I’m sure you’ve experienced stiffness in your neck and shoulders, surely it’s the problem right? Well no, often it’s your current solution!

Here’s why

If you’re a desk worker, I’m sure you know about neck stiffness and neck pain. When or if you get back to the office (thanks COVID), look around, I’m sure you’ll see plenty of co-workers with their chin poked forward such as the image on the right. Your head is heavy! It’s around 5-7kg. If you assume this ‘chin poked forward posture’ for your 8 hour shift, then do it some more looking down at your phone when you get home that evening, that’s a lot of time in this position. What you can also see on the right is the muscles at the back of the neck stretching. They are working hard to hold all 5-7kg of your head for maybe even 9-10 hours of your day, everyday. They are your current solution as to why you can still hold your head up. This is an incredible amount of time for these muscles to be under load. So what are the muscles at the front of your neck doing? Well to be honest, they’re kicking back not doing much at all.

Okay, so we’ve established this imbalance, the muscles at the back of your neck are working overtime, fatiguing and becoming stiff and sore as a result whilst the muscles at the front of the neck are away on holiday.

Now, if you assume the posture on the left, there is an even distribution of the weight of your head. The result? No more neck pain.

To do this all day everyday however, we do need to strengthen these deep muscles at the front of your neck to help out, and even the muscles in the middle of your back. Get them away from their holiday and put them to work. As well as a number of other individualised factors.

Now this does not just apply to the neck, this applies to many areas of your body! Whilst it may be something else, the weakness of another muscle is often overlooked and not thought of.

Don’t get me wrong, there are many factors as to why you’re feeling stiff. This is just a commonly overlooked cause.

Your physiotherapists can perform an in depth assessment to find the real cause of your pain and stiffness, and provide you with the right rehabilitation plan to ensure it’s a thing of the past! 

By Lewis Jaksic, Exercise Thought Physiotherapy Student.

Kim, T. W., An, D. I., Lee, H. Y., Jeong, H. Y., Kim, D. H., & Sung, Y. H. (2016). Effects of elastic band exercise on subjects with rounded shoulder posture and forward head posture. Journal of Physical Therapy Science, 28(6), 1733–1737. https://doi.org/10.1589/jpts.28.1733

Nejati, P., Lotfian, S., Moezy, A., & Nejati, M. (2015). The study of correlation between forward head posture and neck pain in Iranian office workers. International Journal of Occupational Medicine and Environmental Health. https://doi.org/10.13075/ijomeh.1896.00352

Image: https://www.rynkchiropractic.com/single-post/chronic-forward-head-posture-it-s-not-just-how-you-look