The Spinal Impacts of Cheerleading: Keeping Your Back Healthy

Cheerleading is the most popular female sport. Unfortunately, it also ranks as second highest in the nation for severe injuries in sports, with only American football surpassing it. In fact, over 65% of all catastrophic injuries in young people happen as a result of cheerleading.

With some of these injuries being even more harmful than football injuries, cheerleading is the most dangerous sport for women. With many potential injuries—some of them life-threatening—that can happen during cheerleading, it’s important to know what you can do to help prevent these injuries and practice this sport safely.

Here’s how you can avoid cheerleading injuries during this sport season with a healthy spine!

Potential Injuries in Cheerleading

 There are many potential injuries that can happen in cheerleading. These include:

• Overextension. Overextension of the spine as well as muscles surrounding the elbow, hip, or groin can be overextended to cause a painful injury.

• Concussions. Concussions account for one-third of all injuries that happen during cheerleading.

• Sprains. Ligament sprains could include ankle sprains, ACL sprains, or wrist sprains.

• Muscle strains. These could include lower back strains in addition to the hip and groin (most commonly from doing splits).

• Fractures. Foot, ankle, leg, back, hand, and wrist fractures can all happen in this sport.

• Tendonitis. Inflammation of the tendons can happen as the result of a cheer injury around shoulders, elbows, wrist, and knees.

The Importance of Spinal Health in Cheerleading

Cheerleading has the potential to cause strain on your back in addition to fractures. Keeping your spine strong and healthy can help reduce your risk of injury during cheerleading.

Chiropractic care involves manual maneuvers of the spine that can help keep your back strong yet flexible to resist injury. By improving physical strength of the spine, your chiropractor can help you avoid the consequences of a spinal injury in addition to other types of injuries while engaging in cheerleading.

Chiropractic adjustments have many benefits when it comes to performing your best during cheerleading as well as reducing potential injuries. Chiropractic care can improve your range of motion, therefore enhancing performance. Regular chiropractic adjustments can also keep the spine and core muscles strong, therefore helping you to better support your body during cheerleading.

Professional chiropractic care can also keep your muscles flexible and less at risk to experience sprains and overextension. If you do experience an injury, chiropractic care can often help diminish your pain in addition to accelerating your recovery.

How to Avoid Injury

In addition to taking advantage of chiropractic care, there are numerous things you can do to help avoid injury during cheerleading.

1. Always practice in a designated area; avoid areas such as someone’s home or a party

2. Do not practice in an area with distractions

3. Always ensure you have plenty of room to do your routine, if not, consider holding off until you have a large enough space

4. Be aware of conditions such as humidity which can make the floor slippery

5. Work with other teammates who have the same level of experience as you

6. Always warm-up before a practice and stretch after a practice to avoid muscle strain

7. Consider chiropractic adjustments to help strengthen your core muscles to protect your spine

8. Wear the right shoes

9. Wear a brace if you have a known injury during practices and events

10. Don’t practice too much initially—doing too much too soon often leads to injury

11. Always have a spotter during routines that require stunts

12. Eat well—nutrients such as calcium and vitamin D can help build strong bones

Considering Chiropractic Care

Chiropractic adjustments help to keep the spine strong and flexible can help prevent injury, improve performance, recover from an injury faster, and keep you healthy and safe for the duration of your training. Consider getting chiropractic adjustments with Dr. Ward to help prevent injury and have a great time cheerleading this season!