How Chiropractic Can Improve Your Coordination

If you are trying to improve your coordination and activity level, you have many options. Besides exercise and practice, one of the treatment strategies for improved coordination involves chiropractic care. Chiropractic can benefit your physical health in many ways, improving your coordination and your overall physical performance.

As a chiropractor in the Chesapeake region of Virginia for more than 2 decades, I have helped many patients improve their coordination and physical health. In this article, I will share how chiropractic can help your coordination and overall mobility.

Why is Coordination Important?

Maintaining your coordination is extremely important to your physical health. Coordination is closely tied to mobility, or your body’s ability to move freely and without injury. If you have poor coordination, there can be negative consequences, including:

• Reduced mobility: Poor mobility can cause a vicious cycle of physical problems that continually worsens. Someone with poor mobility is likely to lose strength, which then only worsens their mobility over time. The person may then become deconditioned, which can cause problems like:
  • Reduced muscle mass
  • Decreased strength
  • Balance problems
  • Shortness of breath with minor activity
  • Fast heart rate after minor activity
• Injury: Poor coordination worsens your balance, which can increase your risk of falls. Falls are the leading cause of injury and death in adults over the age of 65 years. Overall, about 20% of falls cause an injury, such as broken bones or head trauma.

Many spinal conditions can cause impaired coordination. For example, a person with a spinal condition like sciatica may understandably alter their movements to avoid pain. However, without getting to the root cause of the problem and treating the sciatica, they risk both deconditioning and injury to other muscle groups that they use to compensate for the pain. Fixing the problem behind the sciatica – or other spinal condition – can therefore both improve the pain and the unintended consequences of pain, like poor mobility, coordination, injury, and deconditioning.

Spinal Alignment and Coordination

Your spine is designed to work best when it’s properly aligned. The vertebrae of your spine work in conjunction with soft tissues like ligaments and muscles to help optimize your spinal biomechanics, because they work in sync. When your spine is properly aligned, the strain on the surrounding tissues is minimized. This directly leads to less pain, stiffness, and inflammation.

In addition, the spine plays a major role in relaying messages in the central nervous system, including messages from muscles to your brain and vice versa. Spinal problems can interfere with this process, delaying the vital messaging between your brain and body that supports coordination. By improving your spinal health, you can, therefore, improve your coordination.

How Does Chiropractic Care Help Coordination and Mobility?

Chiropractic care has several direct benefits on coordination and mobility. These include:

• Improved performance: Many people, including athletes like golfers, have seen improvements in their physical performance thanks to chiropractic care. Chiropractic care optimizes your spinal alignment. This means your joints, bones and muscles work together more naturally. This prevents overexertion and strain that can prematurely tire your muscles and harm your performance.
• Decreased injury recovery time: Injuries from mechanical spine problems can often be treated with chiropractic care, especially when the injury is in the early stages.
• Optimized range of motion: Misaligned muscles and joints can harm your range of motion. Chiropractic care helps to realign your spine into its natural position, improving your range of motion.
• Reduction in pain: Chiropractic care treats mechanical spine pain without drugs or surgery. Further, chiropractic care fixes any underlying spinal problems. This helps to prevent additional injuries overexertion of other muscles to compensate for your injured ones.