Maristow Chiropractic Clinic

23/03/2026

Massage guns! 🔫💪Where to buy and what to avoid!

21/03/2026

Kay is taking on a huge challenge later this May, joining the Westbury to Everest 2 team on an incredible adventure, trekking to Everest Base Camp 🏔️

Since last summer, the team has been training hard together 🥾while raising awareness and support for The Nestling Trust, a Wiltshire charity improving women and children’s health in remote areas of Nepal.

The team has fully self-funded the trip, with Maristow Chiropractic Clinic helping to cover some of the costs (and injury advice!), ensuring that all support and sponsorship goes directly towards raising awareness and supporting the charity.

Follow the team on their journey on their page in comments 👇

19/03/2026

Shoulder scans: explaining the black and white fuzz! #

11/03/2026

Lunchtime Wall Sit Challenge!✨

08/03/2026

On International Women’s Day, the clinic would like to thank the many amazing women past and present who have contributed to making the clinic the successful, welcoming and inclusive business it is today 💪 (There is a notable absence from a camera shy individual who does not go without thanks 😘)

06/03/2026

Footwear can make a huge different to foot and ankle aches and pains, but so can the laces!

02/03/2026

This is a book Kay often refers to in conversations: it’s about how and why our bodies respond physically to emotional tension. This review brilliantly outlines why it is a great reference:

I picked up this book because I've been stressed. Like, truly stressed. The kind where your shoulders live somewhere up around your ears and you can't remember the last time you took a deep breath just because. I'd heard Robert Sapolsky's name thrown around as "the guy who wrote the book on stress," and now I get why.

The title says it all, really. A zebra running from a lion gets stressed. Heart pounding, blood pumping, every system on high alert. But here's the thing: twenty minutes later, if it escapes, it's grazing calmly like nothing happened. The stress response saved its life, then turned off.

We humans? We get the same physiological response, but we turn it on for traffic jams. For mortgage payments. For that email we're afraid to open. And we stay in that state. We marinate in stress hormones. And over time, it destroys us.

Sapolsky's central argument is simple and devastating: our stress response evolved to solve short-term, physical crises. We're using it for long-term, psychological ones. And our bodies were not designed for that.

This thing is dense. Like, 500 pages of dense. But Sapolsky writes like he's talking to you over coffee, funny, irreverent, constantly circling back to remind you what he just taught you so you don't get lost. It's a textbook written by someone who actually wants you to understand.

He walks through every major body system and shows exactly what chronic stress does to it.

The Lessons That Stuck With Me

1. Stress isn't the event. It's your body's response to the event.
This sounds obvious, but Sapolsky breaks down the biology so clearly that you start to understand: the same stressful thing can affect two people completely differently based on their perception, their sense of control, and whether they have an outlet for their frustration. Control and predictability are everything.

2. We stress about status because we're still primates.
Sapolsky spent decades studying baboons. He saw that low-ranking baboons have worse stress profiles than high-ranking ones. Sound familiar? We're not so different. Our obsession with social standing, with comparisons, with "keeping up"—it's ancient wiring in a modern world.

3. The best stress relief is genuine connection.
This comes up again and again. Social support, real, deep, someone-you-can-cry-to support, is one of the most powerful buffers against stress-related disease. Not wine. Not distractions. People.

4. Exercise works because it completes the stress cycle.
When you run from a lion, your body mobilizes energy for movement. When you sit in traffic fuming, you have that same energy surge with nowhere to go. Exercise tricks your body into thinking you finished the fight. It's not just healthy, it's biologically necessary.

5. Some stress is good.
This was comforting. The right amount of stress (eustress, they call it) makes us stronger. It's only chronic, uncontrollable stress that destroys us. The goal isn't zero stress. The goal is recovery.

This is not a self-help book. There's a section at the end with coping strategies, but it's brief. Sapolsky is a scientist, not a life coach. The value here is understanding, deep, cellular-level understanding of what's happening inside you. And for me, that understanding was strangely calming. Knowing why my body does what it does made me feel less broken.

I underlined so many pages in this book that I stopped counting. I quoted it to friends until they told me to stop. I understood myself better after reading it, my anxiety, my physical symptoms, my weird habits, than I had after years of therapy (which I still recommend, by the way. Read this AND go to therapy.)

If you've ever wondered why your body feels the way it feels when your mind is struggling, read this book. It won't fix everything. But it will help you understand the animal you are, and maybe give that animal a little more grace.

I would rate it a 5 out of 5 Stars

BOOK: https://amzn.to/4aSSCzR

01/03/2026

Never too late!

80-year-old Natalie Grabow made history becoming the oldest woman ever to compete at the Ironman World Championship.

Believe it or not, she didn’t even learn to swim until she was 59. Proof that it’s never too late to start something new (and smash it).

22/02/2026

22/02/2026

Ev, who worked as our evening receptionist before leaving to start university was awarded her Judo black belt earlier this year. 🥋This weekend, she achieved a remarkable milestone by winning a gold medal 🥇at her first international competition. 🥋 The Clinic has been proud to sponsor Ev throughout her training while at university and with the Welsh national team.

17/02/2026

Friday massage appointments now available!

10/02/2026

What an incredible human 😎

Yesterday my Olympic dream did not finish the way I dreamt it would. It wasn’t a story book ending or a fairy tail, it was just life. I dared to dream and had worked so hard to achieve it. Because in Downhill ski racing the difference between a strategic line and a catastrophic injury can be as small as 5 inches.

I was simply 5 inches too tight on my line when my right arm hooked inside of the gate, twisting me and resulted in my crash. My ACL and past injuries had nothing to do with my crash whatsoever.

Unfortunately, I sustained a complex tibia fracture that is currently stable but will require multiple surgeries to fix properly.

While yesterday did not end the way I had hoped, and despite the intense physical pain it caused, I have no regrets. Standing in the starting gate yesterday was an incredible feeling that I will never forget. Knowing I stood there having a chance to win was a victory in and of itself. I also knew that racing was a risk. It always was and always will be an incredibly dangerous sport.

And similar to ski racing, we take risks in life. We dream. We love. We jump. And sometimes we fall. Sometimes our hearts are broken. Sometimes we don’t achieve the dreams we know we could have. But that is the also the beauty of life; we can try.

I tried. I dreamt. I jumped.

I hope if you take away anything from my journey it’s that you all have the courage to dare greatly. Life is too short not to take chances on yourself. Because the only failure in life is not trying.

I believe in you, just as you believed in me.

❤️LV