How To Do Neck Pain Exercises
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How To Do Neck Pain Exercises
There are specific neck exercises for every cause of neck pain. But generally in physiotherapy, there is a neck pain exercise you can do that is both a preventive and rehabilitative measure.
So, how to do neck pain exercises. It's very important before you do the exercise that you know exactly what's causing the neck pain firstly as different causes will have different exercises. So in general, what you want to do is if you understand that the head is supposed to sit on top of the shoulders, now again, pain will develop as soon as you know that position is compromised.
So for example, if you have a bad posture in your sitting, the strain that you have on your neck will give you neck pain, so what we want to do with exercises for the neck is we want to really strengthen the deep muscles. Now, they sit quite deep into your neck. You can't feel them but they are the ones that keep your head on top of your shoulders and they are really the ones that are neglected.
So, just a very simple exercise and it's a very small movement, we call it chin tucks. It's while you're sitting upright, as you tuck your chin in, you hold it for five seconds and relax and again tucking it in and relaxing. These muscles are called postural muscles so they work all the time and you know, because gravity is always working on you, so it's very important that you first want to strengthen those.
I always start with that one because I think it's one of the most important ones. Okay, now, that will lead into posture correction which we also have to look at. Again, mainly, it's the head should be on top of your shoulders and not leaning forward.
Then also, you might have some tightness on the sides of your neck, again because of bad posture or injury or whatever the cause of that. So, what we'll do with that is we'll do stretches, so for example, putting the head to the side and pulling the head to the other side. It's important also that you hold that for at least 30 seconds and then after we've addressed that, we have to look at the strength of the big neck muscles in the back of your head as well and again, they will get weaker with bad posture so it's important that you have exercises to do for those as well and also if it's a good therapist, he won't just give you a list of exercises, of 10 or 20 exercises to do, but he will give you very specific ones to do so that you understand them and you can do them at home. .