If you’ve been a patient in our office for a while you would have likely heard me say “it’s better to wear out rather than rust out” or “move it or lose it”.  In terms of movement, it’s important to keep moving to help your brain and body work at its best. Indeed the lack of movement among many people these days (AKA a ‘sedentary’ lifestyle) is becoming so concerning that in some circles ‘sitting’ has been coined as the new ‘smoking’ [3].

For those with acute pain (or injury), barring any significant injury to your tissue or bone, movement is one of the best things to restore and heal.  In fact, some research is pointing to the brain not getting proper information and being the underlying cause to the problem [2]. Often people experience pain, but following a chiropractic correction it instantly decreases and subsides. Why? Well simply put, in these particular cases the brain has a poor understanding of what the body is doing. So pain signals are exchanged when, in these cases, they are actually an inappropriate response to what is truly going on with the joints and tissues.

Decreased movement of an area of injury, can cause difficulty for the brain when it is sending or receiving messages for that muscle group, joint, or to other areas of your body. It is therefore important to keep up regular, correct movements to help your brain communicate accurate messages to your body. Proper joint mechanics are controlled by your brain, which means poor joint movement signals can cause the brain to make poor movement decisions and ‘wear and tear’ becomes more likely. Just like a car wheel alignment that is not in the right place, there will be more uneven wear and tear on the tyres. 

Even if you have no pain, regular chiropractic maintenance helps to keep your mobility at its best and your joints working optimally [1].

Questions for Ed about this? Book a Complimentary Chat and find out more, or if you’re already one of our patients simply ask him at your next appointment!

1. Haavik, H., Murphy, B. (2011). Subclinical neck pain and the effects of cervical manipulation on elbow joint position sense. Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics, 34(2), pp 88-97.
2. Lelic et al. (2016). Manipulation of dysfunctional spinal joints affects sensorimotor integration in the pre-frontal cortex: A brain source localisation study. Neural Plasticity, V2016.
3. Merchant, N. (2013). Sitting is the smoking of our generation. [online] Harvard Business Review. Available at: https://hbr.org/2013/01/sitting-is-the-smoking-of-our-generation.