Find your sport, spare your neck

Do you suffer from neck pain? Is that why you clicked on this article? You may be reading it on your phone, which you’re holding in front of your chest, looking down. If so, be careful; you’re in the process of giving yourself even more neck pain.

Your crooked back and lowered head don’t fit a human’s natural posture. You’ve simply coopted it as your default pose in the roughly 55 to 85 hours a week you spend online according to Postbank’s study on youth in the digital age – and 84 per cent of that time is reportedly spent on your phone. The 30-hour difference can be explained by age. Those over forty settle for 55 hours, while younger people spend more time in the digital realm. But that doesn’t mean younger people experience more neck pain. It grows with age – for three reasons: neck problems are souvenirs from the womb and therefore typically older than we are to begin with; we increase neck pain permanently over the course of our digital lives; and they tend to creep on and on.

Initial therapy for neck pain is best done after birth

We’re back at Chiropraktik Wien, which you may already know from Part 1 (see link above) of our series. Anna Fiand, Master of Science in Chiropractic and physiotherapist, runs the practice together with chiropractor and physiotherapist Wolfgang Placht. She reminds us that we have only limited control over our neck pain. «Poor posture during pregnancy often affects the baby,» she explains. The mother’s sacrum or pelvis might be displacing the baby’s head, or it might not be lying properly purely due to limited space. The forces that act during childbirth especially put pressure on the two uppermost cervical vertebrae, i.e. the atlas and axis, which can easily shift around in the process. «It’s best to set up these vertebrae right in the delivery room,» advises Anna Fiand. «That would be the initial therapy that would save you the many more sessions.»

Displaced vertebrae put pressure on the nervous system, which is responsible for information processing in the brain. It’s responsible for balancing how everything in the body should be with how things really are. If the actual and target state diverge, the brain adjusts for this. The human system is designed in such a way that it can compensate for discrepancies over long periods of time. «The brain compensates for our sins.» The problem is that new ones are being added to the list all the time – like right now, if you’re reading this text on your phone. The more we use our system in a species-appropriate way, the less there is to compensate. «Spending 85 hours on a digital device is definitely not species-appropriate.»

Exercise therapy: the sport for neck pain

The most natural movement for humans is walking and hiking. For Fiand, a runner herself, running 42 kilometres on asphalt is no better than herniating a disc in her cervical spine on a road bike. «Every sport will put a strain on your body,» she says, adding that it’s just a matter of not overdoing it and, most importantly, finding the right exercise for you. By «right» Anna Fiand means the type of movement most compatible with your own system. «We’re all built from the same blueprint, and yet each of us has a different adaptation of the core ‘human’ concept; different genetics, different vulnerabilities.»

It’s like we just can’t keep our bodies happy. Movement makes us susceptible to wear, tear and injury; no movement makes us susceptible to lethargy, thereby ensuring degeneration. Both too much and too little of it can cause poor posture and incorrect load-bearing, which the body then compensates for by adapting posture. It’s all about finding the middle ground.

Psychotherapy – it all starts with the psyche

«The body translates the soul into the visible,» as poet Christian Morgenstern put it. How we carry ourselves on the outside reflects how we feel on the inside. Those weighed down by psychological problems will move around with the corresponding posture – hunched over. This, in turn, makes them even less able to cope with the adversities of life. Fiand uses a plastic ruler as an analogy: hold it vertically and pin straight, and you can press down on it as hard as you want from above. It’ll withstand the pressure. But if the ruler is curved even a little, it’ll keep bending more and more under the pressure until it snaps.

Main therapy – snap to attention

According to a study by the Robert Koch Institute in Germany, 55 per cent of women and 36 per cent of men suffer from neck pain. The disparity is attributed to anatomical differences, primarily lower muscle strength in women. Chiropractor Anna Fiand specifies: «The essence of the problem is posture. African women, who carry loads weighing up to 50 kilos on their heads, know no neck pain. They don’t have any changes to bone structure; those would be visible on X-rays. Their neck muscles are so strong that they’re neither tense nor cramped. The reason for this is the axial load due to upright posture.»

Our lifestyle, on the other hand, is crooked. We sit at school and work in slouched postures on chairs that are often not appropriate for our bodies. And instead of compensating for this in our free time, we lounge in equally slouched positions on sofas that aren’t appropriate for our bodies. Of course, you can sit just as incorrectly on an ergonomically sophisticated, 5,000-euro chair. In the end, good posture is our responsibility. No aid can do it for us,

which proves quite difficult, as we’re not taught the art of sitting in a way that’s comfortable for our bodies. Crooked posture is a permanent state, because no one has the perfect everyday life. Office workers with their downward gazes are the ideal candidates for neck pain. Painters, on the other hand, strain their necks by looking up professionally. Construction workers, whose jobs alone hardly cause neck pain, spend their free time hunched over their phones. Anna Fiand’s tip to counter this? «Keep snapping back to attention.»

Posture is compulsory, exercises are voluntary

«Every time you straighten up in front of the computer, that’s exercise,» says Fiand, who advises taping sticky notes to your screen to catch your eye every five or 10 minutes. Of course, you could set regular reminders on your phone, but they’d just force you to look down even more often.

There are plenty of exercises for strengthening your neck. As with sports, it comes down to finding the one that’s right for you. The only criterion here is to ask yourself, «Does this exercise do me good or not?» The chiropractor finds it interesting that most people intuitively do the right thing, such as stretching and lolling about in bed in the morning before getting up. «It’s a good way to get yourself in the groove.»

The simplest exercises to strengthen your neck

There are many specialists who can take care of neck problems: orthopaedists, physiotherapists, osteopaths, health trainers, alternative practitioners and, of course, chiropractors like Anna Fiand. If pain has been plaguing you for a long time, you can’t go wrong with any of these. If you’d like to start off by choosing the exercises that suit you from the following ones, here’s some reassurance: you can’t do anything wrong except overdo it; and you can’t make anything worse except by continuing after your body’s told you to stop. The rule of thumb is to let your body decide when it’s had enough.

My colleague Michael Restin recently tried out a so-called neck stretcher for his tense neck:

But here’s what you can do for your tense neck muscles without any gadget at all:

Cervical spine figure eight

Lie on your back with your legs bent and your head resting on a firm pillow or small ball. First, stretch out your neck to be as long as possible. Next, picture your nose is a pencil and draw a figure eight on the ceiling in delicate strokes. Doing these figure eights mobilises the cervical spine.

Do shoulder circles to improve your posture

You can stand or sit with your arms hanging loosely. Circles your shoulders, alternating sides. Slowly increase the size of the circles, focusing on the movement to the back and down. This strengthens your shoulder and neck, improves circulation and releases tension.

Lift and lower your shoulders for relief

Raising and lowering your shoulders will tighten and relax the shoulder-neck muscles, relieving pressure on the cervical spine. You can stand or sit with your arms hanging loosely. Raise both shoulders towards your ears at the same time, then bring them back down. Increase the movement slowly. Breathe in as you raise and out as you lower your shoulders.

Stretch your cervical spine muscles

Imagine the hood of a sweatshirt hanging down your back – this corresponds to location of the trapezius muscle. He’s the poor devil who’s hit most by our sins and therefore predominantly responsible for our neck pain. To help the muscle out for a change instead of challenging it, stand or sit up straight. Push down your arm along with the shoulder you want to stretch. Next, tilt your head to the opposite side and gently push it forward until you feel the stretch in your shoulder-neck area. To up the intensity, place your free hand on your head and gently pull it forward.

Stretch your short neck muscles

Push your chin forward horizontally and then back. Next, consciously straighten your cervical spine completely and then push it backwards, as if to create a double chin. Make sure to keep your head level with your eyes looking ahead.