There is nothing quite like the exhilaration of riding your motorcycle along your favourite road or track. If the rubber side goes up, you may bounce. A motorcycle injury is never fun. Your body can either absorb the energy in the muscles, tendons and ligaments or break bones. Even after your bones have healed there can be pain or restriction coming from your injured muscles and tendons. This is where we can help in your rehabilitation.
For other riders, they suffer for less obvious reasons. The more common reasons that riders come in to have treatment for include: lower back ache, pain and stiffness. Neck and shoulder pain after long sessions on the bike. Some riders have elbow and forearm pain that can make twisting the throttle or using your clutch painful. Knees can be sore because of the strong contractions involved in changing direction.
An Osteopath helps back aches and pains with a combination of loosening the back muscle tension and gentle techniques where you are in control of the forces to get the joints moving again. No sudden, unexpected manoeuvres. Back problems for a motorcyclist often occur in the “transport” or straight sections of a ride between the “twisty roads”.
Very often problems have knock on effects. When you have spasm in one area, the sections above and below the site are forced to take on some of the duties. They compensate for the injured area. If things go on for a while, those areas start to complain and can get sore. In the case of the lower back, the thigh and hip muscles can get overused. When the thigh muscles get tight, it can affect the knees.
When your shoulders and neck are sore it can make head checks hard. As well as that it may make heavy braking and cornering difficult. This affects your safety, let alone taking away your enjoyment. Sometimes it can give you headaches. Working on the muscles around the neck, gently stretching and getting you to contract and relax the muscles helps mobilize the little but very important neck joints.
If you have sore elbows, it could be a number of things. You may have old injuries or your posture on the bike. This is where squeezing the tank is very important. It means that you take more of your body weight on your lower limbs as opposed to supporting your weight on your wrists.
Your body is like your motorcycle in that it is a physical structure and mechanism. If it gets knocked out of shape or alignment it needs tweaking, tuning or maintenance to bring things back to normal. Things don’t get better by themselves. In fact they can progress and get worse. It’s important to do something at the right time as opposed to leaving them. This is very important with a new injury. We help to return to you to where you where before the injury. In the case where you have had an injury for a long time, it takes time to help the body know what normal feels like. There are times when consistent treatment over a longer period helps to make you feel even better than you have been in a long time. You actually feel fantastic.
You may be affected by something other than this when you ride your bike. If you have any questions about what we can help with please ask us.
