Neck Pain Arising From Poor Posture

How To Relieve Neck Pain From Poor Posture

Do you suffer from neck pain? Does it seem to get worse after a long workday in the office? Here's an interesting fact: the average head weighs around 10 to 11 pounds (4.5 to 5kg for the metric users out there). 

Go find whatever things you can stack up to that weight. Now try to hold it with your hand and forearm upright. It gets tiresome after a minute or so, doesn't it? 

Well, props to the real hero here: your neck. It is important to bear in mind that the neck supports the entire weight of the head during most of our active hours and, while it may seem an effortless deal, the stress caused to it by poor posture can lead to pain. Unlike sports injuries which require sports physio, tech neck can be a huge contributor to a sore neck and requires specific muscle strengthening exercise to fix it

How to identify poor posture neck pain?

Neck pain can have several causes, such as the pain derived from whiplash syndrome or autoimmune diseases like fibromyalgia. But if you're experiencing neck pain and you consider yourself a fairly healthy person with no record of severe injury, ask yourself the following:

Do you have long work hours that involve sitting down in a desk, looking at a screen or having your neck in a fixed, angled position? 

Do you forget to stand up and stretch your neck and shoulders every couple of hours? Do you have difficulty or greater pain doing the former? 

Do you feel the back of your neck flat? Do you see your shoulders rounding to the front when standing up straight? 

If the answer to these questions is yes, you might be experiencing poor posture neck pain.

What your poor posture neck pain symptoms could be telling you about your health

Poor posture, especially the one sustained through years of incorrect sitting and lack of exercise, can cause greater problems than neck pain alone. Among these we can find:

•  Loss of cervical lordosis, commonly known as flat neck syndrome or "text neck", derived from years of tilting our neck to the front and downwards, can deform and eventually erase the natural curve of the neck, which should look like a C with its curve to the back of the neck.
•  As the neck has to make more effort to hold the head up in an angle than when standing upright, the shoulder muscle group comes in to assist, adjusting themselves forward. This can lead to round shoulders and scapular winging, one of the prime causes of shoulder impingement.
•  As poor posture takes over the neck and shoulders, neck pain can cause us to find a more comfortable position to hold our upper body weight while sitting, leading us to hunch over and develop even worse posture. This can cause a permanent, unnatural curvature in our backs, called scoliosis.
• After the neck has lost its original shape to poor posture, the vertebrae can be displaced further leading to compression of the spinal canal. If untreated, this can cause severe pain and paralysis.

 

How To Relieve Neck Pain 

 

The good news is that most of these complications can be prevented by corrective posture therapy.

What is corrective posture therapy?

The damage caused by years of bad posture be mended by undertaking corrective posture therapy, which is applied by physical therapists and prescribed by physicians and traumatologists. 

This therapy consists of a series of exercises designed to revert vertebral deformities, giving a healthy muscle tone to the neck, back, and shoulders and realigning the upright posture. 

Corrective posture therapy is usually paired with medication and external aides such as posture corrector shapewear and/or applying warm or ice-cold compresses to relax the cervical muscles and nerves and alleviate the pain to some degree until the posture is improved.

However, sometimes corrective posture therapy is not enough to remedy the cause of the pain; surgical treatment might be needed in the cases where the cervical vertebrae are too compressed and restoring inter vertebral space or intervention of a hernia is needed.