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Denver, CO – In this video you will discover neck pain relief stretches to avoid, and some of the worst exercises for neck pain. Neck muscle pain relief exercises to avoid include some things you’re likely already doing on a daily basis. You can be doing all the right things, but you need to be aware of the worst neck pain relief exercises and habits that might be hindering your recovery. Nothing can ruin your day quite like neck exercises making your pain worse. If you’re looking for neck pain relief near me, your best bet is to stop these neck exercises, stretches and positions.
Chances are good that you’re doing one of these things and it’s either causing your neck pain or contributing to the slowdown of your recovery. The truth is we do a lot of these things and we don’t even realize it, but if you’re doing them, I want to bring it to your attention right now in this video and make you aware of it so you can speed up your neck pain recovery process.
Hi, I’m Dr. John Brockway. I’m a chiropractor in Denver, Colorado, and what this channel is about is helping you to stretch, strengthen, and stabilize your body so that you can move without pain and get back to life again. Now in this video I’m going to briefly tell you about how to identify those things that are causing you to slow down your neck pain recovery process, certain positions and certain exercises so you’ll be aware of them and so you’ll cut these out or minimize how often that you’re doing them.
Now before I do, I’m going to get you briefly acquainted with some of the normal neck anatomy in order to better understand what it’s that may be causing or contributing to what’s going on with your neck pain recovery process. As this video is not going to be exhaustive, it’s going to include just the top 10 things that I see daily, but these are things that are going to help you out in your recovery. I’m going to briefly show you the normal anatomy of the neck and then we’ll get right into it. It’s really important to understand the normal anatomy because this video is not going to be exhaustive of all the ways that your neck pain recovery process might be hindered, but I want to make you aware of normal anatomy so you can start making good decisions for yourself. So normally there are seven bones that are in the cervical spine or the neck.
Most of them are separated by this cushioning material called a disc, and this is really good for helping out with compressive loads. The last thing we’re going to be looking at is what’s called the facet joints, and that’s the hinge joint right back here, and this helps us to largely bend our head forward and extend our head backwards like this. Alright, let’s get right into it. So the first offender is sleeping on your stomach. Look, I get it, it’s comfortable you’ve been doing it ever since you were a baby, but it is no bueno for your neck. Let me show you exactly what’s going on whenever we do sleep on our stomach. As you can see from the spine model here, our neck is turned. We’re not in a very good position and we’re holding that position for six to eight hours. The other way that I like to put it is I have my patients walk up to a wall.
I tell ’em, turn your head to the side now go ahead and hold it like that for six to eight hours. I think you understand why this is a bad idea for your neck. Now it’s only fair that I give you my best recommendations as well. In a perfect world, you’re going to be sleeping flat on your back with a properly supportive pillow. Short of that lying on your side is also acceptable with a properly supportive pillow behind your neck and one in between your knees. Okay, so the next offender is reading in bed and who doesn’t like to read right before bed? But the reason why this is bad, just remember that spinal anatomy that we showed you prior, whenever we’re reading in bed, more often than not what I see is patients lying flat on their back. Their heads are going to be tipped like this and we’re going to have a couple pillows propped up behind our neck, and this is really bad for our neck. This straightens out the nice beautiful curve that should be in the neck that really stretches out the muscles into the backside and is really tightening up the muscles into the front.
Now, I don’t necessarily want you to cut this habit out, but we can modify it. So in an ideal world, what you’re going to do is you’re going to be seated next to the headboard. You’re going to have a pillow behind your back. You’re going to have your knees bent, your feet flat on the bed and you’re going to use your thighs in order to hold up your book as a resting point. This is going to allow you to have a much better position for your neck, a whole lot less stress going on, and be sure to look with your eyes rather than tipping your head in order to read from the pages of the book.
Okay, so next up on the list is improper ergonomics. Now I’m largely talking about work ergonomics in this circumstance. Let’s take this for an example, a laptop use. It’s pretty much impossible to have good body mechanics and good posture and not stress out your neck whenever you’re working on a laptop as is. Now, if you do have a laptop, there’s something very simple you can do in order to help to have better body mechanics and it simply comes in the form of having an external keyboard If you want to step it up even more, you can also get an external mouse. You can have a laptop stand, you can have a sit stand desk. You can also have an anti-fatigue mat.
Now, if these are of interest to you and you like the idea of maybe having your boss pick up the tab for all of these things, be sure to check out my video on best ergonomic positions for neck pain relief right here.
Okay, so next up is texting and phone use. I get it, we all have one. It’s a normal part of our lives, but there’s definitely some things that we can do in order to help protect our neck. So let’s get right to it. Texting. Here’s more often than not, what I see heads down and we’re kind of doing this number rather than putting our face to our phone, let’s bring our phone to our face and text just like this. Now when we’re talking about talking on the phone, a lot of times kind of looks like this, again, not great for our neck. Here’s what I’d rather do. Let’s put that thing on speakerphone. Start talking right into it. If you do have to send a text message to someone, learn how to use the talk to text function, then we’re not spending all day trying to type an email on your phone for something that really should have been taken care of while you were at the computer at home using good ergonomics.
Okay, number five is sit-ups. Now it’s rumored that some branches of the US military have outright banned this exercise, and the reason for that is sound and it’s mostly because not only is this bad for your lower back, it also compromises your neck. And the reason for that is that our neck is in a flexed position for an extended period of time and it’s really not great for the neck or the supporting structures. Now, I don’t want to leave you hanging. There are some additional things that you can do that are still going to get you that six pack AB without compromising your neck. Some of those exercises include crunches, and we’re going to do this with our arms by our side and we’re not going to compromise our neck. So just arms by the side of support and we’re going to come up. We can also do plank exercises, we can do bird dogs and we can also do leg lifts.
Okay, so next up is a commonly prescribed exercise amongst physical medicine providers. This is the chin tuck. Now there’s a few different reasons why I really don’t care for this. The first is whenever I have neck pain and I’m performing this exercise, this hurts me so bad. The second reason is this also can compress your windpipe, making it difficult to breathe. And the last reason why I don’t really care for this is that this causes compression and shearing of your spine, which aren’t very good things.
Now, short of that, what you can do instead are extension exercises with resistance. You can check on my other video here that goes into more detail, but here’s what that looks like briefly. We just take our hands, we’ll use that as resistance, and we’re doing an extension exercise like this. Here’s what that looks like. Perfect. Okay, so next up is hyper extension exercises specifically for the neck.
Here’s what that looks like. Now, the reason why I don’t really care for this is a few different reasons. Firstly, this causes quite a bit of stretch and strain into the neck. If you have an unstable bone that’s in there or an unstable segment, this is generally not a good idea. The other reason is this can cause jamming of the facet joints. The facet joints are largely what control our ability to flex our neck and extend it backwards. And lastly, if there’s any sort of dizziness going on, or you might not even know that you have a dizziness issue until you start performing this exercise, and that’s really not the best time to find out that you have any sort of dizziness issues. Now, instead of doing these things, what I prefer are the neck extension exercises with resistance. Again, we just use our hands for resistance and it’s going to be looking up just like this.
We’re using our hands for resistance just like this.
We can also utilize a rolled up towel when we place that behind our neck. This is going to be something we lie on flat and it’s going to help to get the curve into the neck, take the pressure off those discs and off those facet joints and allow you to have a very similar benefit without compromising the neck. Okay, so the next exercise that we should avoid is neck sight bending and pulling our head. Now our head weighs about 10 to 12 pounds and that’s plenty of resistance just to simply take our head to the side and to have a nice gentle stretch whenever we’re adding our arm and hand in the form of getting additional stretch. It really can be compromising for the neck and this can cause additional issues or an additional injury. So again, I simply recommend utilizing just gravity and taking our head to the side and getting a nice gentle stretch. Being sure to do that nice and slow. That’s the key to all things good whenever it comes to taking care of your neck.
Okay, so next up is neck rolls. Let me show you what that looks, likes, kind of this number. I remember doing this in PE class when I was in fifth grade, and this is really not great for the neck. I see my wife doing this a lot. She works from the computer and she’s always talking about her neck, giving her problems and things she’s looking for to get relief. And she’s doing these quite a bit. Now, the reason why this is a bad idea has to deal with, it can really face cause facet implication or jamming of those facets into the back. It is just really not a good situation for you to find yourself in. Instead, here’s what I would rather recommend just doing simple flexion and extension exercises, rotation and again, side bending.
Okay, so the last offender is self cracking your own neck. Now, I still have nightmares to this day about a friend of ours in church who would find himself doing this during the service. And not only was it a distraction, but I was genuinely concerned about his health as he was doing this. Now, I can’t fault you for doing this. The reason why this happens more often than not is that there’s a bone that’s stuck inside of your neck and it’s asking for some attention and it usually comes in the form of movement. Now, when people are self cracking their own necks, what’s happening is that the body is smart. The segment above and the segment below the one that’s stuck, start moving too much. So what ends up happening is as we try to crack our own neck, we’ll often get that sound and that pop and that release and we’ll have some temporary relief, but it’s actually popping that segment that’s moving too much already and this is why that pain relief can be.
So what we really want to do instead is find a licensed professional in the physical medicine realm like a physical therapist or a chiropractor, to help you out with getting those segments moving properly. I hope you found this video helpful. If you have any questions or comments, please be sure to leave them in the comment section below. Also, be sure to check out our video here on Proper Neck Ergonomics.
