Dr Chalmers Path to Pro - The Most Important Thing for Female Athletes
Concussions are more common in female sports than people often think, especially in activities like soccer, volleyball, and basketball. A lot of these injuries come from falls and the way the head moves during impact, not just from direct hits. That’s why building neck strength is so important it helps reduce the risk by slowing down head movement when athletes fall or get knocked around.
Another simple way to support brain health is by adding creatine. It’s been shown to help the brain recover faster after a concussion and can be a helpful supplement for active kids and teens. Along with regular strength training and good chiropractic care to keep the body aligned, these small steps can go a long way in protecting young athletes.
Highlights of the Podcast
00:04 – Female athletes and concussions
01:30 – The key solution: Neck strength
04:23 – Why female athletes get concussions
05:30 – Creatine for brain protection
07:34 – How to take creatine (practical tips)
09:06 – ACL injury risk and pelvic alignment
09:45 – Final takeaway
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:00:04] So when we start talking about the difference in functional athletes and what people need and different exercises and things like this, usually you break all those down into the sport. Like, you know, we were specifically talking about female athletes. We're talking about softball, baseball, I'm sorry, softball soccer, basketball, whatever. All the training is different. There's one thing that all female athletes need to focus on and all coaches and parents need to really kind of recognize and focus on for all female athletics is the strength than that. Uh, when we talk about, everybody talks about concussions and they immediately start thinking about football and I go, oh my gosh, people who play football have giant numbers of concussions. And, you know, the pro athletes and NFL, it's concussion, concussion. The number one place that we see concussions is in female sports. So first of all, when start talking about this, let's kind of dial this back and be like, okay, how do we get concussions? You don't get a concussion from hitting the head. That's not. Really where it comes in. What happens when the brain hits the skull, and the way that the skull and the brain collide is that the head starts to move faster than, so the outside of the skull moves faster than the inside of the school where the brain is can move. So think of it like this, you've got a shell with a bunch of fluid surrounding an object in the center. And as the things move, if they move slowly enough, these things never touch. If they move really fast, it'll slam into it.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:01:30] And then the bigger problem is that then when you get to the other end where it's here and it whips back you get the other side it's called a contracoup concussion so we get hit here and then you know as we're translating over here the skill slams into the brain we get to this point and it whips and as it whiffs back the skull then hits the brain on that side. That's where a lot of this comes from. Well, the easiest way to reduce this isn't with new helmets or new fancy things, strengthen the neck. Because what we're trying to do is we're trying to slow down the translation of the skull and the head. So if you get hit here and you've got a big thick neck all that force has to go into moving the skull through the neck all energy can dissipate into the neck musculature and the structure and it can radically decrease movement of the head and thus it can decrease uh impact to this to the brain or thus decreasing concussions this is why it's so radically important like one of the things that you know i don't care i've got guys in here on fighting sports so Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, you know, you've got boxing, you got karate, taekwondo, regardless of what it is. If you're gonna be taking head strikes or people are gonna be knocking you down, the number one thing we start doing is we start strengthening the neck. Now, the best tool to strengthen the neck is the iron neck. It is by far the best I've ever seen to do this. It's a little bit pricey, I think it's worth it. If you guys, if you have female athletes, if you are. Your guys, you just don't want concussions.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:03:05] If you, you know, whatever, strengthening the neck is going to radically decrease your concussion force and the damage from your concussions so if you get a big strong neck and you get at level two concussion, that could have been a level four. In my case, I'm alive because of my neck. When I got my car actually shadow my car with my face, broke my left foot, my left femur rolled my car over several times. It was a not a great day for me. Um had me life cut out of the car, life flighted to Parkland while I'm kind of coming in and out the head neurologist came down to figure out why I wasn't dead and when he saw my neck he was like oh that makes sense he's like that's why he's alive so yeah which is kind of funny because we talked about later the size of my neck saved my life in the car wreck but it's slowly killing me because it's adding to my sleep apnea issues so I mean double-edged sword but that's one of those things we got to really start to recognize and start pouring into If we want our athletes, specifically our female athletes, to have less concussions, we need to strengthen their neck. Now, this does not mean their neck needs to be this big. Like, you're not gonna find a 15-year-old girl with a neck this big, so it is what it is. But if we start strengthening the neck and thus reducing the damage from these falls and from these hits, it'll help tremendously.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:04:23] One of the things that people don't recognize is that we look at volleyball, basketball, and soccer and some of the top places where female athletes get their concussions and the question is always you know well how come how many girls are getting hurt in these sports? First of all lots of girls play those three sports so there is a number factor we kind of have to factor into that but two they fall down a lot. It's not that someone's hitting them in the head. It's that when they fall down there, you know, a lot of these girls are five, two to six feet tall and your volleyball and basketball players are kind of taller. So what ends up happening is that you have a longer arm, a longer fall down rate. And when you hit the ground, the head whips back and forth and there's your concussion. So this is where a lot this stuff starts coming at. So if we're starting to strengthen the neck and The other big one that we know is that if these women have more creatinine in their system, when they have this translational impact, it radically increases the healing function. And so, you know, we have, we heal a lot faster for concussions. You can look this up. Just Google creatine neuroprotective for concussions, you know. I use a lot of national institute of health research. But you can, you can go through that and find it you know whatever level you like. There's a ton of research on it and it's all it was all incidental, which is my favorite kind of research. You're like, why did this group of people not have, you know, get better twice as fast than this group people? And we looked at him and we're like all of these were uncreative. Well, that's interesting. Let's specifically look at that. And we specifically looked at it like, oh, crap. It's really great for the brain. Fantastic.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:06:01] So that's one of those things of like, you know, we weren't we weren't going after this, but we found it incidentally. And so it was a really cool finding. That's my favorite research. So that's kind of what we found. So if you're wondering, should I let my kids, you know, take creatine, 100% chance that's yes. If they're working out in any sport, yes. And I've got a kid right now who had a really bad concussion, like altered the way he walked type of bad concussion. He got it riding his bike, had a helmet on, whole nine yards. But he got his concussion that was his football player that was really bad from riding his back. So It's kind of one of those questions of should all the kids be on this? Mine are. And my 10 and my 12 year old are. You know, my 12-year-olds, you know, they're both lifting. So they're, you now, as far as 10 and 12 year olds should. But, you know, it's more for neuroprotective function, you know, and so that's, that's one of my big pieces of it. It is a fantastic thing. And don't worry about taking too much. There's always an upper limit. But yeah, you're going to know usually what I tell people is roughly five grams for every 100 pounds of body weight. You're safe. You can most likely do more than that. But if we're looking for the, you know, across the board, easy thing. Yeah, so I don't measure mine, I probably take 20 grams a day, somewhere in there. I just scoop it out with a spoon and toss it my in my drinks. And I just that's how I take mine. Um.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:07:34] We put it we the one that we have in the office it'll be on the website maybe into next week uh that one we use for baking a lot uh so we can put it in cookie dough balls we can put it and protein balls we could put it muffins you can put pancakes you can put it on and pretty much everything um so like when we're working with athletes we're like oh man i'm trying to you know gain mass but stay lean and i want to eat you know Good tasty food. Just put it in the food. If it's a high enough quality and it's the right grind and the right texture, it'll mix in really, really well. It's kind of funny because when I look at my proteins and the stuff that we're going to bring on, I look for obviously chemical functionality, then everything has to be quantum functionally set so that it works through a quantum state. But then how well will this mix with things when we're trying to bake with it? Because a lot of the proteins that we take in. We use in baking. So, you know, it's one of those things that like a lot of the recipes we have that we use have are all high protein, they're all set up that way. So this is, you know, people always ask me like, how is it that you fix diabetes eating cookie dough and ice cream? Well, it because you make it differently. It's amazing. In my opinion, some of the stuff tastes as good or better than normal stuff. But that's just how you do it. So if you've got female athletes who are having trouble gaining mass, if they're having trouble, you know, if you're worried about concussions, which you should be not like stay awake at night worried about it.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:09:06] But you should at least be on your mind of I have a female athlete who's going to be doing x, y and z, she's gonna be falling down. So the two things that we need to recognize is that one, she is going to run the risk of concussion. So we need you to do the things to support that creatine is a great one strength in the next a great One. And if she's going to fall down, her hips are going to get out and that's going to push her in a very, very, a real way into damage to the ACL knee injuries, because the way the pelvis directly affects the ACL. So those two things you gotta keep in effect. So the ACL thing, get into a chiropractor who understands pelvic function. If all they do is put them on their side and roll them, they're not doing pelvic function, pubic synthesis work, SI work, stuff like that. I like drop tables. You don't have to use them, but that's my favorite. So if you have female athletes that are not going to get dressed at a regular basis, you definitely need to get them into a Cairo Doesn't have to be me but somebody who understands, you know, what's going on with the neck? What's going out with the pelvis? But yeah, so if you had female athletes and you're worried about concussions, you worry about their brain function that type of thing Strengthen the neck creatin obviously sleeps a big one You know, there's all sorts of hormonal stuff we do with this But you know the easy things that everybody can do take a little bit of creatine and strengthen that neck. You guys have any questions, hit us up, questions@ChalmersWellness.com or drop them in the comments or do what you guys always do, just call the office. All right, you guys have a nice day. Thanks for your time.
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Dr. Matt Chalmers
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