Neck & Back Pain Help
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Fix Your Own Neck, Upper Back, and Shoulder Pain
If you are experiencing neck or back pain, this article can offer you help. It is easy to forget a lot of the information we give you in physical therapy regarding your injury, injury prevention, and most importantly how to maintain good posture. Hopefully this article will serve as a reminder for you, so that the next time you are sitting at worked slumped over your keyboard, and your neck or back starts to bother you, your handy self help reference guide will be there to help.
Neck Pain and Back Pain Why?
Neck and back pain is not difficult to prevent or fix. People do an astonishing number of things every day to strain, weaken, and put pressure on their necks. They stand, bend, sit, and let their head slouch forward and shoulders round, all day, every day, then compound the problem with inactivity, holding muscles tightly, and bad exercises that only round the upper back further. Even with the help of physical therapy or exercises, strong muscles will not automatically give you good posture, make you stand and move properly, or make up for all the things you do the rest of the day to hurt your neck and back. This is why you still get pain even though you "do your exercises." Many wind up taking pain pills, or in long term or recurring pain, not understanding why their physical therapy or exercise program, or pills, or yoga "didn't work." At Mile Square, your physical therapist will review this with you. We will demonstrate appropriate posture, and teach you stretches and exercises to reinforce appropriate posture throughout your day.
Bad Discs
The pressure of your own body weight on your neck muscles and discs over years of poor sitting, standing, and bending is enough to injure your neck as badly as a single accident.
All this chronic forward bending (flexion) overstretches the muscles and long ligament down the back of your neck, which weakens the neck, and makes room for discs to push outward. It also physically pushes vertebral discs posteriorly (outward towards the back).
After years of squashing the discs in your neck with a forward head posture - by letting your head drop forward, the discs in your neck may degenerate, bulge, or herniate and press on nerves, sending pain down your arm.
Similarly, sitting with a slouched posture, bending, twisting, and lifting improperly can do the same to your low back, sending pain down into your buttock, groin, leg and foot.
Tight muscles from years of poor positioning and short resting muscle length can also press on the same nerves mimicking nerve impingement pain.
A degenerating disc is not a disease, but a simple, mechanical injury that can heal, if you just stop grinding it and physically pushing it out of place with terrible habits.
On the left is a normal disc between two vertebrae.
On the right is a disc pushed out (herniated) from bad bending habits.
Forward bending gradually pushes discs out towards the back.
Lift and bend properly to avoid pushing your discs out of place.
Sitting, standing, and living with a forward head posture and slumped low back can eventually push discs out of place
