As your local chiropractic professionals, we believe it takes an athlete to treat an athlete. We are exactly that at Journey Chiropractic. We offer chiropractic services, rehab and sports medicine services, athletic injury prevention, and much more. In today’s blog, we’ll be honing on the latter of those three services — how can you prevent sports injuries? Too often, folks turn to a sports medicine clinic like ours only after an injury has occurred. And, as most athletes who have experienced the thralls of rehabilitation can attest, for every week of training an athlete misses, it typically takes twice as many to catch up! Hence, the importance of preventative sports medicine and athletic injury prevention in teenagers and young athletes make themselves clear. The key is, don’t miss training! In the following article, we’ll go beyond surface-level tips you might be expecting, like “make sure you stretch!” or “eat and sleep well!” While such basic measures are, of course, necessary, we want to take a deeper dive. So let’s go! Warming up (and cooling down) is so much more than mere stretching. Simply put, the body has to be prepared for performance before it can perform safely. “Cold muscles are hurt muscles,” it’s been said, which is why we’d always recommend beginning physical activity with at least a 15-minute warm-up that includes both stretching and dynamic movements. Functional Training – Too often people think about training in static ways. It’s easy to get too invested in just one thing, whether it’s free weight training or running long distances. And while such ventures are not problematic in and of themselves, it’s important to establish a balance between strength, biomechanics (how our bones interact while performing a movement), and flexibility if you want to be fit and firing in your sport of choice. Functional training is about ensuring you perform dynamic exercises tailored to the movements of the sports in which you compete, leading to improved stability, strength, endurance, and performance.