Best 3 Physical Therapy Exercises For Pain & Stiffness From Neck Arthritis

Hey, I’m going to show you the three best physical therapy exercises, if you’ve got pain and stiffness coming from neck arthritis. My name is Dr. David Middaugh, and I’m a specialist physical therapist El Paso Manual Physical Therapy. And this channel is dedicated to helping people stay healthy, active, and mobile. while avoiding unnecessary surgery, injections and pain medications. Please subscribe to our channel so that you don’t miss out on any of the helpful videos we upload every single week.

I’m about to get into the three exercises to get you this relief from your neck arthritis. But if you’re not sure, if you’ve got neck arthritis, then you’ve got to check out our video that we’ve linked in the description below. That covers five signs that you’ve got neck arthritis, if you’ve never seen a doctor for this. If you’ve never had an X ray, and you’ve been told that you have neck arthritis, go check out that video right now to make sure that this is the right exercise video for you.

Okay, now that we’ve cleared that up, let’s get into the first exercise, it’s going to be a double chin neck mobility exercise that I’ve talked about this in a few other videos, but it is so fundamental to make sure all the bones in your neck, all the joints in your neck are moving correctly by firing a deep core muscle of the neck.

So, what you’ve got to do is make a full double chin just like this, hold it there for about another five seconds. And when you do that, you should feel the muscles behind your throat tightening up a little bit. They’re right behind your throat, your airway right here. And when you swallow, not off to the sides or not these big muscles, here are the ones further out there right behind your throat.

So, when you do that double chin motion you should feel them tear out in this video is going to be focused a lot on these muscles. So, you got to get clear on this right now if you don’t pause here, rewind, and make sure you’ve got this down correctly for yourself so that you can get those deep neck flexor muscles working properly. Once you find that you can fire those muscles.

Next, you’ve got to fire them at a smaller percentage. So, if you were firing them at 100%, when you made your double chin back off to about 50 to 25%, you want to be at the amount of head nodding or chin position where you barely feel the muscles firing. And just to show you from the side view it’s not looking down, it’s shoving your head back and maintaining your head straight, even nodding down slightly so that you can fire those muscles, you’re making a double chin, that’s what you’re doing here.

So, find out the right position you need to be into just barely turn on those neck muscles. For me, it’s about right here, it doesn’t look like a big double chin at all. It’s just a subtle nod with my head moving back a bit. Okay, once you found that this is critically important, you’ve got to get this head position right to get these neck muscles working. Now you can go to the neck mobility movements. So, we’re going to go through three different movements.

The first one is going to be his side bending, so you can hold your chin down just a bit like that, you’re going to bring your ear to your shoulder, I’m going to go to my right doesn’t matter which way you start, we’re doing both sides. So, chin down, then head over towards your shoulder and go as far as you can, if you want a balance there, but you can, but you can do this for five reps, chin down, get those deep neck muscles working and bring your ear over to your shoulder.

Avoid the temptation to turn your head to bring your chin your shoulder, we’ll do that motion a bit. Just make sure you bring your ear when we get mentioned straight. Then bring the ear over the shoulder. So that’s my third, chin down you to the shoulder. And last one and I’m going to go the other way chin down. There we go. Something popped in my neck, that’s what we want here is for things to free up.

I’m going to do that a couple more times, can balance a bit of a heel, I can eat it. Okay, so I did five nice directions of side bending with my chin down to fire these muscles. Next, let’s do the same thing with rotation. So, chin down, and now you’re going to bring your chin over your shoulder, just like that. That’s your ear, your chin, chin down and then rotate, chin down, and then rotate and do that five times in each direction.

So, I’m going to go to my left now chin down, turn left, something popped again. And I feel a little grittiness like crunchy like sand inside of my joints. And it’s improving, as I keep going. It’s almost gone. Now at this point, yours might never go away, you might feel like it’s always there. The hope is that it improves a bit, the more you move, and as we go through all the exercises, if you come back to this neck mobility exercises, double chin mobility exercise, it should be even better as time goes on especially as you get stronger as the weeks go by.

And the last motion you’ve got to do is neck flexion you’re going to hold the chin down, and then bring your head down chin towards your chest, and then come back up, chin down first and then looked down to chin down and looked down. And for this one, you’ll feel like you’re doing almost a max w at the bottom of the motions, double chin a little bit, link all the way down to more. There we go, I don’t want to go up in that direction.

At this point, sometimes it’s fine, you know, let me go through with you, because you might find that it gives you relief. But oftentimes, for me, as a physical therapist working with patients that have neck arthritis, we find that it’s not the best thing for them to be doing long term, you just can’t keep those neck muscles engaged, and look up.

So, watch, if you start like this, when you start to look up, you give up so you kind of lose stability. And the reason for this is that the root problem of neck arthritis is often that these deep neck muscles are too weak and the ones in the back are too strong. So, if you’re going up like that, you’re just going to feed into the strong muscles that are already causing the problem.

So, there isn’t really a need to do that you need to go down and get those deep neck flexors working most, right for the second exercise, you’re going to need to lie down somewhere get on the floor, on the couch, on the bed, wherever you feel most comfortable. Let’s go on over.

For the second exercise, we’re going to do a neck sit up. Now it sounds exactly like what it is. But you’re going to use a towel, or I’ve got a big pillowcase here. In this case, I’m going to put it down on the bed or wherever you’re lying down, just like so you’re going to want to lie down so that your head is about right here. And your shoulders and body are down here so that you can kind of pin this down with your bodyweight. Just like that.

It’s okay, if you’re not perfectly centered, what you want is for the corners of the pillowcase here to help you out you won’t be able to grab them to help you do the sit up motion. So, for that next step, you need to be good at that deep Netflix activation, the double chin motion, like I said, it’s going to come back, you got to do the double chin first, grab the pillowcase.

Holding the double chin, you’re going to be looking down and holding right here for 10 seconds. Now what you want to begin to do is offload your hands. So, in other words, do less work with your hands, don’t let go completely at first, and keep your chin down against your chest so that you fire these muscles deep in here. So, you’re going to be 10 second holds 10 times, giving more pressure to your neck and taking less support from your hands.

So, if I if you think of it in terms of percentages, right here, I’m about 5050 half the works been done by my hands holding the pillowcase up. And the other half is in these muscles. And I can feel those deep neck flexors working pretty good here. So, the next rep here I’m going to do 6040. So, I’m getting a little less pressure from my hands. And it’s working more on my neck. And what you should feel to is your abs working, that’s a good thing.

You should feel your abs are tightening up a bit, but you’ll definitely feel it in your neck after about 10 seconds. And see we can go more 7030 70% working from here and 30% from my hands. And then you can work your way all the way up to where you’re doing 100% from your neck, nothing from your hands. Great, but let me just warn you before you keep going.

You don’t want to feel any increased pain or discomfort. Besides muscles working. If muscles are working and you’re in the front of your neck. Great, you shouldn’t feel muscles are working on the back of your head neck. Those are not the muscles you want to work. That’s actually a compensation pattern that’s feeding into your neck arthritis issue.

So, avoid that please. You need to get support from the pillow if you’re getting that that muscle fatigue in the back of your head and neck. So right here, chin down, but 7030 it’s definitely more work for my neck. Now I’m barely holding on with my pillowcase here. Okay, that’s 10 seconds.

Now let’s do 80/20 push you mentioned into my neck. A lot more support from only my neck and minimal from my hands. That’s about 10 seconds or so. I feel these neck muscles working or going 90/10 barely even holding on with my hands. definitely feel my neck working.

Alright, all right. Next, we’re going to go on 100% from my neck. And I feel it right here. Pretty good. But don’t do this. Again, if you feel the back of your neck working, you might feel stretching on the back of your neck that’s different. You just don’t want to feel the muscles tightening up or fatiguing in the back of the neck.

They should be fatiguing right here on the front, deep behind the throat. And if you feel like you can do all the reps like this, go for it. But what this is doing is strengthening those deep neck flexors because it takes pressure off the joints where the arthritis is in your neck. Right for the next exercise. You’re going to still stay on the floor of the bed wherever you’re at. You’re going to get on your hands and knees.

Let me show you. So, for this one, you’re going to get on your hands and knees and you’re going to be getting into the position where you’re on your knees bed like you’re on your haunches like a cat or a dog would sit, and they’re going to be pushing your hands away.

While keeping that double chin position, a slight double chin position, you’re not going to go on max double chin. And the goal of the exercise when you hold because you’re going to be doing 10 second holds, you got a shrug all the way while keeping your chin tucked down. So, it looks like this. Hands knees right here. And then tuck the chin down, holding your chin tuck down, sit back, and then right here, you should be shrugging as much as you can, on trying to push my shoulders into my ears.

As I maintain my chin tucked about 50%, I feel those neck muscles working. And I definitely feel my shrugging muscles working because I’m, I’m showing up if I relaxed the shrug, it’s like this. But if I shrug then I’m like this. After about 10 seconds, you can come out of that position. And let’s do that 10 times. Just like that. So, hands about right here, tuck the chin. And then I’m pushing my body away through my hands, while shrugging my shoulders into my ears.

To get my struggling muscles working. Don’t lose your head position, I’m keeping my chin tucked down. If it’s not down, this happens, you shouldn’t be looking up. You shouldn’t be looking at the table, you should be looking kind of between your legs from right here. Rest I will do about 10 of those I’m going to pretend my shirts get in my face. I’m going to pretend that I’m going to do all 10 here, but I’m going to cut it short just a bit. You pause it and finish your 10 wraps.

Because I got a couple more things to tell you regarding neck arthritis and exercises for them. So be sure to watch to the end of the video so that you catch everything. So, pluck down, shrug, get a good shrug, you’re trying to shrink about 100% definitely keep the chin down about 50%.

Thanks for doing these three exercises with me give them a shot, you should feel like your next move a lot easier. If you go back to that first double chin mobility exercise, you should feel like your neck moves more freely, the muscles around your neck will also be warmed up. Now it should not hurt to do these exercises, it should feel better freeing afterwards, you shouldn’t feel like things got stiffer.

If that’s the case, then you might have something else in addition to neck arthritis going on might have a nerve issue, you could have a disc issue as well, I need to investigate that just a bit more. It could also be that your technique was off on this exercise on these exercises, go back and make sure that you did everything just as I explained. And if you’ve got a more severe case of neck arthritis, your stiffness and pain is just quite high, then I recommend you do these exercises every hour while you’re awake. You know, within reason

Of course, you’re going to be out doing things or you might not be in a good position where you can do it exactly every hour. But the more you can stick to that routine, usually the faster you’ll get some relief and increase your mobility for the long term. If it’s more of a medium case, it’s not real severe, but it’s also not quite mild. And that would be in a consistent routine of doing this three times a day for at least a couple of weeks or until the stiffness and pain subsides further.

Now if it’s just mild, meaning it bothers you still daily, but it’s not bad. It’s not keeping you up at night, it’s not limiting you and your motion quite a bit, then I would do this as needed. When it flares up, do the exercise maybe every day or even a few times a day or every hour for a day or two, well it flares up and then once it goes away, you can stop doing these exercises.

Now my advice for you long term if you’re feeling great if these exercises helped you out, and you feel like your pains nearly gone, you’ve been maybe doing these for a few weeks or maybe even a few months if it was a more severe case in need to get stronger especially with overhead lifting. I’ve linked a video down in the description that talks about how to do overhead lifting properly.

So go check that out if you’re at that point in time. And just this is a bit controversial overhead lifting you got to keep this in mind if you go see a doctor and they find out that you have neck arthritis, they’re probably going to tell you not to lift anything up overhead because it’s going to make your neck pain worse. But the way that I teach it in this video is a proper way with proper neck mechanics.

That double chin is really important. It’s the right way to get stronger and if you do that exercising gets stronger over time, then you should get long term relief from neck arthritis flare ups. Guys if you liked this video, give us a thumbs up and don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss out on any of the helpful videos we post every week. Thanks everyone. Bye