The Art of Chiropractic in Professional Sports

In this episode of the ICA Sports and Fitness Science Podcast, host Brant welcomes Dr. Brett Winchester from the St. Louis area. Dr. Winchester discusses his 23-year career focusing on chiropractic treatment for professional hockey and baseball players. They talk about the upcoming Pro Hockey Chiropractic Society's conference in Dallas, emphasizing the importance of manipulation techniques and dynamic neuromuscular stabilization (DNS) in sports. Dr. Winchester highlights how chiropractic care can enhance athletes' performance and emphasizes the need for a standardized approach to athlete assessment. They delve into the unique experiences and benefits of attending the conference and the value of networking with professionals in the field. The episode wraps up with advice for aspiring sports chiropractors on getting involved with professional teams and the critical importance of understanding and communicating effectively with athletes.

Transcript

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hi, welcome to another edition of the ICA Sports and Fitness Science Podcast. Today we are joined by Dr. Brett Winchester. He is from the St. Louis area, and him and I will be getting together in July, but we'll tell you more about that in a second. I'll let you introduce yourself. Yeah. Thank you Brent. Yeah, my name is Brett Winchester. I have a practice outside St. Louis, Missouri. I work a lot with professional hockey players and professional baseball players, and I've been in practice now 23 years, and my background is with the, I'm on the board for the Motion Palpation Institute, which is a manipulation technique system. And then also DNS and DNS is gonna be one of my focuses for the talk that we have coming up in Dallas. Yeah, talking about Dallas that's how we get know each other is'cause I take care of the A HL Rockford Ice Dogs for 21 seasons. And you said the St. Louis area, so I imagine you've worked with some of the hockey players in that area. And we have we have, we're part of a group, it's called the Pro Hockey Chiropractic Society, and they have a huge conference coming up. But that going on, you know how much you know about what's going on down there. Yeah, I'm always excited to be a part with whatever. Alan's cooked up and we we're talking about different cities, and Dallas made a whole lot of sense for a lot of different reasons. Parker's obviously right there, the stars are there, of course. Troy Van Bean's there. So it, it just made a lot of sense and, through Parker and other organizations. I've been in and out of Dallas quite a bit throughout my career, and it's just a, it's a beautiful place to host a seminar. A lot of good social events. I think the venue is gonna be unbelievable. I know part of it's gonna be at the Dallas Stars facility. I think maybe other part is gonna actually be a Parker. And it promises to be just a great overall event. I went to the one in Chicago and I to. Nashville. And I gotta tell you, if you're on fence about coming to this conference, you are right where the players are sitting. You're gonna be right by all their stuff. And I know in Nashville, we're actually in the predators locker room. And in Chicago we did a whole tour of the practice facility, got to see where they all work out. And Dr. Mall was in there fixing everyone's shoulders and elbows and wrists. So this one established, it sound pretty cool, the same experience. And so you're gonna be one of our presenters down there. And I was just curious if you could give us a little. Insight or a little preview of maybe what you're gonna be talking about while we're down there. Yeah, so one of my focuses is gonna be like a MultiPro multimodal approach for the hockey athlete, how we combine rehab techniques. With manipulation with soft tissue. In saying that kind of one of the overreaching themes will be how we use the principles of dynamic neuromuscular stabilization with the hockey athlete. So there's a lot of implications with skating and shooting and really the snapshot of the snapshot. A lot of the mechanics are real similar to the golf swing. So one of our jobs as a chiropractor to make sure that our athlete's body are able to get full expression of motion and when we do have full expression of motion, also being sure that our central nervous system's able to be able to control these ranges of motion. And that's where I think manipulation and DNS and everything, that a lot of the people that. Are gonna be there already know when that's all combined together. You are really creating the gold standard for what we want out of our, not just our hack hockey athletes, but our athletes in general. So I think, and a lot of times people understand this, but sometimes it's helpful to see exactly how it's being integrated on a day-to-day basis. Yeah, you know the, talked about the stabilization I learned a lot about that or even working with the strongman games because these guys want to go out and they wanna carry cars and throw bulldoze over their head, and last thing they wanna do is be put on their side and aggressive, twisting, and overdo the stress receptors. They tend to do really good. With the quick short level adjustments and I brought that back from there to my hockey team. And we had a guy who, whose right glutes were not firing at all. And I was able to give this sky deck adjustment and the athletic trainers on our team took the player around the corner because they couldn't believe what I just did. And I had an intern and she watched him recheck everything.'cause they were just like, I can't believe that just happened. So I'm sure you got a thousand of those stories. yeah, I just think too, it's helpful like with stories like that and like you did, you gotta be able to establish a baseline first. So if we don't know how to assess our hockey players then it, the treatment becomes a little bit more complicated. So I think even if our hockey players didn't have a mouth and they weren't able to verbalize subjectively what their pain is. Arming our clinicians with tools to be able to assess well. That way we know how to not just get our athletes out of pain, but also know how to improve performance. Which I think for the contemporary chiropractor, that's the way or the future and and hopefully getting away from just, oh, the chiropractor works on the bad back well. know, we all have tools to help with all kinds of soft tissue injuries, stabilization problem, and then diagnosis, and then of course back pain and things like that. But we have a skillset that is unique to all the other disciplines, I feel and no one's in a better position than a chiropractor for a portal of entry for treatment of the professional hockey player. I love. You talked about having the examination too, to establish the baseline with the player because if we could one of those and player goes from to St. Louis. When they see me, when they see you. It doesn't always have to be a completely new foreign experience as you go chiropractor to chiropractor, and that's one of the things our group's trying to do as simulate is a standard of measurements and looking at people so that way it's not always a new experience and I'm excited to hear how you do it and maybe how somebody else does it and start putting that stuff together. I'm sure you would agree with me on that. Yeah, I think, my focus has definitely been with baseball and hockey, but I feel like these societies that, you guys are grab getting together here they do a really good job of that. I feel like I. There's no turf wars. I feel like everyone's really confident with getting other opinions and passing the players around. Obviously they're moving from different cities and and that's really important for the profession that we're good at doing that. And I think, we, they've done a great job of doing that. Really. I. So this would be a great event to attend if you were wanting to get into the world of hockey. Or baseball, the other sports, going to these conferences and meeting these chiropractors and get to see hands on and talk to people. I don't know about you, but the first time I went and got there and worked with other hockey chiropractors, I had more questions about when do you get to the game? What kind of access do you have with players? Even more so about care. That's a neat part of it too, right? Yeah. And I think and I'm sure I know you're getting the same question too. What most, especially the younger clinicians wanna know is how do you get involved with a team? And you know what I tell everyone is you gotta start with the person that's in front of you. So you gotta get a great result with the little league hockey player. Before you even start the conversation of working with a professional hockey player. So you gotta have the tools and you gotta understand the lingo. And one thing that did surprise me a little bit I have an intern right now is from Canada. Like they're enamored with being in the, with, in the locker room, and one of our sessions is actually gonna be in the training room at the Dallas Stars facility. So I just think it's such, if you love hockey, it's just such a great, as you were mentioning before, access to, just a lot of cool things if you're into, if you're into pro hockey. My father's a chiropractor and I was always told, if you stay in chiropractic care, you should give these great abilities and great skills. And I said I never quite made it on the, into the division one football and all that stuff. Like I thought I was gonna 'cause of my dad being a chiropractor. But being involved in the sports of chiropractic, I get to go in the locker room still. When our team wanted the championship, I got a championship ring. I didn't get hurt, like the hockey players like, or in those rings. and I think that, like you said, now we get to live vicariously through them. So you might not be able to play pro hockey or baseball at this point in your career, obviously, but you get to be around it. And I think that, now where it used to be, an outlier for the players that were, seeing chiropractors, it was like the best kept secret. But now, I can't think of one professional baseball player or hockey player who doesn't have a chiropractor or multiple chiropractors that are involved in their treatment. So it's it's all, it's changed a lot in my career. And I'm sure your career too, where now, they're looking for it. We don't have to convince them of it. They're looking for the services that we're offering. And again, if you are not part of a team or you don't even know to get your foot in the door working with the team, this is a great conference to go to. Just, sitting down a breakfast or lunch with everybody, you get to ask questions and pick brains. There's usually probably about 40 or 50 of us there to ask questions to. I. I know in my office two of us are coming, so it's a great event for that. So I really, if you're on the fence about coming, I really recommend coming and checking it out. I always finish up here with these podcasts asking my guests if they have any other final comments or thoughts they'd like to share. So I'll go ahead and ask you the same question I ask everybody else I. Yeah I just think just not to plug another seminar, but I do think this one's gonna be special just because. think it's an eclectic group. If you look at the different speakers, I feel like it's people with a little bit different background. And the magic that always happens in these seminars is when you put 'em all together in the same room, then you really get some, unique conversations that you wouldn't get if you weren't there. And I feel like you said, what I tell my interns is life is a tryout. The first step is showing up. You gotta show up and be around the people that are working with the players and then who knows, everyone's always looking for associates and stuff like that. It's just a really good time to get to meet some people. And it is always fun. Besides, you're gonna learn a lot. I just think it's gonna be a really cool, unique opportunity to be at the facility and those things. Awesome. It is I highly stress showing up for it. And I wanna thank you for joining our podcast today and jumping in here and talking to everybody. Get everybody excited about working with pro athletes. One more topic I'll just quickly talk about too, if you're on the fence about working with pro athlete, doesn't matter the sport. I've always thought there's a way to talk to athletes compared to a grandma that comes in your office.'cause the athlete, their only asset they have in life is their body because they've visit everything. They have their time, their energy, everything. All their focus have been making their body a finding tuned machine and there's a skill to that. Would you agree with me on that? Being able to talk to an athlete? Oh, a hundred percent. They're, whether they will admit it or not, because they're a professional athlete. They're a Ferrari, the chiropractor has so many tools to allow them to perform like a Ferrari does. If you're 60-year-old nothing's wrong with a Ford Escort, but it's just a little bit, it's a different, it's a different beast, yeah. So you're working with Ferraris and our job is to make sure they can perform like a Ferrari. Awesome. This will be as you can't tell by our excitement. It's gonna be a great weekend. Go to the Pro Hockey Chiropractic Society's website, get all the information on it. It's the weekend after the 4th of July down in Dallas, Texas, and we look forward to hopefully meeting you there. I want to thank that. Thank you for joining us today and appreciate you jumping out here real quick with us and I'll tell everybody hope to see you in Dallas. Thanks Brant. Yeah, great. Great to finally meet you and and thanks to Alan for all the work he does and it's gonna be a great event. Hope to see you there. Alright. Goodbye