Question: What does Chiropractic Care and Massage have to do with learning to riding a bike?
Answer: It is all about the nervous system.
Take yourself back to childhood for a minute…and imagine you’re learning to ride a bike for the very first time🚴🏿. You’ve got to:
- balance,
- look ahead,
- pedal,
- steer – all at the same time, and If you’ve never done it before, it’s hard!
In our brain there is a complex process happening. Think of our brain like a big bunch of cables (nerves), which connect together to communicate messages around our whole body.
When we learn something new, our nerves create a circuit by connecting different nerve endings together. The brain then remembers this circuit and runs it again when we need to do the same things. Just like a computer, running the same program, we create a circuit in our brain to do every activity. Riding a bike, typing, reading and even thinking. It means we can quickly re-do an activity once we have learned it, rather than starting the learning again each time. Clever huh 😮! We even have nerve circuits for how we experience pain.
So What’s All This Got To Do With Chiropractic and Massage?
When you learn to ride a bike, you’re giving your brain a new circuit. It might take a while to create it, and it will likely be challenging to begin with, but the more you keep running through that circuit again and again, the easier it gets! This is why, when we stop riding a bike for a while then try it again years later, we might be rusty at first, but it is never as hard as it was the very first time we tried.
Chiropractic and massage work in a very similar way. We’re teaching your brain a new circuit or reminding it of an old one – how to move, respond and react in ways that your body either didn’t do before, or has forgotten how to do! A single adjustment can reboot your nervous system to remembering an old circuit and override pain. A massage can reconnect the brain with how our muscles should be working.
Through chiropractic and massage, we remind our brain of the healthy nerve firing patterns that it would have used before an injury/repetitive use/poor posture and stress. This helps our nerves fire more normally and in a healthy way again. We often recommend more than one session of care as it can takes time to retrain the nervous system. Just like riding a bike.
So next time you are out cycling or teaching a little one to learn to ride a bike, think about what the nerve system is doing? It is incredible 😊
