Neck Pain?
11 March 2014
A lot of us complain of neck pain and there can be many causes of it but the main cause I see is bad posture such as sitting at a desk all day. (I currently had to adjust my neck back into alignment!)
So what can we do about it?
Giving the neck a stretch is one thing we don’t do enough.
Rotate your neck left and right the full way, up and down the full way and move your right ear to the right shoulder & left ear to the left shoulder.
Once you have gotten as far as you can go, use your hand to push your head a small bit further. Do this for all the movements except looking up
The one movement I see people do all the time is rolling the head around which is bad. Rolling forwards/downwards is fine but when we roll the head and neck back the ways, it wears the discs of the spine! so beware!
Always make sure all movements feel good. Pain is bad and a sign to stop so listen to your body. A stretch feeling is good but pain is not.
Sitting all day at work behind a desk??
This in itself can cause a lot of neck pain and it’s all about the posture. We tend to lean our head forward which over the course of 8 hours a day, 50 weeks of the year will cause problems.
Being aware of the problem is the first way to fix it. You will need to be very aware the first while because your head will want to creep forward so sit back and keep your head back but relaxed.
Sit in tight to the desk and as close to the computer or work as possible. This will limit the amount of times you will want to hunch forward.
Don’t forget about the shoulders!
Most of the time, we will round our shoulders forwards. It’s very hard to see in ourselves but from side on, a lot of people especially those who sit behind a desk will have forward rolled shoulders adding to our neck pain.
The fix of this is to bring our shoulders backwards as far as we can. Grab your hands behind your back to really push them back. This pulls the shoulders backwards and stretches the chest which is tight (adding to our problem).
If you want your neck looked at by myself, call me at Andersons Injury Clinic LIMAVADY on 028 777 67272
Philip Anderson
(Image courtesy of marin / FreeDigitalPhotos.net)