What Actually Causes Painful Neck Cervical Stenosis?

What actually causes painful neck cervical stenosis? People with neck problems often get their X rays back from the doctor and the doctor will just mention, oh, you have stenosis in your neck. And leave it at that sometimes they don’t go into it at all, yet, the person’s having neck pain, maybe pain down their arms into the shoulders, possibly all the way into the hands.

And very often it’s just blamed on age, the doctor will say something like, well, you’re in your 50s. Now your 60s are more. And this just happens when you hit that age. And it’s scary to get that cervical spinal stenosis diagnosis, because there’s a chance that you might need surgery if it progresses. And if you don’t know what’s causing it, then how can you tell what you need to do in order to stop the progression of cervical stenosis and avoid surgery.

In this video, I’m going to clearly explain cervical stenosis so that you can understand what to do about it and how to avoid surgery. Now cervical stenosis just means narrowing of the spine. And that space where the nerves go through where the holes are where the nerves come out of the sides of the spine, and pass down the middle where the spinal cord is, those spaces are narrowing and pinching on that nerve.

Symptoms of this could be pain in the neck, you could get neck pain, you may also get numbness and tingling going down the arm and the hand, you could get pain going down into the shoulder, arm hand anywhere in between the elbow as well, very commonly, people have stiffness in their neck. And they may also have arthritis in their neck that was found on the X ray.

Another reason for spinal stenosis is that there can be disc herniations from the discs between the vertebrae between the bones of the neck that are compressing the nerves that are coming out the sides of the neck.

Now the root cause of all of these issues that lead to stenosis to narrowing of the spaces where the nerves come out is too much compression going through the neck joints and the neck bones. And there’s a physical adaptation to the spine in order to take those pressures over the years over the decades possibly so that your neck doesn’t break fracture or fall apart, your neck bone thicken your neck bones, the position of your neck and bend in such way that the openings of the spinal canal, the vertebrae kind of change in alignment, and begin to shut that space.

And the sides of the spine here where the called foramen where the nerves come on the side, those spaces are made up of the vertebrae like this. And those can shift this way to you may also give bone spurs that form in the openings in the side of the spine that can compress the nerves as well. All of these problems are as a result of too much pressure on the spine bones.

Now doctors don’t typically explain this because they’re not aware of this. They’re told to treat cervical stenosis as an age-related problem. And they’re just going to offer you pain medications injections, and there’s surgery out there to decompress the spine, it’s actually it’s called a spinal decompression surgery, the medical term for it is a laminectomy.

And all that means is they’re cutting a section of the bone off and here we’re this part of the bone sticks out in the back of the spine, they’ll remove it, and that depressurizes the spinal cord to allow the proper flow of nerves down into the rest of the body. But that doesn’t solve the root problem for the long term.

Because even if you have a surgery to take a chunk of bone off your neck bones, you are still getting excessive compression from other parts of the body that are just going to lead to the next surgery or the next spot that’s going to get pressurized too much and adapt to the body itself has the ability to take pressures off if you strengthen the right muscles and maintain good motion in the joints of your neck and the upper back and shoulders.

So I often get asked, Can cervical spinal stenosis heal without surgery? And absolutely yes, we have people here in the clinic all the time that come in with cervical spinal stenosis. And after we free up all their joints in their neck, teach them how to maintain the motion their neck and get them to depressurize their neck joints with their own muscles through specific exercises.

They feel fantastic and no longer have neck pain and the numbness and tingling and pain that goes down the arms and other issues too because you can get numbness, tingling and pain even into your legs into your spine into your lower back. It’s possible to even have problems with your bowel and bladder like changes in going to the bathroom.

Because the muscles that control your bowel and bladder that allow fluids and solids to come out of your body. They’re innervated by the nerves that come up through here in your neck and run down to that area of the body. So I’m going to tell you how to begin taking pressure off your neck joints right now so that you can begin to get relief and maintain freedom of motion in your neck joints.

Now this is a process that takes many weeks and months, and it needs to eventually become a habit that you just keep up the rest of your life very much like brushing your teeth. You need to exercise your body in areas that you tend to have problems in, just like you need to brush your teeth because you get stuff on your teeth because you eat.

So the first thing you need to work on is shrugging, when you shrug those muscles that pick up your shoulders, they work together with muscles deep in the front of your neck, to take pressure off your neck joints. So just make sure when you shrug that you’re shrugging in a way that keeps your chin down.

And I also want you to reach your arms up overhead, as long as you feel like you can, if you can do this right here, and shrug with your arms up overhead, then you’re taking pressure off your neck joints. Now it’s going to feel like effort. And especially to keep your neck down like a double chin type of motion, it’s going to feel like you can’t do it very well, but hold it for 10 seconds. And after 10 seconds, you can come back down and repeat this 10 times.

And this is something that you might need to be doing hourly throughout the day. And you’ll find that if you do 10 second holds 10 times, or whatever you can, if you start to have pain or you just get way too tired, go five reps, or seven reps or whatever you can do, but work your way up to doing 10 reps at a time, you’ll find that these shrugging muscles feel worked and fatigued and tired.

But you might have more mobility in your neck. And that helps to better align your neck. And you’ve got to be careful not to let your chin jet out forward or not to allow your head to look down, you have to make sure you’re looking straight ahead. With your chin slightly tucked down. We call this a cervical retraction motion. Now it’s not an extreme cervical retraction where you’re shoving your head all the way back.

It’s a mild cervical retraction, you should barely feel those, those double chin muscles working behind your throat. They’re called the deep neck flexors. The second exercise you should do is neck rotation exercises, while using your deep neck flexors. So that looks like this, you’re just making a double chin a mild to moderate double chin, maintaining it as you turn as far as you can comfortably, and then rotate back the other way.

And then back to the middle with this does is when you fire, those deep neck flexors are the muscles that are right against the front side of your neck here behind your throat. It forces good uniform motion through all the neck bones firing this muscle forces, the joints that are stiffness to begin to move and to gain that freedom of motion that you’ve probably been lacking for a long time.

So along with the shrugs, after do your 10 second holds 10 times, then it’s time to make a double chin, turn right, turn left and just do that 10 times and avoid allowing your chin to go out and turn this way. Because as soon as you do that, you put a bending your spine, where we call it a lordosis movement like your head is sticking out forward head posture is another way that they call this.

But when you do that, it forces a lot of motion through just one part of the spine. And that allows the stuck joints to stay stuck. That doesn’t help out your cervical stenosis situation.

The third exercise is hanging, I’ve got a pull up bar here. So this one’s a little more challenging to get to because you may not have a pull up bar at home, I’ve linked in the description below this hanging station, it’s also to put your elbows here and to do ab work, you can do a variety of different things. But I like this one, it’s on Amazon, you can find the link in the description below.

But what you want to do to hang you’re not going to use your full bodyweight in case you’re thinking, Oh, I can’t hang I’m not strong enough or I’m too heavy, you don’t need to be very strong and you need to be very light, or you got to do I’m standing this is set up at its lowest position this this pull up bar is adjustable.

And if you’re very short, and you can touch the floor and reach up, then what you do is you get a stepstool under you or something very sturdy, so that you can keep your feet on the ground at all times during this.

Once you get into position here, you’re just going to allow yourself to hang it my feet on the ground here. But what this does is it shoves my shoulders up and you have to kind of relax your shoulders while still gripping and allow your shoulders to go up as much as they can. This is good because you don’t usually reach up that far.

And your shoulder joints and your collarbone joint that connects right in this area right here doesn’t usually get that far up, especially if you’ve got a desk job or if you just have more sedentary person, for whatever reason, you need to get your arms in that full position and even get a little bit of nice gradual stretch. So this can be a big benefit to taking pressure off your neck joints.

For hanging you want to hang for anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds even as long as a minute if you can tolerate it. And this is something that I would do frequently throughout the day. So investing in a little bit of equipment for home can definitely go a long way in helping your cervical spinal stenosis.

So these three exercises are what I would start with to begin to get some mobility back and to get that pain under control. The shrugging, holding For 10 seconds 10 times frequently throughout the day, and the neck rotations with a chin tuck with a cervical retraction. Do it 10 times back and forth 10 times each direction, and then hanging for 10 seconds, up to 60 seconds at a time. Also frequently throughout the day.

There are some patients that come in here and I tell them, you need to be doing this hourly because their condition is that bad. And there’s other people that end up doing this a few times a day, two, three times a day and they do see success with that.

It really depends on how severe your condition is, what’s your relative strength and the rest of your body is your past fitness history, your current fitness history, all of that needs to be factored in to determine exactly how much exercise you need to do to get the benefit of this exercise.

Hey, we’ve got more tips and help for people with cervical stenosis. I’ve got a link to a playlist of all our cervical stenosis videos down in the description below. So check that out. If you liked this video, give it a thumbs up and please subscribe to our channel so you don’t miss out on any of the helpful videos we share each week.

If you know somebody that’s suffering from cervical spinal stenosis, please share this video with them so they can get help out too. I’ll see you in the next video. Bye