Acupuncture and Sports Performance

When most people think of acupuncture, they probably think of a spa treatment or holistic modality to relieve certain ailments. However, healthcare professionals are now recommending acupuncture for competitive athletes.

Athletes all over the world are turning to sports acupuncture to help them avoid getting hurt and to promote recovery when an injury is sustained. Sports acupuncture is used to speed healing, relieve pain, and increase muscle strength and stamina.

Surfers, skaters, runners, Major League Baseball and NFL star players, and even Olympians have embraced sports acupuncture. At Awaken Integrative Wellness, we practice sports acupuncture on a daily basis.

How Sports Acupuncture Works for Athletes

America’s top athletes are using acupuncture on its own and in conjunction with other modalities and Western medicine as a part of their regular practice and treatment regimes. Acupuncture helps the body to heal and balance itself by allowing energy to properly flow from the points along the meridians, the energy pathways defined by Traditional Chinese Medicine. Energy needs to flow freely without blockages in order for the body to function at an optimal level.

In the West, acupuncture has become a fairly well recognized if alternative method of treating maladies nausea, pregnancy sickness, and pain, which are the maladies that are most often covered by insurance. While Chinese medicine has always closely been linked with sports, martial arts, and healing all things in nature from nature, Western medicine has only recently become more accepting of the practical application of acupuncture in sports settings.

Sports acupuncture is becoming a recognized treatment for frozen shoulder, tennis elbow, back pain, pulled tendons, torn ligaments, tendonitis, arthritis, bursitis, sciatica, tight hamstrings, muscle/tendon strain, golfer’s shoulder, tennis elbow, weak back, stiff neck, and other ailments athletes may incur.

Sports acupuncturists aim to bring the body back to balance by understanding the compensation patterns presenting with each sports-specific movement and injury. This allows them to help with injury prevention, optimal performance, and faster recovery.

Sports acupuncture may combine Traditional Chinese Medicine techniques with recognized diagnostic techniques such as range of motion tests, orthopedic evaluation tests, palpation, and manual muscle tests. Some sports acupuncturists may pay less attention to the traditional acupuncture points and focus more on inserting needles directly at pain sites and sore areas.

“In my extensive off-season workouts, I have noticed a difference in my balance and agility since receiving [sports acupuncture] treatments,” said Baltimore Ravens safety Will Demps, according to the Pacific College of Oriental Medicine. “I feel my muscles have been ‘turned on’ and are firing on all cylinders.”

Acupuncturist Matt Callison, a faculty member at the Pacific College of Oriental Medicine who has treated players from the Minnesota Vikings and San Diego Chargers, has been working with athletes for more than a decade. “It all started with one guy—Martin Bayless—and then he ended up referring some more players, and it has snowballed from there,” Callison said.

Japanese MLB players like Ichiro Suzuki and Kazuhiro Sasaki have introduced acupuncture to their baseball teammates to help them bounce back more quickly after heavy trainings and during rehabilitation from injuries. Star NFL players like Steven Young and Jerry Rice of the San Francisco 49ers were also treated with sports acupuncture. Sports acupuncture is credited with helping Canadian speed skater Kevin Overland win the bronze medal in the 1998 Olympics.