The movement-based chiropractors at ICT Muscle & Joint Clinic are proud to offer two different Sport Physicals. We are the only clinic within the state of Kansas, at this time, to do so. We hope this will become a trend. Our two Sports Physical offerings are the Basic Sports Physical and Advanced Sports Physical which are offered at both ICT Muscle & Joint Clinic chiropractic clinics in East Wichita and West Wichita.
We do offer a Basic (AKA “normal”) Sports Physical. This is the traditional Sports Physical which has been around for decades – nothing new. But in our opinion, this is not a sports physical; it is a health physical or check-up. Cataloging basic information such as height, weight, blood pressure, eyesight, etc., may be needed but is not calculating an athlete’s athletic prowess, movement quality, or movement limitation(s) specific to a sport or even overall movement-health. Ask yourself, if a young athlete is going to move for their sport, does it not make sense to assess the young athlete’s movement as well?
Our Basic Sports Physicals are $35. Like all Sports Physicals, it is non-billable to insurance.
Please print, fill out (athlete, parent, and/or guardian), and bring this Kansas 2024 Sports Physical Form in for your appointment. It is important to bring in this form with your portion filled out prior to the visit.
You can schedule directly online for a Sports Physicals. Select East or West Wichita and then a preferred doctor if desired. From here, select Basic Sport Physical. Appointment duration is booked for 20 minutes.
In our opinion, an athlete’s assessment should focus on how well a student-athlete can move beyond sitting at a desk and taking blood pressure. Dysfunctional (less than ideal) movement patterns may increase odds of injury. An individual’s age, gender, general movement pattern(s), and sport-specific movement pattern(s) should all be taken into consideration when assessing for a sport physical. Addressing an individual’s movement capacity may reduce injury and improve sport performance.1 It is the combination of these metrics (age, gender, and sport-movement requirements) which collectively help identify at risk categories for injuries. When identifying no, low, moderate, and high-risk categories for injury, high risk athletes were 3.4 times more likely to get injured during season compared to the low-risk athlete based on our assessment protocol.2 3 4
Within our Advanced Sport Physical, a Basic Sport Physical will be provided; however, the student-athletes will receive much more. Our Advanced Sport Physical is a contract between us, you (parent or guardian) and your student-athlete. This contract is more than a physical paper. It is a commitment to each other to keep the athlete healthy and working toward improving their overall health – on and off the field or court.
It is estimated 45 million youth will participate in sport related activity in any given year. Unfortunately, roughly 35% of these youth athletes will stop participating each year with a total cost to injuries estimated at roughly $2 billion.5 With advancements in technology and healthcare, this should not be occurring. Yet the facts are the facts. This is why we have created an Advanced Sport Physical.
Our goal with this Advanced Sports Physicals is to hold all parties (us, student-athlete, parents, guardian, coaches, and school programs) accountable in stopping and hopefully reversing this trend for Wichita athletes. If we can keep our kids healthy and injury free, then they can enjoy sports and an active healthy lifestyle easier. Through this commitment together, we believe, we can locally make a positive impact in reducing injury rates while decreasing the 70-80% attrition rate (the rate of at which a person leaves (AKA burnout) of youth athletes by 15 years of age.6
The kids who do keep moving early in life are those who are healthier amongst us as they age. With the USA obesity rate increasing to 42% in 2021, we must focus on encouraging and keeping our youth active and participating in healthy activities to address this concern.
“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” – Benjamin Franklin
The goal of this program is to target prevention and in so doing creating a positive, active experience for our youth. The youth-athletes who participated in trial-based programs, similar to what we are offering, had better injury prevention outcomes.7 This makes sense because the number 1 factor for injury is previous injury – not necessarily in the same area of previous injury. This becomes even more true within specific types of injuries such as ACL tears. Combining these risk factors, athletes younger than 25 years of age who return to sport have a secondary ACL injury rate of 23%.8 Even adequate sleep is a factor in injury occurrence. Athletes who had ≤8 hours of sleep are 1.7 times more likely to have an injury compared to those who slept ≥8 hours. For every additional grade level, an athlete is 1.4 times at greater risk of injury.9 We highlight these seemingly unrelated aspects to emphasize a better, global approach in assessing and providing care for our youth.
Hopefully this quick information highlights the importance of needing a more thorough sport physical to truly help our youth in their sport-related activities.
This is your traditional Sport Physical noted above.
The Functional Movement Screen came about to help identify large movement limitations or flaws for a person – not athlete specific. The FMS works to identify movement patterns which may produce pain for a person needing to be addressed before moving onto more advanced assessments such as the Y-Balance Test or Functional Capacity Screen.
The Y-Balance Test is performed after the FMS to help identify movement limitations, or asymmetries, between the left and right side of the body, as well as the upper body from the lower body. The Y-Balance Test identifies limitations in how the core and limbs are communicating and moving under bodyweight loads. This is a vital component for rotational and explosive athletes.
The Functional Capacity Screen assesses four key controls: Movement, Postural, Explosive, and Impact. These controls identify the athlete’s ability to climb, carry, jump, and run respectively. We break these controls down, within this order, after assessing the FMS and Y-Balance tests. This allows us to be highly accurate and efficient, producing reliable and valuable data to address an athlete’s limitation. Then we work to keep them healthy and injury free in congruence with their strength coach, personal trainer, sport coach, parent/guardian, and school system.
$340 paid in full at the time of initial visit.
We believe in keeping up with a student’s health during and out-of-season. This package includes an initial 1-hr assessment, and 3 follow-up visits within the given year. These visits are designed to assess, monitor, track, and improve the student-athlete’s athletic prowess towards preventing injury.
You can schedule directly online. If you are scheduling for a first visit, please select East or West Wichita location. All our doctors are trained in this system; however, if you have a preferred doctor, please select their picture. From here, select New Patient which will direct you to a 1-hour time slot.
For follow up visits, your child’s doctor will guide you toward 40-minute appointment intervals.
Click on any item below to learn more about sports physicals and student athletics.
Competitive youth sports have exploded over the last 15 years. For better or worse, at this point it does not look to be slowing down. As a result of this, youth injury rates have skyrocketed. There are many factors to this. However, healthcare has known that in-sport volume is a plague to injuries. More than 25-year-old research has consistently been validated with pitch count in youth baseball and softball, but no guidelines have ever been implemented to modify a young athlete’s pitch count.10 There are many factors into why this is; however, it does not change the fact that improved programming needs to occur to help prevent injuries. There are ways we can improve this ever-increasing injury rate that we will address for your youth-athlete in the Advanced Sport Physical.
We do believe, there is an important picture to paint, brought to light by Eric Cressey, a highly sought-after strength and performance coach to some of the best prospective pro baseball players in the country.
Imagine, you have the potential to buy two Ferraris. One has 200,000 miles and the other has no miles; you are going to buy the no mileage vehicle. It’s simple, it will have the same performance capacity but less wear and tear. Think of this regarding high school athletes looking into college sports and college recruits. If two athletes are of equal caliber but one has been plagued with injuries, then a college recruit will be more willing to recruit the student-athlete with less wear and tear.
Now stating this, injury rates are not the only factor college recruits investigate. However, this simple picture does highlight what might be going through a college scout’s head when identifying which student-athlete to pursue. Understanding and preventing wear and tear on our youth-athletes is not only good for overall health but also a way to decrease athletic injury and improve athletic performance.
We go above and beyond with our Advanced Sport Physical. We look for markers which may indicate an athlete’s overall mobility score. Through this process we can identify if an athlete is not only predisposed to certain types of injuries, but also exercises, guidance, and care to help prevent injuries from occurring.
This incidence of different body types and flexibility11 capabilities are noted within the injury rates.
Hypermobility is more common than many, including healthcare providers, might realize. It is significantly under diagnosed. Roughly 34% of youth are hypermobile.13 This is an important marker to identify within a youth-athlete due so that stretching and lifting programs may then accommodate as such. Generic programs, which have all youth doing the same stretching and lifting programs, should be abolished. 34% of youth-athlete’s program potential should be very different than their peers – even within the same sport. The athletes who participate in neuromuscular training programs have less injury complications than those of SHAM programs.13
According to the Beighton Scale, children under the age of 16 must be able to achieve 6 out of these 9 points to be considered hypermobile. If your child or youth-athlete can perform 6 of these 9 points, their stretch- to-strength programming ratio should potentially be different than their peers.
Sport Physicals need to move beyond the current simple health check looking for red flags. Identifying red flags are important; however, that is merely a health check.
Just like our pain auditing protocol for patients experiencing pain, our sport physicals have their own protocol to address red flags for specific movement limitations. Throughout these visits, we will focus primarily on movement quality, not pain patterns. If a student-athlete is getting pain, we will halt visits until pain is eliminated. If we do not program as such, your child may be at an increased risk for injury which is the opposite of what we are working toward.
Content written by Dr. Keith Sparks, DC | Selective Functional Movement Assessment Certified (SFMA) Certified, Functional Movement Screen (FMS) Certified, Y-Balance Test (YBT) Certified
Content Reviewed by Dr. Rachel Sparks, DC | Doctorate of Chiropractic from Cleveland Chiropractic College-Kansas City
1 Pfeifer CE, Sacko RS, Ortaglia A, et al. FUNCTIONAL MOVEMENT SCREEN™ in YOUTH SPORT PARTICIPANTS: EVALUATING the PROFICIENCY BARRIER for INJURY. Int J Sports Phys Ther. 2019;14(3):436-444. doi:10.26603/ijspt20190436
2 Plisky PJ, Rauh MJ, Kaminski TW, Underwood FB. Star Excursion Balance Test as a predictor of lower extremity injury in high school basketball players. J Orthop Sports Phys Ther. 2006;36(12):911-919.
3 Butler RJ, Lehr ME, Fink ML, Kiesel KB, Plisky PJ. Dynamic balance performance and noncontact lower extremity injury in college football players: an initial study. Sports Health. 2013;5(5):417-422.
4 Smith CA, Chimera NJ, Warren M. Association of y balance test reach asymmetry and injury in division I athletes. Medicine and science in sports and exercise. 2015;47(1):136-141.
5 Adirim, T.A., Cheng, T.L. Overview of Injuries in the Young Athlete. Sports Med 33, 75–81 (2003). https://link.springer.com/article/10.2165/00007256-200333010-00006
6 Breuner CC. Avoidance of burnout in the young athlete. Pediatr Ann. 2012;41(8):335-339. doi:10.3928/00904481-20120727-14
7 Zwolski C, Quatman-Yates C, Paterno MV. Resistance Training in Youth: Laying the Foundation for Injury Prevention and Physical Literacy. Sports Health. 2017;9(5):436-443. doi:10.1177/1941738117704153
8 Wiggins AJ, Grandhi RK, Schneider DK, Stanfield D, Webster KE, Myer GD. Risk of Secondary Injury in Younger Athletes After Anterior Cruciate Ligament Reconstruction: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Am J Sports Med. 2016;44(7):1861-1876. doi:10.1177/0363546515621554
9 Milewski MD, Skaggs DL, Bishop GA, et al. Chronic lack of sleep is associated with increased sports injuries in adolescent athletes. J Pediatr Orthop. 2014;34(2):129-133. doi:10.1097/BPO.0000000000000151
10 Feeley BT, Schisel J, Agel J. Pitch Counts in Youth Baseball and Softball: A Historical Review. Clin J Sport Med. 2018;28(4):401-405. doi:10.1097/JSM.0000000000000446
11 Konopinski MD, Jones GJ, Johnson MI. The effect of hypermobility on the incidence of injuries in elite-level professional soccer players: a cohort study. Am J Sports Med. 2012;40(4):763-769. doi:10.1177/0363546511430198.
12 Sobhani-Eraghi A, Motalebi M, Sarreshtehdari S, Molazem-Sanandaji B, Hasanlu Z. Prevalence of joint hypermobility in children and adolescents: A systematic review and meta-analysis. J Res Med Sci. 2020;25:104. Published 2020 Nov 26. doi:10.4103/jrms.JRMS_983_19
13 Foss KDB, Thomas S, Khoury JC, Myer GD, Hewett TE. A School-Based Neuromuscular Training Program and Sport-Related Injury Incidence: A Prospective Randomized Controlled Clinical Trial. J Athl Train. 2018;53(1):20-28. doi:10.4085/1062-6050-173-16
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If you are in the Wichita, KS, area and are having frustrations, complications, or stagnant results with care, then contact us for in-person help with our unique healthcare approaches. If you are not within the greater Wichita, KS metro, we have created amazing Telehealth and Video Programs to provide you the same high-quality care. Contact our professional chiropractic staff at our East Wichita clinic or West Wichita clinic about possible treatments for your muscle, joint, nutrition, and health-related concerns today.
