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- Welcome to Living Healthy Chicago, I'm Jane Clauss.
We all do it, we spend a lot of time
staring down at our phones and devices,
and because of that, many of us struggle
with neck and upper back strain,
it's commonly called text neck.
So today, we're gonna talk to an expert
about how to manage it and make you feel better.
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Joining us to help us with our aches and pains
is Physical Therapist, Keith Travers.
Keith, is there really such a thing as text neck?
And if so, what is?
- Text neck is increased stress at the base of your head,
from the position that you're holding your head
throughout the day.
When we have our head forward in that position
it puts a lot of tension at the base of your head
and your upper traps and leads to pain for a lot of people.
The computer is a big issue.
It's teleconferencing after teleconferencing,
after teleconferencing.
- What is exactly happening
with the muscles in our shoulders and our neck
and our posture to get this text neck?
- So you head weighs about 10 pounds,
10 to 11 pounds on average.
So, as your head goes forward about an inch,
you add another 10 pounds of foot pressure
that your neck has to stop from going forward.
And so commonly, we're probably sitting
around two inches forward so we're adding 20 pounds
to what we have to hold up.
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So when you start to come forward an inch,
you start adding another 10 pounds
your neck would have to hold.
- So that's not so easy. - No, not so much.
- So done for several hours straight,
you can see how your body's gonna break down,
those tissues are gonna get really, really tight.
- When do we need to go seek help?
- So, super serious is when you're having
numbness and tingling in your hands, or down your arm,
or pain down your arms, one or the other, or both,
or you start to lose like gripping ability
and your arms start to get weaker.
That's a big deal that,
then you need to for sure to seek professional help.
- Are there things that we can do at home
to remedy this issue that we may have
before we start worrying about it,
or should we just say,
"You know what, it'll go away if I sit up straight."
- So there's definitely a grouping of exercises
that we've come up with that can help
with combating that posture, that forward position.
- So let's help everybody to help themselves.
You have some exercises to show us.
- I do, absolutely, yes. - Okay.
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- So your first exercise is called the chin tuck, okay?
So we're sitting forward in this position all the time,
so imagine that your chin is on a platform
and you're just sliding it straight back into this position
kinda giving yourself a double chin.
Most people don't like this when they do that,
but this also puts a lot of stretch
to the base of your head, okay?
And it starts to target those muscles
that help to stabilize your cervical spine
and reduces some of the tension at the base of your head.
So we generally tell people initially
when they're having problems,
let's do that three times a day for a while.
- Okay, exercise number two.
- Exercise number two, so exercise number two that we use,
we use a foam roller a lot,
and not everybody has those
so you can use a nice beach towel, roll it up,
get it nice and tight, maybe tape that up.
And then you put the foam roller behind your back,
and we're gonna lay back on the foam roller.
Okay you feel that a little bit.
- [Jane] Feels good.
- [Keith] All right, now I'm gonna have you take
both your hands and relax your head over the top of it
and just sag over the top.
So we're countering all of that forward flexion
you've had all day long.
Hold that for about five seconds, come back up.
- And exercise number three.
- Exercise number three would be like the Superman exercise.
So you're laying on your belly, so if we've stretched out
all this area on the front side to get some length to it,
we wanna do some strengthening on the backside,
or we're never going to be to hold the position either.
So from here, you're squeezing the shoulder blades up,
good, raising your head,
chin comes down a little bit right there
and we're working all this structure.
And legs can come up at the same time, about five seconds,
and come on back down.
Two sets 10, three times a day, it starts to combat
some of your forward posture.
- I think the one thing we should remember
is that we should be mindful of our posture
when we're working on the computer
or looking at our devices.
- We have to combat that positioning with healthy exercises
to get ourselves in an upright posture,
kind of like breaking a habit.
So we have to train our brain to be in an upright posture,
and we have to have the system right,
meaning this has to be loose enough
and that has to be strong enough,
and once we do that enough times
and tell our brain to do it, it becomes our norm.
- Great exercises, great information, thank you so much.
- Thank you.
- All right, if you want more healthy living inspiration,
just head to our website, livinghealthytv.com.