Utah is such a wonderful place for outdoor activities year round.  In the summer we have hiking, outdoor sporting activities and watersports such as boating, skiing, wakeboarding and tubing.  In the winter we have cross country, downhill skiing, snowboarding, sledding and more. The popular ones that are easy to go from season to season are the skiing and boarding sports.  One is just cold and the other is warm. We are talking about downhill skiing, snowboarding, water skiing and wakeboarding. Very fun and a great workout for you.

These activities are fun to do physically and socially, but not fun if you are injured.  Here are some of the most common injuries that people come in for treatment because of these sports.  

• Low back pain
• Neck pain/Whiplash

Do you board or ski and have you experienced these before?  Have you taken care of yourself and seen a professional for them?  If not, I suggest you take action now. Here are the reasons why I’ve seen these injuries and what you can do about them.  

Low Back Pain

There are two reasons your lower back may get hurt from skiing or boarding.  One would be a strained or sprained back from a jerk or a hard fall, we’ll get into more detail about this later.  The other and the most common would be overuse injuries. Now, if you take action early on, this is something that you can prevent on your own.  

Overuse injuries to your lower back are caused by muscle and joint imbalances.  For example, sitting all day is causing your hips to become tight and your core and glute muscles become weak. This is explained by the joint-by-joint approach.  Follow this LINK to read more.  In short, your body’s joint alternate from mobile joints to stable joints from top to bottom. Your hips (mobile joint) become tight and can’t do all the work that they were built for, so your body compensates by your lower back (stable joints) or your knee (stable joint) doing their job as well as the hips job.  Your hip is built to move in all directions and with power, might I add. Your lower back and knee are primarily built for one directionIt, forwards and back. They are strong but only in those directions. If you can’t rotate around your hips, that rotation is going to come elsewhere, most likely the low back and/or knee.  They get burnt out way too fast and then we see overuse injuries or worse traumatic injuries that seem to come from nowhere.  

For boarding and skiing, there is a lot of rotation and power in these sports.  But if your hips aren’t ready to take that much load or stress then you will apply that stress to the neighboring areas, such as your knees or your lower back.  Can you picture this in your mind? So when your lower back hurts from the slopes or the lake, it’s not a lower back problem, it’s a hip problem. Your lower back is the source of pain but your hip is the cause of pain.

What can you do?  

1. Cut your sitting time during the day in HALF. 
2. Stretch, loosen those hips of yours. DAILY
   1. Hip Flexor stretch
   2. 90/90 stretch
   3. Hip adductor (groin) stretch
   4. Hip mobility series
3. Strengthen your glutes and core muscles.  
   1. Planks
   2. Glute Bridge
   3. Dead bug

Add these to your daily routine.  Just spend 15 minutes a day and you’ll be able to have more fun on the mountain or the lake. These simple stretches will also allow you to do these sports longer into your years.  You can find 15 minutes in your day. It might require you to put your phone down for 15 minutes but you can do it.  

Neck Pain and Whiplash Injuries

This injury happens daily on the mountain or the lake (depending on the season).  While wakeboarding, the nose of your board gets caught under water, and there is no saving that when you’re getting pulled by a boat.  A faceplant is in your very near future and from this we see many whiplash injuries to the neck. This goes for both boarding or skiing on snow or water.  

Whiplash injuries, like in a car accident, are basically sprains of the little joints that are located in the back of your neck.  Follow this link to a video with detailed description of how these injuries happen to the neck. These injuries are more violent than they may seem because your head is on the end of a whip.  Your head becomes more like a bobble head doll and gets flung back and forth. This injury can take weeks to months to fully recover. These injuries are similar to a sprained/strained lower back when you slip and fall.    

What can you do?  

1. Heat packs over the tight muscles for 15 minutes with stretching afterwards can help loosen things up.  
2. Getting chiropractic adjustments as prescribed.
   1. This will truly help the sprained joint heal properly so that your neck won’t build any unwanted scar tissue or dysfunction that will lead to more pain in the future.  
3. Rehabilitation for the surrounding muscles to build support to the injured joints.
   1. These exercises will vary, depending on the person and the injury.

If you have been down the lake or up on the mountain lately, and you’ve experienced these injuries, come in and get evaluated and inshape so you can continue to do this sport  for many years to come.