With hours of training, practicing, and playing in the Florida sun; it is almost impossible for teenage athletes not to have some sort of aches, pains, bruises, and injuries at some point throughout training camp and the regular season. While head, neck, hamstring, knee, and shoulder injuries are also very common locations on your body to get injured during high school football, the low back is another common area that we typically do not expect in the active and younger population.

Muscle strains, ligaments sprains, bruises (contusions), disc injuries (bulges or herniations), sciatica, and fractures (pars fracture, also called a “spondy” or “spondylolysis”) are the most common injuries to the lumbar spine (low back) or pelvis in a high school football player. The good news is that all of these previously mentioned low back injuries respond well to good rehabilitation from your local sports injury chiropractor in St. Johns, FL  who knows how to treat athletic injuries.

Treating Athletes with Low Back Pain

At St. Johns Chiropractic & Performance, we understand what it feels like to have low back pain as an athlete. Dr. Grant Speer grew up playing all sports and had his own issues with back pain while he was playing basketball in college. After being diagnosed with disc bulges and a ligament strain, he learned how to rehabilitate these injuries and how to navigate playing sports with a back injury.

Using his previous experiences and combining that with his education as a strength coach and a Doctor of Chiropractic, he has come up with systems and protocols for helping active people and athletes get out of back pain quickly make sure that low back injuries do not become a constant source of pain in your life! Call our clinic or schedule below to find out how we can help you or your child get out of low back pain and return to the activities that you love without any limitation!

Avoid Low Back Pain in Saint Johns, Florida

This article will highlight 2 valuable stretches and exercises that you can do to help avoid low back pain during this high school football season.

Exercise #1 – Standing Pelvic Tilt! This exercise moves the low back, pelvis, and both hips through a full flexing and extending range of motion. When you do this exercise nice and slow, you are activating all of the muscles around your core and hips in building motor control throughout those muscles. This is a common movement that has to occur in many athletic movements including squatting, bending, reaching, and throwing.

When doing this exercise, try to only move your pelvis and keep your mid back and knees completely still. For a high school football player wanting to avoid sciatica and lumbar spine pain, we recommend doing 15 reps each direction twice a day! Improving the mobility of your spine and hips and control of these core muscle can also help athletic performance!

Exercise #2 – Kneeling Hip Extension! This movement helps mobilize the hips into areas that they do not often get moved! Hip extension and internal rotation are most commonly deficient in athletes and the adult active population. However these are crucial hip movements for developing speed, power, and quickness! A lack of hip movement is also a key factor in having low back injuries and pain! This movement will not only help increase that hip range of motion, but it will also help decrease soreness around the hip muscles.

When performing this movement, keep your back foot directly behind your knee and keep your chest up. For local athletes that want to increase their hip range of motion to help avoid low back issues during sports, we also recommend doing this exercise twice a day for 15 repetitions!

Affordable Chiropractic in St. Johns County

At St. Johns Chiropractic & Performance, we help athletes and active adults here in Northeast Florida recover from pain, avoid injuries, and rehabilitate their injuries with chiropractic services so they do not become problems in the future. If you or a loved one has a sports injury or tightness or pain that they would like an athletic therapist or a doctor who specializes in sports injuries to examine it, please give us a call or book an appointment with us!

We offer affordable appointments and treatment options to get the families and athletes of Saint Johns, Florida the care they need to live life and play sports without pain!

Share:

Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
LinkedIn

Related Posts