Full Swing Healthcare in Jacksonville uses dry needling as a frontline tool for sports injuries. Sports-related trigger points, the tight, irritable knots that form around overloaded or injured tissue, don’t resolve on their own, even after the structural injury heals. That’s often the real reason athletes feel like they never fully get back to where they were.
Every Sport Creates Its Own Patterns
Years of treating athletes have taught us that each sport produces predictable trigger point patterns, and knowing those patterns lets us work faster and more precisely.
- Golfers: paraspinal and rotator cuff trigger points from the rotational demands of the swing. Dr. Muren is TPI Certified, which gives him a specific framework for evaluating the physical limitations behind golf-related injuries, and that translates well to other rotational sport athletes too.
- Runners: TFL, IT band, and calf patterns from repetitive hip flexion loading.
- Tennis & pickleball players: forearm extensor trigger points from grip and racket mechanics.
Knowing what to look for means we spend less time searching and more time fixing.
Getting Back vs. Getting Better
Rest manages pain. It doesn’t always fix the underlying problem. A baseball pitcher from Jacksonville University came to us mid-season with posterior shoulder pain and a measurable drop in velocity. His MRI was completely normal. The culprit was a cluster of trigger points in his infraspinatus and posterior capsule, built up from accumulated overuse over a long season. Ice and rest were keeping him on the mound, but not solving anything.
After two dry needling sessions targeting the posterior rotator cuff musculature, he was pitching without restriction the following week. Trigger points from overuse don’t respond to rest the way structural injuries do. They need to be directly addressed.
We Look at the Whole Picture
Dry needling is rarely the only tool we reach for. For most athletes, we pair it with a chiropractic evaluation of the joint mechanics driving the overuse pattern in the first place.
A runner with an SI joint restriction that’s subtly altering her stride will keep overloading the TFL and IT band, and keep coming back with the same problem, if we only needle the muscle without correcting the root cause. Addressing both layers is what gets people back and keeps them there.