Hey, El Paso! I’m Dr. David, with El Paso Manual Physical Therapy

I want to share with you a concept about treating neck problems that hardly anybody out there talks about.

In fact, many medical professionals avoid doing this motion for fear that it’s going to make your neck

problem worse, but we actually love to do it, because we make sure that it happens right so that it can help your neck problems.

It’s really one of the fastest ways to helping out the most common neck problems.

Here’s what you’ve got to think about:

When you reach up or raise your arm, how far do you usually reach?…

…and what does your neck do?

What we see people do, is reach up, and their head and neck do this:

Their chin rotates away from the arm that they’re reaching, or if they’re reaching up with both hands, their chin goes straight forward like that.

What that tells us as physical therapists, as neck specialists, is that your neck stability muscles aren’t very good, and the muscles that are supposed to bring your shoulder all the way up are also not very strong.

Here’s how we fix this motion. (This is really important.)

Make sure that you try this out right now, where you’re at, and see if you’ve got good control and strength of your neck and shoulder muscles.

Reach up with one hand, as long as it’s not causing you any problems, you don’t have a shoulder problem, and you want to try to close the gap between your head, your ear here, and your arm as much as you can.

You may not touch your arm to your shoulder, your head to your shoulder, but that’s okay.

Just get as much as you can possibly go, and what you should feel is some muscles right in here working.

You want to get that muscle stronger.

Over time, you want to train this movement with weights, so doing some sort of overhead reaching, overhead pressing exercise is actually a great thing for you, as long as it’s done safely and appropriately, which we help people to learn how to do that just right.

This is something that we hear from our clients all the time:

“The doctor told me to stop reaching up overhead”

“it makes my neck worse whenever I lift weights overhead.”

Or many times they have a shoulder problem associated with it, like a rotator cuff tear, but training this motion correctly, making sure that you can get to the point where you can reach up overhead right, and do it with some weight down the line, is a great thing for the health of your neck and shoulders as you age.

You want to make sure that you do that motion right and keep that motion strong for the long term.

This is going to help take pressure off joints, take pressure off nerves, and allow you to be strong, as well.

It allows you to be able to do motions that you should be able to do, like reach up for high places, pick up little babies, like grandbabies, or your babies.

It’s an important function that you should be able to do.

So, whenever you’re reaching up, make sure that if you’re reaching up all the way, that you try to close the gap between your head and shoulders, and then keep that chin from jutting out like that. Just keep it tucked down a little bit.

I hope this helps, guys.

We’re happy to help you with any questions that you have about this.

If you need help clarifying the thoughts and ideas, reach out to us, we’re happy to help.

Thanks, guys.

Have a wonderful day.