Which receives more tune-ups: your body or your bike?

With the cycling season approaching in Colorado, are you thinking about scheduling maintenance for your bike before maintaining your body? While it’s important to ensure the bike components are working properly–none of them will ever hurt or cause pain. Those components, left unaddressed may make the riding less efficient and the riding noises more audible, but I encourage you to consider your body your first mode of transportation. 

A little background: Before moving to the Boulder area I used to commute strictly on my bike–a Surly long-haul trucker– around Seattle, WA, with Ortlieb panniers on the back rack. One of my massage mentors, prior to teaching massage, was a bike mechanic and bike builder. When I would pedal across the city to his office, I’d request a “tune-up”. After the massage, I’d let him know I wanted to take it for a “test spin.” I referred to him as my mechanic. 

Like a mechanic, he understood how my body worked and could make informed soft refinements to help me recover more quickly and perform with less effort. 

In my massage practice at REVO in Boulder, I support cyclists like a mechanic modifying sessions to address the spectrum: facilitating rapid recovery from training, addressing frequent pain patterns of the hips/low back/neck, and optimizing tissue for greater efficiency.  Your body is a complex system that performs better with regular care to ensure effective power generation, minimize pain patterns, and speed up your recovery time. 

How many tune-ups do you need? It depends on your goals(upcoming race, want to send flagstaff or super james?), injury history etc. 

One simple way to think about this that I share with my clients and patients: care frequency is optimal when proportional to the expected outputs. Similarly, the more often a sports car is expected to operate at high performance levels—the more maintenance they require, not less. Think of your road bike or mountain bike, the more you ride it the more often it gets the TLC. For routine maintenance, massage 1-2x/month will help keep you riding hard, with less pain.