Conditions
Sports injuries
A sports chiropractor can often help with sprains, strains, and overuse injuries by treating the injured tissue and the training error, weakness, or movement fault behind it. At Next Move in Orlando, each visit is a full hour one-on-one: assessment, hands-on treatment, and rehab in one session, with a plan built to return you to sport, not just past pain.
Getting you out of pain is the easy half. Getting you back to your sport stronger than you left it, without the re-injury, is the actual job.
What's actually going on
The injury, the cause, and the comeback
Every sports injury has three parts. Most care only addresses the first one.
Sprains & strains
Rolled ankles, pulled hamstrings, tweaked backs mid-lift. The tissue damage usually heals on its own timeline. What doesn't fix itself is the strength you lose while guarding it, and the movement habits you pick up to avoid the pain. That's the part that turns a two-week injury into a six-month one.
Training overload
Most "out of nowhere" injuries have a paper trail: a new program, a jump in mileage, a competition block, a return from vacation at full intensity. Tissue adapts to load gradually, and injuries happen where the demand curve outran the adaptation curve. Reading that history is half the diagnosis.
Return-to-sport rehab
"Pain-free at rest" and "ready to compete" are separated by a lot of work that most care skips entirely. If nobody rebuilt your strength, power, and confidence under sport-specific load, you go back at 80 percent and re-injure the same spot. Re-injury isn't bad luck. It's incomplete rehab.
Why it keeps coming back
Because rest treats the symptom and rewards the cause
An injury that healed with time alone healed into the same body that got injured.
The standard cycle looks like this: get hurt, rest until it stops hurting, return to full training, get hurt again. Each lap through the cycle, you lose fitness, gain hesitation, and the underlying problem, whatever combination of weakness, mechanics, and loading error caused the first injury, stays exactly where it was.
Quick-visit care doesn’t break the cycle either. An adjustment and ten minutes of e-stim can take the edge off, but nobody in that model has time to ask why a healthy athlete’s hamstring failed in week three of a new program, let alone build the eight-week loading progression that prevents the repeat.
Breaking the cycle means treating the injury and the cause in the same plan, and holding the return to a standard: measurable strength, tolerance for sport-specific load, and a body you trust again. That takes time with a doctor, which is the entire reason our visits are an hour.
How we treat it
The four-step pathway, applied to your sport
Same framework as every plan at Next Move, pointed at the injury in front of us and the season in front of you.
01
Assess & Collaborate
A full hour on the injury and the training that produced it: what happened, which tissue is involved, how irritable it is, and what your sport actually demands of it. Your training log gets examined as carefully as your joints do.
02
Reduce Pain
Calm the injury down without shutting you down: hands-on treatment for the acute pain, plus a clear answer to the question that matters most in week one, which is what you can still train. Blanket rest is almost never the answer, and deconditioning is its own injury.
03
Fix Your Patterns
Fix the gap that set it up: the strength deficit, the movement fault, or the loading error. If your hamstring pulled because it was weak at long lengths, we train it at long lengths. The rehab targets the mechanism, not just the symptom.
04
Become Resilient
Earn the return: rebuild capacity past where you were before the injury, then progress through sport-specific loading until going back isn't a leap of faith. You return when the tissue is ready, not just when the calendar says so.
When to see someone
An honest word about red flags
Some injuries need a physician before they need rehab. If you heard a loud pop followed by rapid swelling, if the joint gives way or won’t bear weight, if there’s visible deformity, numbness that isn’t fading, or any hit to the head with confusion or memory gaps, get medically evaluated first. Suspected fractures, full tendon or ligament ruptures, and concussions are not chiropractic problems on day one.
Screening for this is built into the exam. If your injury needs imaging or an orthopedic opinion, we’ll tell you that at hour one, not after a package of visits. Plenty of those cases come back to us for the rehab afterward, and that’s the right order of operations.
Start here
New Patient Exam: $150 · 60 min
A full hour, one-on-one: history, movement assessment, root-cause diagnosis, and your first treatment.
In season and not sure it’s worth an hour yet? The Free Consultation is $0 (15 min · telehealth): talk it through with Dr. Nguyen first.
Where to start
Chiropractor, physical therapist, or orthopedist?
Sports injuries get treated by all three. The way the injury happened decides the first stop more than the sign on the door. Here is the split we use.
Sports chiropractor at Next Move
The injury is mechanical and not an emergency: a strain that keeps recurring, tendon pain that came on with training, a joint that is stiff and limiting your lifts, or a sprain that healed but never got strong again. You want the assessment, hands-on treatment, and rehab in one 60-minute visit, and a plan built to end. Not the right first stop if you suspect a fracture, a full tendon or ligament rupture, a dislocation, or a concussion. Those need a physician first, and we will tell you so at the exam.
Physical therapist
Rehab after surgery, or a recovery that has to follow a surgeon's protocol, such as after a fracture, an ACL reconstruction, or a repaired tendon. Also a strong choice when you want a long, supervised progression with a therapist rather than hands-on treatment plus rehab from a doctor. In practice a good sports PT and a good sports chiropractor overlap a lot on soft tissue injuries. Pick the clinician who assesses before treating and gives you a plan with an end date.
Orthopedist or your physician
First stop for anything acute and severe: you cannot bear weight, the joint gave way with a pop and swelled fast, something looks out of place, numbness is not fading, or you took a hit to the head. Also for pain at rest or at night that is not tied to movement, or after a conservative plan has had a fair trial and is not moving. They order imaging, manage fractures and tears, and are the ones to discuss injections or surgery with. Many of these cases come back to rehab afterward.
When imaging makes sense
Most sprains, strains, and tendon pain do not need imaging on day one; it is warranted when a bone might be involved, such as an ankle injury with tenderness on specific bony spots or an inability to take four steps (an X-ray), or pinpoint shin or foot pain that worsens with running, which suggests a stress fracture that an early X-ray can miss and often needs MRI. Next Move does not have imaging on site. If your exam raises any of these, we refer you to a physician or imaging center and pick the rehab back up once you are cleared.
Going deeper
Acute injury or overuse injury? They need different plans
Sports injuries split into two families, and the split changes everything about the plan. Acute injuries happen in a moment: a rolled ankle, a hamstring that grabbed at full speed, a back that seized under a bar. Overuse injuries build over weeks from repetitive load: Achilles or patellar tendon pain, shin splints, runner's knee, tennis or golfer's elbow, rotator cuff tendon pain in an overhead athlete, and at the far end, stress fractures. Both hurt when you move. They are not the same problem.
An acute injury has a damaged tissue with a healing timeline you cannot rush. The plan protects that tissue, screens for the injuries that need a physician, and keeps everything else training so you do not decondition around it. Then it earns the return in stages, because pain-free at rest and ready for a cutting drill are separated by a lot of work.
An overuse injury is usually a tolerance problem, not a tear. The tendon or bone was asked for more than it had adapted to, and it started complaining. Complete rest tends to calm it and leave it weaker, which is why the pain often comes back the first week you train again. Current sports-medicine guidance is built around progressive loading instead: strengthening the tissue in doses it can tolerate, using how it responds over the next 24 hours as the gauge, while fixing the strength gaps and technique faults elsewhere in the chain that overloaded it. For stubborn tendon pain we may layer shockwave therapy and soft tissue work into that plan, but the loading does most of the work.
The common mistake is treating one like the other: resting an overuse injury until it stops hurting, or pushing through an acute one because it is "just a strain." Sorting which one you have, and reading the training history that produced it, is the first job of the exam. For runners that means how you run, hip strength, and the mileage log. For lifters, technique under a real load and the program that led up to it. For overhead athletes, the shoulder blade and upper back along with the shoulder itself. If yours is a running injury, the running injuries page goes deeper on shin splints, Achilles pain, IT band pain, and heel pain, including how to tell shin splints from a stress fracture.
Questions
Straight answers
Can a chiropractor treat a sprained ankle or pulled hamstring?
Often, yes, once the serious stuff is ruled out. A sprain is a stretched or torn ligament and a strain is a muscle or tendon injury, and both usually need the injured tissue protected early and loaded later. A sports chiropractor treats the irritated tissue, restores the motion you lost guarding it, and rebuilds strength at the lengths your sport demands. Start with a physician if you think a bone is broken, the joint looks out of position, or you heard a pop and immediately could not use the joint.
Should I ice or heat a sports injury?
Early on, ice, and leave the heat alone. For the first two to three days after a sprain or strain the NHS advises protecting and resting the area, icing up to 20 minutes every two to three hours, compression, and elevation, while avoiding heat such as hot baths and heat packs. Once you can move the area without pain stopping you, keep it moving so the joint or muscle does not stiffen up. Later, heat is a comfort measure before you move. Neither one is the treatment.
How long should I rest a strained muscle before I train again?
Less time fully off than you think, and longer before full speed than you want. The NHS notes most sprains and strains feel better after about two weeks, with strenuous exercise like running avoided for up to eight, and severe ones taking months. That is a range, not your date. Protect the tissue for the first few days, keep training what does not aggravate it, then rebuild the muscle at the lengths and speeds your sport uses. AAOS warns that reinjuring a hamstring raises the risk of lasting damage.
When does a sports injury need an X-ray or MRI?
When a bone or a full tear is in question, not for a sore muscle. After an ankle injury the Ottawa ankle rules point to an X-ray if you are tender over specific bony spots at the ankle or midfoot, or cannot take four steps. Pinpoint shin or foot pain that worsens the longer you run suggests a stress fracture, which AAOS notes is often hard to see on an early X-ray and is picked up sooner by MRI. Next Move has no imaging on site, so we refer out.
Why does the same injury keep coming back?
Usually because the pain got treated and the cause did not. Pain settles well before capacity returns, so people go back to full training with tissue that is still weaker than the sport demands, and the same hamstring, shoulder, or shin gives out again. The other common thread is training load: the mileage jump or intensity spike that produced it the first time is still sitting in the program. A plan that ends should rebuild the tissue past where it was and fix what overloaded it.
Do athletes really need a chiropractor?
No, not as a rule. A healthy athlete on a sensible program does not need routine adjustments to perform. Where a sports chiropractor earns a place is when pain is changing how you train, an injury keeps coming back, or you were told to rest and it did not fix anything. Then you need someone to find the cause and build the way back. That is different from being told you need to be adjusted forever.
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