Isometric Neck Exercise

Lift your chest and pull your shoulders back and down, squeezing your shoulder blades together. Continue to raise your head and look upward, feeling a stretch along the front of your neck. Do the same thing with your hand on the back of your head, attempting to press your head backward into your hand while maintaining a neutral head position. Hold for two seconds; then release and repeat the exercise for a total of eight to 10 repetitions. When performing the exercises, try moving an equal distance to either side.

Along with a range of motion exercises , managing neck arthritis pain can be greatly enhanced if you strengthen your muscles. This is because when muscles meant to support the spine are too weak to fulfill their responsibility, pressure and compression result. Most muscle strengthening exercises involve moving the joints, using the muscles to push or pull against resistance. However, isometric exercises involve holding static positions for long periods of time.

Pinch the shoulder blades together and lift the hands off the floor. In cases of extreme forward head posture, a person may not be able to pull the head all the way back to the door jamb when first starting. In these cases, it is advisable to pull the head back as far as possible without pain. After initially performing the chin tuck exercise in a door jamb and becoming comfortable with it, the exercise can eventually be done standing or sitting without a door jamb.

If you would like to see if exercises can help relieve any neck and/or shoulder pain you are experiencing, it is always beneficial to have your condition evaluated by a health care professional. It is always best to have the program include clear goals, including ergonomics and additional ways to improve postural muscle balance, stretches as well as any strengthening exercises. Findings of the present study showed that VSE were comparable with IE in improving neck functions and performance. VSE might be superior to IE in promoting efficiency of superficial neck muscle in torque generation. It had been shown by various studies that IE were effective in improving neck functions and reducing neck pain intensity, and hence they were prescribed to participants with neck pain . With the findings from this study, VSE might serve as an alternative to IE in neck training and rehabilitation.

While you can recognize when your neck hurts or is stiff, a weak neck can have other symptoms that are not as obvious. In addition to discomfort in the neck itself, you may have headaches, dizziness or problems with your joint and jaw muscles . You also may have pain or weakness in your arms or AC joint impingement in the shoulder.

Office work is a kind of job that demands sitting for prolonged time requiring the use of computer. These two factors are mainly responsible for overloading of the spine. Neck pain and computer users are clearly connected due to extended periods of sitting prevention of falls in a certain position with no breaks to stretch the neck muscles. Prolonged computer use with neck bent forward will cause the anterior neck muscles to gradually get shorter and tighter, while the muscles in the back of neck will grow longer and weaker. Neck problem also accounts for a large proportion of occupational illness and disability. Neck pain is common among computer workers in our country and contributes importantly to the demand for medical services and the economic burden of absence from work due to sickness.

These exercises can help improve poor posture, gain muscle strength, and relieve some tightness. As always, exercises should be done slowly and in a pain-free range. The neck position is crucial to achieve a proper posture. It’s been said that the “first impression is the last impression”.

If you can’t go deeper, just press into the right hand again. If your head tilted farther to the right, bring your right hand to the left side of the head again and press into it (Figure 11-11). Post-isometric stretching can be used for lateral flexion as well. First, tilt you head as far as you can to the right (Figure 11-8). When you’ve reached your comfortable limit in left rotation, you provide resistance as you turn your head to the right again and as you resist by pressing to the left (Figure 11-7). You place a hand on your right temporal region to provide resistance as you press into the hand as if you are trying to turn your head to the right (Figure 11-5).