Rehabilitating Professional Soccer Players post Spinal Surgery

I have been a Sports Chiropractor to numerous premiership clubs over the years and I am often parachuted in to help resolve a dramatic incident of some sort: I presume I am a trouble-shooter when all else has failed.

One such event is post spinal surgery!

I know it sounds amazing but professional athletes having spinal surgery is a common occurrence even in this day and age of advanced Pilates protocols, gym ball work outs, heated yoga sessions and Bosu ball functional ballistic movement programmes. Some players just refuse to put the effort in and end up in the hands of the surgeon.

Firstly, a player should never get to the stage that he has any sort of discal irritation. This should be prevented by specialist manipulation that can be delivered by an osteopath, a physio, a physician or a chiropractor.  It does not matter who delivers the high velocity thrust as long as they have undergone the appropriate training. The main thing is that all players require spinal manipulation to improve neuro-muscular tone.

In this day and age it is a crime to overlook this but it still happens.

When this is overlooked by the medical team a pattern on neural dysfunction is allowed to develop that creates inhibition of the local stabilisers (multifidus and rotatores spinae). This inhibition now allows an increase in aberrant motion and ultimately a positive feedback mechanism of inhibition that allows low-level irritation of the surrounding tissues such as the intervertebral disc, ligaments and neural tissue.

On a macro scale the larger muscles of the spine now start to compensate. The psoas muscles will now become involved and, as they hypertrophy there is a reflex inhibition of the glut maximus. As you can imagine this is fatal in a footballer who needs stability and explosive power. The end result is spinal pain, neuralgia and greater inhibition.....and a referral to the surgeon.

Once the surgeon has cut away the offending irritated disc and offered the nerve some breathing space the player is given the all clear. However no one has dealt with the inhibition that has caused the problem in the first place and the player often reports that they have lost their 'power'.

It is now essential that there is an increase in local spinal afferent information and this is best achieved by spinal manipulation. The spinocerebellar tract carries information to the cerebellum, which then up regulates the messages to the local spinal muscles via the corticospinal tract. There will be an immediate and objective change that can be demonstrated by manual muscle testing and a subjective report from the player that the 'power' is back.

Frequent manipulation allows neural potentiation and before you know it the player is performing close to a level they have not achieved for a long time.

The benefits of high velocity manipulation by a skilled practitioner cannot be under estimated and the performance improvement is immediately noticeable and importantly measurable.