They Had Stopwatches. We Have Lives.

The first chiropractic study that really woke me up wasn’t about back pain.

Or asthma.

Or mood.

When I was in chiropractic college, I sat through a lot of research that sounded like this:

“Here’s a study showing chiropractic helped back pain.”

“Here’s one on asthma.”

“Here’s one on mood.”

And on and on.

Yawn.

Not because those things don’t matter. They do.

But they all seemed to start with a problem and ask the same kind of question:

Did chiropractic treat it?

Then one professor taught us about a study on two groups of athletes.

One group received chiropractic care. The other group did not.

These weren’t injured athletes being treated for a problem. They were athletes without symptoms, and the researchers measured how they performed in things like balance, agility, reaction time, power, and coordination.

Both groups improved.

But overall, the athletes receiving chiropractic improved more.

That one made me sit up.

Not because I suddenly thought chiropractic was for making athletes faster.

It was because, for the first time, I could see the same slice of life with chiropractic and without it... measured.

The ability was already theirs

The researchers called what they were measuring the athletes’ “inherent ability.”

That phrase stayed with me.

The ability was already theirs.

Chiropractic didn’t put it there.

What caught me was seeing more of that ability show up with chiropractic in the picture.

And that opened a much bigger thought for me.

Performance isn’t something separate from an athlete’s life.

It’s what they do.

A runner runs. A gymnast balances. A golfer coordinates movement. An athlete’s life just happens to include things researchers can time, score, and measure.

They have stopwatches.

The rest of us usually don’t.

Most of life never gets measured

But we perform too.

We perform our lives every day.

A firefighter at a call.

A librarian helping someone find what they need.

A mom doing what moms do.

Nobody is standing nearby with a stopwatch measuring how well we got out of bed, carried the groceries, played with our kids, worked, walked, thought, reacted, or simply moved through the day.

Most of it never gets timed, scored, or measured.

We just live it.

That’s what this little athlete study helped me see differently all those years ago.

The point isn’t athletic performance.

The point is life.

Chiropractic doesn’t put “better” into you.

It’s there to help you more fully express the life you’re already living.

The research
Lauro A, Mouch B. Chiropractic effects on athletic ability. J Chiropractic Research and Clinical Investigation. 1991;6(4):84–87.