Neck stiffness? Try this.
A lot of our athletes and patients over the years tell me that, yeah, my neck is kind of generally okay, but after I train my arms, I do any kind of sporting stuff, my neck is just locked up and I don’t know what to do about it. And that may be you, that may be your clients. This is something that’s so common, and unfortunately, I think that the exercises that you need to do and the way in which you need to do them are often either not known about or misunderstood.
Because the deal here is we are struggling with a problem called cervical scapular coupling. In other words, your neck and your scapula, your shoulder blade, have to understand what the other one’s doing in order to keep muscle tension at appropriate levels. Whenever you think about neurology, we know that our brain requires a certain level of prediction in order to allow freedom of movement to occur.
Think about this, if you’re driving along, you’re headed somewhere that you know really well, it’s a beautiful sunny day, you can kind of relax and often you’ll drive and you’ll think about other things. You really should be paying attention, but maybe you’re not, right? But you get there and you’re like, okay, everything was fine, it was an easy drive. But if you then say, hey, that night a storm comes in and you have to drive somewhere you’ve never driven before, think about what your body does. Not only will you drive slower, you’ll drive more cautiously, but your body will actually carry more tension. That’s because you don’t know where you’re going and your ability to see what’s going on around you and understand what’s going on around you has been compromised because of the storm. That’s how our brains function.
So if our brain does not understand that our shoulders are doing the job that they’re supposed to do, it will begin to protect your neck by inducing stiffness and oftentimes pain because our neck is a part of our, if I want to call it prediction system. In other words, it works like this. The most important things for us to know where we are in space and to stay safe are our eyes and our inner ear. Well, our neck is a vehicle that’s supposed to keep those safe and stable as we’re moving through the world.
So if anything disrupts our movement or causes issues in our movement and they are not communicating well, well, the end result of that is your brain feels less safe and it locks up your neck to try to prevent you from moving and also to make sure that your eyes and inner ear are able to do their job. Long-winded, but that’s basically the neurology behind all of this stuff. So we have to get our neck and our shoulder blade to understand what the other one is doing.
In other words, in most cases, whenever we get neck stiffness after we do a lot of upper body activity, it is because our neck does not trust that our shoulders can do the job alone and so our brain will add tension everywhere. I’m gonna show you what to do about that in just a second.
Now, before I do that, if you are a movement professional, a doctor, a therapist, a coach of some kind, Pilates, yoga, martial arts, if you work with people and teach them to move better and feel better and get out of pain, if that’s you and what I’m talking about right now sounds familiar either for you or your clients, make sure to click the subscribe button. Also check the link. We’d love to set up a call and talk with you about our education system. We’ve been doing this for 25 years and we always love working with elite professionals who are interested in blending neuroscience into what they already do. Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.
We’re gonna go through three different exercises. Remember what I want you to understand here is not a super complex exercise. It is how we teach it and how we apply it. So for most of our clients, whenever we begin loading their arm in some way, if they have poor cervical scapular coupling, the loading of this arm will cause tension to increase in the neck. So what we have to do is consciously uncouple those. Now, this begins by having us do a quick assessment. So you’re gonna stand there, have your client stand there, check rotation, check lateral flexion, check flexion and extension. If your client has an issue, most likely they’re gonna have a problem and they’ll say, yeah, right rotation, ow, left lateral flexion, ow, flexion, ow. Figure out what their ow movements are and get a pain rating on them. Now, the next thing we’re gonna do is we’re gonna begin the uncoupling process or I guess an improvement of the coordination process. And the way that we’re gonna do that is we’re gonna add load. I typically will use something like a little medicine ball. You don’t have to have long lever work for this to be effective. So what I’m gonna have the athlete do, hold a dumbbell, hold a medicine ball. It can be very light. This I think is an eight pounder. It can be five pounds, whatever. We just wanna have a little load on the shoulder. Now, obviously you have a much bigger, stronger athlete than you might need to have a little bit more load, but we wanna begin by doing this asymmetrically. So we’re gonna load one side. I’m gonna load my right arm. I’m gonna go into this flex position and a little bit of shoulder flexion. So I’m flexing my elbow, flexing my shoulder. I’m gonna hold that position. And all that I’m gonna do at this point is I’m simply gonna have my client begin doing small lateral tilts away. We’re combining an isometric exercise, which is gonna put a lot of load on the shoulder, a lot of load on the scapula, with small pain-free mobilizations in all directions while we are maintaining this asymmetric load. You can notice as I’m going through these motions, I am not doing full range. I will probably have the client do somewhere between eight and 10 motions into each direction with this asymmetrical loading. We’ll stop, shake it out, have them reassess. All right, they go back, they go through flexion, extension, lateral flexion, rotation. They may already find that their neck feels lighter, feels longer, and that their pain has dropped. We’re then gonna asymmetrically load in flexion on the opposite side, elbow flexion, shoulder flexion. And we repeat the same process, all right? Very small rotations, lateral flexions, flexions, extensions. We’ve now loaded into a flexion pattern. I then like to have them do the same thing in extension. So we’re here, we have them again flex the elbow a little bit, but then go into shoulder extension, facing forward. And now I am again doing my very, very small range of motion explorations. Focus here being stabilizing in the shoulder. We’re doing that, we’re forcing that by holding onto the weight and relaxing the neck while we’re going through these motions.
Finally, our third exercise is we’re gonna now do this with a push of some kind and a pull of some kind. Normally, I would have them do a push at 90 degrees. I’m gonna turn just a little bit so you can actually see what I’m doing, but I’m taking the shoulder into a abduction. I’m gonna use the wall. I’m going to make sure I have a kind of comfortable stance and I’m gonna push into the wall, right? So as I push into the wall, it’s gonna make my shoulder blade engage. Once again, as I’m holding there, I’m gonna go through my lateral tilts, my rotations, my flexions and extensions. And what you will typically find in every one of these is that one of the positions, whether that’s a shoulder flexion, shoulder extension, abduction, a push or a pull, will either increase or decrease pain in the typical area that they experience it.
So let’s say in this particular position where I am now pushing, and let’s say I have pain in left lateral flexion. What I’m gonna have the client do is we’re going to now work that and we’re gonna work right up to the edge of discomfort. And right when we get to the edge of discomfort, we’re gonna add a little bit more tension to the scapula. But when I mean tension to the scapula, I typically mean we’re gonna depress it a little bit. We’re just gonna tighten up the muscles a little bit. So now let’s say I’m at my pain point, I add a little bit more tension to the scapula, relax the neck intentionally, and often I can go a little bit further.
This becomes something that we’re gonna have the client repeat multiple times per day. But just remember, it’s a very simple idea. We have to improve our cervical scapular coupling mechanisms, most of the time that means asymmetrical loading of one shoulder and then the other shoulder combined with very intentional, relaxed mobility drills. What I find is that after I have clients do this, this takes about three minutes to go through different iterations, we put the weights down, whatever, have them move around, and often they’ll say that is the most free my neck has felt in years.
It is really simple, but it’s missed, like I said, it’s often not taught, and often when this kind of work is taught, the focus is incorrect based on how we know brains function. So go through this carefully, try it on yourself, make sure that you start teaching it, because it is very, very powerful. So that’s it for today, and remember, again, if you are a coach, doctor, or therapist, you wanna learn how to blend modern neuroscience into what you do, subscribe to the channel, click the link, and we’d love to chat with you.
