A Belgian chiropractor is in charge of the AC Milan sports medicine department

David Beckham can thank Milanello training regime for return to fold

As David Beckham emerged after a massage and an hour of Pilates on his last day at the renowned Milanello ‘laboratory’, he looked like a man who had just spent five months on a health farm rather than undergoing the most thorough training programme of his life.

By Jeremy Wilson
Published: 5:00PM BST 09 Jun 2009 Daily Telegraph

Best foot forward: thanks to the training regime at AC Milan, David Beckham believes ‘f’itness-wise, I’m the best I’ve been for a long time’ Photo: REUTERS

Tanned, lean and in perhaps the best physical condition of his career, he would again keep World Cup winners Ronaldinho and Gennaro Gattuso on the bench for AC Milan’s final match of the Serie A season before joining up with England and winning his 111th cap in Saturday’s 4-0 win against Kazakhstan.

With Wayne Rooney, Frank Lampard and Gareth Barry, he is one of only four players to have featured in each of the six World Cup qualifiers. The once perennial debate about whether he is worth his place in the England squad has also been quietly settled. So just how has Beckham moved out of the international wilderness almost three years ago to be such an integral part of Fabio Capello’s emerging squad?

The seeds for this latest and most unlikely revival were sown during two days that Beckham spent at the Milanello training base the week before Christmas with the club’s medical director Jean-Pierre Meersseman, a Belgian kinesiologist studying how the body functions and moves.

Beckham was taken through a series of tests and, while Meersseman concluded that the former England captain had the natural fitness to emulate Paolo Maldini by playing into his forties, he wanted to address three specific issues. Beckham’s aerobic capacity was considered to be one of his main assets but improvable while a special programme to strengthen his upper legs was also recommended.

However, AC Milan’s attention to detail was most underlined by the requirement that Beckham should wear a small support in his mouth until some dental work was completed to fill a tiny gap in a tooth. It was felt that this could be affecting his balance and, potentially, even his fitness. In the past, Milan had healed a back injury to Clarence Seedorf by fixing a similar dental problem. Click to read rest of article

 

“We have totally eliminated the use of pharmaceuticals of any kind”The chiropractor is top man and all the medical people take their lead from him.

With the NICE guidelines, It wont be long before the same happens here.

 

Richard Lanigan
Richard Lanigan

Richard Lanigan DC.BSc (Chiro) MSc( Health Promotion) was born in North London 1957 of Irish Parents and was educated in Ireland. Originally trained as a PE teacher, he moved to Denmark 1979, where a serious knee injury got him interested in rehabilitation and training methods. Richard founded Denmarks premier fitness centre "Sweat Shop" in 1982 and travelled all over the world to find how best to prepare athletes for competition. In 1984 he became fitness and rehab consultant to the Danish national badminton teams, handball teams and many football club sides. This approach to optimal performance is normal in 2010, however back in the early 80s it was very revolutionary, when stretching was limited to putting on your socks and knee injuries were immobilised for months in plaster.
Richard developed rehabilitation and fitness programmes for many of Denmark’s top athletes including Kirsten Larsten and Ib Frederickson, all England singles badminton champions in late 80s. "Team Denmark" hired him and his facilities to help prepare many of Denmarks athletes for the LA and Seoul Olympics. In 1990 he worked with Anya Anderson, Olympic gold medallist and voted worlds best female handball player at the Atlanta Olympics.
Richard advised Copenhagen’s main teaching (Rigs) Hospital on starting their rehab facility in 1984. In the same year he started working with Denmarks leading chiropractor; Ole Wessung DC, who demonstrated the effectiveness of Chiropractic in improving athletic performance, so impressed was Richard that in 1990 he moved back to England to study chiropractic at Anglo European College of Chiropractic and was student president for two years between 1993-1995.

Richard was awarded a fellowship by the College of Chiropractors in 2008, however in January 2009 Richard chose to stop using the title chiropractor in the UK because the British regulatory body for chiropractic (The GCC) had not maintained international standards of chiropractic education in the UK and including prescribing medicines in the chiropractic scope of practice, a fig leaf for incompetent UK chiropractors to hide behind. Richard has another clinic in Dublin and is a member of the Chiropractic Association of Ireland and the European Chiropractic Union.
Richard has four children Eloise aged 3, Molly and Isabelle aged five and the eldest Frederik aged twenty one is pursuing a career as a professional tennis player and has represented Norway in the Davis Cup in 2006 & 2007. None of Richards children have ever taken any medicine, www.vaccination.co.uk they eat healthy food, take lots of exercise and have their spines checked every month, www.familychiropractic.co.uk
Richard has had much experience working in the Cuban health service where Doctors are keen to incorporate drug free interventions (acupuncture and chiropractic) and prevention in their health care programmes www.henryreevebrigade.org

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