I bet I hear this from 9 out of 10 of my friends almost every day. When they ask me why, my response is “have you seen your head position?” Look at your side view in a mirror. Is your head over your shoulders and shoulders over hips, hips over knees and knees over ankles? The body is totally inter-connected and needs to be vertically aligned. If that line of gravity is not vertical, then you are asking a lot of muscles to do jobs they were not designed to do, especially in your neck. Kind of like a bowling ball on the end of a fishing pole. Your head weighs roughly 20 pounds and it’s on the small end of your spine. With your head forward, you are asking all the small muscles of your neck to hold up 20 pounds for hours with very little help from the larger muscles in your mid and lower back and hips.
It is important to know that your neck pain is not the problem but it is a sign that the rest of your body is not working as it should to support your head. So let’s fix the real cause of your neck pain by looking at your overall posture.
Let’s start with simple standing. Looking in a mirror, are your shoulders level? How about hips, are they level? Do your feet and knees point out or straight? Do your knees point in the same direction as your feet whether they are out or straight? From the side view, do your ankles, knees, hips, shoulder and ear line up along an imaginary plumb line? Any deviation, vertical or horizontal, will create some form of neck or back pain at some point.
Our body is a stimulus-response system. What kind of stimulus have you been giving your body over your lifetime? How many hours a day do you sit on average? Add up the drive to work, sitting at work, drive home, computer time, TV, mealtime. It’s probably more than you think. Now, think of your sitting position. I’ll bet your shoulders and head are not in a vertical line with your greater trochanter (that bone you feel on the outside of your upper thigh). That means your hips are not involved in your sitting position and they should be the base of support while seated. Your spine is in a C-curve with your head at the end of it with no base of support. No surprise that our neck hurts and our mid back is really tight and sore.
Does this sound like you? We can help! Put your neck pain behind you and let us show you what you can do to keep your head and neck in alignment and pain free.
