Best 3 Physical Therapy Exercises To Free Up A Painful, Stiff Neck Strain

Hey, if you’ve got stiff and tight neck muscles that are coming from a neck strain, then the exercises that I’ll be showing you in this video are going to help you out tremendously. I’m Dr. David Middaugh, specialist physical therapist at 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 that we post every single week.

I’m about to get into the three exercises that are going to help you free up your stiff neck. But before I do, I want to encourage you to watch to the end of the video because I’ll be talking about things that you should do in case these exercises don’t work, there’s a few things to consider so that you can know what next steps to take. And you’re not lost and confused about how to get rid of this stiffness in your neck.

Now, these exercises unfortunately can’t help every single neck problem out there. But they’ll help a significant majority of people with neck problems. And hopefully that’s you, but just in case it doesn’t, I’ve got more information to help you out with your neck problem. Now let’s get into the first exercise, double chin mobility. Now as the name implies, you’re going to be making a double chin in this exercise, actually all the exercises are going to have a double chin. I’ll show you the basics of this.

Now this is a double chin is my double chin. I know some of you out there saying well he has three chins or fortunes or maybe you’re saying that about yourself. All you have to worry about when you’re doing a double chin is think about what muscles are firing behind your throat. There are some muscles right behind your throat, your airway and your passageway for food, your esophagus.

That are these muscles are right against the front of your spine of your neck bones right here. They’re called the deep neck flexors. And you can feel them tighten up if you do a max double chin. If you go all the way down like that and hold it for a bit. Sometimes you got to hold it for 10 seconds or so you should feel the muscles right back in there starting to get tired or tighten up a little bit. Those are your deep neck flexors.

Now you need to engage those at least a teeny, tiny little bit when you’re doing these exercises for you, instead of going 100% I want you to back off to about 15, maybe even 25%, find the spot where your neck muscles, your deep neck flexors just barely begin to turn on. So, for me, when I start doing a double chin right there, I can feel them very subtly engaged back there.

That’s perfect. I can go a little harder if I want. But I want to caution you against going too hard. Make sure you keep it to right on the edge of when those muscles fire so for me, it’s about right here. So, keeping that slight baby double chin, now you’re going to go through your mobility exercises, we’re going to go through flexion, where you’ve been down, side bending, and then rotation. And now we’re not going to do extension looking up.

Because if you’re trying to get more mobility, people tend to have plenty mobility going in this direction already. Even though your spouse might not let you your muscles might be spasming up, and the ones that help you to go back in this direction may hurt more when you go in that direction.

But trust me to fix this problem, you’ve got struggles deep neck flexors are usually not active in people with neck spasms. So, we’ve got to get these net deep neck flexors working better to get the strain going away the spasm go away and get your stiffness out of here so that you can have more freedom of movement in your neck.

So back to your double chin, then we’re going to go through flexion. So, we’re going to do three reps, like so, take your time going down, and then come back up to the starting point about right there for me where I’m looking straight ahead at you. And then I’m going to keep my double chin going about 25% or 50%. And I feel a little bit of a stretch back here, but nothing painful.

If you’re having pain, going through just a part of that motion stop where you have pain or the edge of it, don’t push into it, you’re just going to go up to where say it hurts right here. I can go all the way down here, but say it starts to hurt me by right here. That’s the stopping point, then you’re coming back to the middle.

Now three reps is the baseline, you could do plenty of this, you could do 10 2030 reps, 50 reps, and as long as you’re not pushing into pain and you feel these deep neck flexors going, you’re good, it’s probably going to be very beneficial for you to do extra. So, hang out on this first exercise for as long as you like as long as you’re getting improvements in your neck mobility and decreasing the pain and getting more freedom movement in your neck.

So, the next motioning to do same exercise still baby double chin, they’re going to do side bending, bring your year over to your shoulder, while still pointing your nose forward. I’m just going to go to my right, three times here maintaining I’m checking to my chin down a little bit. I felt those muscles turned on and getting a bit of a stretch on this side. And for me, I can feel things popping and shifting in my neck.

That might be the case for you. Sometimes you don’t get popping or shifting. That’s okay. As long as the popping or shifting isn’t painful, like lingering pain. You’re okay. It’s probably the joint that was stuck that needs to free up to calm the muscle down. That’s strained. So, let’s go the other way, double chin, maybe double chin.

A little pop there. To fuel a big stretch, three, do one more for fall Good. Now I’m going to turn over to my right but maintaining a double chin. So, when I turn the goal is going to be to bring my chin over to my shoulder rather than my ear to my shoulder, that’s what I was doing with rotation with Sai betting in a second a second ago. So double chin, then turn the crunchies in there.

They got better this time, no crunchies, bringing my chin over to my shoulder. One more. And I’m going to go to the to my left over here, double chin turnover, little chain turnover. And I can go as far as I want to, they’re my neck bones, just stop me. But again, I can’t stress enough if you have pain going into a specific direction, do not push into the pain stop at the very edge of it.

So, if it hurts you to turn left or swipe in this way, then just do double chin first always then say hurt right there, just stop right there. And if you just move into that direction, over the course of 10, maybe 20 reps, you might find that you can go a little further and a little further a little further. And as we do the next exercises, they should also help out in getting more motion and you might need to come back to this exercise, replay the exercises here and do them again, if you keep getting benefits out of it, why the heck not keep going.

Alright, let’s cover exercise number two double chin with an overhead reach. So, you’re going to go back to your double chin, same exact intensity as you did before what worked for you without paying and maintain your double chin, you’re going to do an overhead reach, but you’ve got to throw in a shrug. Now here’s the key thing.

When you shrug, people typically lose a double chin in their head goes kind of up a bit and their chin flies out forward, kind of the opposite of what a double chin is. So, I need you to just be conscious of where your head and chin are in space when you do your double chin. Because when you start to reach up overhead, you need to maintain it. And what you’ll find is as you shrug like I’m going to have you do your head you have to kind of fight to stay in this position because your head wants to go like this.

But you have to keep your head right in that same position that you started with. So, head still baby double chin. Let’s get into the exercise. Now. You’re going to reach up overhead. Once your hands are about right here, begin to shrug your shoulders, keep your chin up position, and then go all the way up, hold it there for 10 seconds. As high as you can, as long as there’s no pain, and it’s an effort. Double check my chin is down.

Now if you have pain in this exercise on check your chins down, right, not too hard, but some and then make sure that you’re shrugging all the way and if you’re not shrugging all the way, then push yourself to go up even further. That could be the reason why you’re hurting. Another reason the more common reason you might be getting pain is that the shrugging muscles might be one of the muscles that are spasming.

So only shrug what you can without discomfort. quick side note here, spasms happen because a muscle is not behaving the way it was intended to it all of a sudden contracts. And when a contracts for long enough, it becomes injured and now we call that a strain. So, I say I’ve been seeing spasm and strain kind of interchangeably here because they’re on a spectrum.

What’s the muscle starts to spasm if a muscle spasm is literally an uncontrolled and voluntarily controlled contraction like I’m controlling this contraction right here I’m squeezing my fist which makes these muscles work. But if they all of a sudden just start seizing up with me intending it to that would be like a spasm that’s what happens up in the neck, you’re not intending to make that muscle get real title of a sudden, but it does.

If it stays like that for long enough then the muscle becomes injured, and we call it a strain a muscle strain. So, they’re on a spectrum. Okay, back to the overhead reach exercise. double chin. Big strong maintain your double chin and if it hurts to go higher than you could back off, or double check that you go on high enough, so you have to trial and error both situations.

Does it hurt less if you go all the way up 100% or does it hurt less if you just hang out at 50% or 40% so for me I feel good 100% I’m going to go all the way up and hold it for 10 seconds my third round and you can do 10 reps like this shrug, holding a double chin and I am trying to struggle as much as I can. My feet are planted on the ground firmly.

My hips and my back are stable. I don’t feel like I’m wobbling all over the place and I am struggling as hard as I possibly can. And I’m feeling these muscles fatiguing. Now separate pain from muscle fatigue because pain hurts you know it just doesn’t feel good versus muscle fatigue.

It kind of relaxes things afterwards. You want that relaxation effect afterwards, it shouldn’t be painful, like where you’re grimacing. Like right now it just feels like I worked out a bit, I’m even starting to sweat a tiny bit, I can feel myself, you know, starting to glow. That’s the effect you’re looking for when doing this exercise. Just like that.

Now, these two exercises, the double chin mobility exercise we did, and then this overhead reach the double chin, are setting you up for the final one. We’ll do one more, we’ll say we did tend, don’t chin, big shrug, hold it up. Because the final one, you’re going to use a towel or in my case, have a pillowcase here. to really move your neck joints, you’re going to stretch your neck joints out just a bit. And that helps to free up the muscles and caused that strain to heal and diminish.

So, I’ve got a big pillowcase here, you can use a towel, anything that’s about this size is probably about three feet long. A meter so long, by two feet, maybe a foot and a half. And you’ll see how I have it set up you’ll find something in your house, I’m sure you have something available to you that you can use a piece of clothing will work pretty well to fold it in half the long way. And I’m going to do it again fold in half.

The Long way again, does it have to be perfect, because then what you’re going to do is wind it up, twist it just like that. And the tighter you make it generally the better. Because that’s going to go against your neck. So put that over your neck. And then you’re going to switch hands at this point to see that. So now my, in this case, my left hand is pulling the right end of the pillowcase. And you can position that pillowcase on the stiffest part of your neck here, where you have some tenderness or where you feel like the muscles most strained or spasm and get it right on there.

Then what you’re going to do is double chin a little bit double chin right here. And as you double chin, pull the pillowcase over and allow your head to kind of go with it. As you maintain somewhat of a double chin. Now you may lose a double chin as you go further in, that’s okay allow it to happen. Once you get to the end of what you can feel like you can go comfortably, then you’re going to just bounce your hand there at the end a little bit to get the joint to move to get the muscles to move.

So, get all the way over and bounce. Like so. And if you feel like you need to go level up or level down, you know just adjusted a little bit, do that if you need to tighten it up a bit more to get a little more firmness or untighten it because it’s a little too firm, you could adjust how firm it is like that just feels a lot more gentle on my neck. But I feel like I can tolerate that kind of need a bit more hardness.

Yeah, that’s more effective for me. And if you need to the other side, you just switch hands. And same thing on the other side. Just to higher here, balance a little bit at the end, maybe 10 to 20 reps, I got a pop, they’re a little bit lower 10 to 20 reps. And this frees up your neck tremendously already I feel tremendously more free. I was getting little pops and crunchies I was on the computer for a couple of hours before this video.

And so, I literally was getting stiff on my neck as I was typing all my words up in all my preparation for this video. And so, I’m actually way more free at this point in my neck after having done all three of those exercises, I hope that you got the same benefit of doing these exercises. Now this doesn’t help everyone out. Like I said, I can’t stress that enough.

So, you know we will I will get comments on the videos here of Oh, this didn’t work for me. Well, you want to hear this next part then because if these exercises didn’t work for you, here’s three things to consider. So that you can take the next steps on fixing your neck problem.

Number one, did you do your double chin too hard if you were really cracking that chin all the way down and then doing your shrugs or and then doing your mobility exercises that can make all the muscles in your neck simultaneously contract, including the muscle that strained or spasming and that could make the situation more painful.

You really want to be careful to just barely do the double chin to where you feel those deep neck muscles. And if you don’t quite feel those deep neck muscles engaged just by themselves, then you probably need to spend some time just practicing this little baby motion right here so that you can get those deep neck flexors to fire just a tiny bit.

When they fire a little bit without everything else going on. Then you’re in a good spot to begin doing these exercises. So go back and try that and try the exercises. Again, make sure that you can get just the deep neck flexors to fire with those mobility exercises. And with you had reach and see if it does give you benefit at that point.

Number two thing to consider is you might need some hands-on treatment; it could be that your muscles and joints are so stiff that you need to get a health care professional like a manual therapist like myself to free up the joints by hand one by one to free up the muscles by hand. And you will feel tremendously better. If you can’t access a male therapist around, you.

We are kind of rare out there, there isn’t many people that specialize in manual therapy like we do here, then a chiropractor might be a good fit for you, or possibly even a massage therapist, they just may not be able to get super specific on the level, it really depends on the training. There’s a lot of variability between chiropractors amongst themselves and massage therapists as well.

And the third thing to consider is you might have something more serious going on than just simply a neck strain. It could be something like stenosis, a pinched nerve in your neck, it could be a disc problem, or even arthritis. I’ve got plenty of information about all of these conditions. In our channel. I’ve linked a bunch of relevant videos down in the description.

So, if you’ve tried these exercises out or you’re just curious to see what are the symptoms, what else is going on? What is arthritis or stenosis look like? Go down to the description and find those videos in there and go check those out to learn about how to begin to fix your neck problem without surgery, injections and pain medications. I hope this video was helpful give us a thumbs up if it was for you. And don’t forget to subscribe guys we’ll see in the next video. Bye