- (Up beat music) Bob and Brad
the two most famous
physical therapists
on the internet.
- Hi, I'm Bob Schrupp, Physical Therapist,
- Brad Heineck, Physical Therapist
- And together we are the most famous physical therapist
on the internet
- In our opinion, of course Bob.
- So excited Brad. (giggles)
Today, we're gonna talk about cervical spondylosis
and we're gonna show you exercises
and stretches for neck pain.
What is cervical spondylosis?
- Yeah, let's cervical.
What are we referring to
- Is the neck.
- And you might say cervical, depending on where you live.
- (giggles) I always liked that
but the spondylosis is really just age, wear and tear.
- Mhm
- I mean, things are starting to wear out.
- Sure.
And for those of you who are being a little
you know, well, I'm not that old, I'm only in my twenties.
I learned very early on at a course I went
to is that cervical deterioration starts beginning
from about late nineteens to early twenties.
Your, your neck begins.
Deteriorate do deteriorate that early.
- Well, that's what they, I don't, I don't believe it either
but it's probably earlier than you think.
- That's why you're getting that crooking in your neck.
Even at the age twenties,
- I can believe it.
If you're at your cell phone or your head like this,
- Right.
- All the time, poor posture.
- So with wear and tear, you're gonna get the discs,
you know the discs,
you know, we have the discs between the bones.
They start to dehydrate and herniate.
You get bone spurs, you get the ligaments are stiff.
So the, the biggest thing you wanna do is you
wanna start getting some motion,
- Right
With your neck.
- Exactly.
- I just had a 92 year old Brad that came
in really spry young gentleman
- (Giggles)
- that he could hardly move his neck at all.
- Sure.
- He was having severe pain.
Nine out of 10, within two days, the pain had gone
down to a two outta 10,
- just,
- just from range of motion.
- Just some basic stretching.
- Yep.
- Okay.
- And by the way, I'm gonna show you a couple tricks
at the end of this video, to try to get you to
watch the whole thing that I used on him.
- Sure.
- That he, he worked did very successfully
but let's start off with
so there's three main areas that we're gonna tackle here.
Let's start off with the range of motion first, Brad.
- Yep.
- So let's start with cervical rotations.
- Yep.
- Okay.
- Good posture when you're doing these Brad
- That's right.
So you're gonna be up shoulders back.
- And the other key is
that you don't wanna push into the pain too heavily.
- Exactly.
- I mean,
- no sharp pain,
- Right
So like, if I go this direction, ow ow ow ow
just hit it and then go off of it.
- What do you mean hit it?
- Well, go to the end and then bump against it.
- Yeah. So your just gonna
when you start to feel it that's enough.
- Right. And so let's say you can go more this way.
Well work this one more, any motion you can get.
- Right.
- So, I mean, let's say you can go left
but you can't go right.
Fine. Do a lot of lefts
and do just kind of bump into the right.
- Right. Cause a lot of times you'll find that gonna
you do 10 of 'em this way.
And then you go back to the right
and all of a sudden it's gotten a little bit better.
- Yeah, exactly.
Just by motion, you know, putting your motion that way.
- Yeah. All those vertebrae are connected.
- Yeah. They're all connected.
So rotations and we're, I'd like to see a good ten.
- Yeah.
- You know, in, in each direction.
- Yeah. You're not gonna go 50 or 60 that's too much.
- I, and in the first day I would only do it a couple times
but by, you know, the second or third day
if it's feeling fine, you could do it every hour.
- Sure. Yep.
- So
- You, you'll gotta listen to your body
- Yep
- if it comes up.
If it hurts sharp pain while you're doing
it or a half hour later, it's like, oh
that's starting to getting pretty sore from what
I did back off.
- motion is lotion.
Right? Isn't that?
Alex's favorite term?
Have you ever heard that one?
- No. No. (giggles)
- We're, this is a family show.
- No. All right. I know.
I always thought too. That doesn't sound good.
All right.
Let's so we did rotations now let's do side bending.
So you're gonna go
you're gonna place your ear to your shoulder.
You're not gonna go like this.
- Right, right
- Bring the shoulder to the ear.
So you're gonna give a little stretch here
- But that's a verbal cue I'll use with my patients.
Bob. I say,
bring your right ear towards your right shoulder.
Don't look at it, but just go this way.
And usually they'll do this.
And then I'll say shoulder down
if they do height
- and don't do this.
- Yeah. Right.
- You're keeping your nose straight forward here.
And since I got such a little nose
that's easy for me to do.
All right.
Then we're gonna also do extension.
- Right.
- Brad, do you wanna show that one from the side?
- You bet.
I prefer the profile is what I call it.
- Very good.
Very good posture.
- Yeah. So we're up in here?
Well, everyone out there right now, we've got thousands
of people, maybe millions sitting up now.
- That's right,
- right.
So we're gonna do a chin tuck first just
- I like the chin tuck just to get it
in the right position.
- Right. Gets your, your head up.
- I don't want you doing that.
You know, don't I don't want you to start
from this position and go like this.
- Yeah.
- So you wanna get it
in the right position by kind of tucking your chin
in a little bit and then go back.
- Yeah. And there are gonna be people who are kind
of stuck here and, and they may not be able to get
to this position,
- Right
- do the best that you can.
I'm supposed to look at the camera, they say,
- do the best that you can some
some comments on the,
- okay.
- Okay. So I wanna pay attention
and then chin tuck, in chin, tuck in if you want,
and you're not having sharp pain and it feels kind of good.
You can give a little over,
- over pressure.
- Yeah.
- As long as it feels like a good, comfortable stretch.
Okay. And then we're gonna go
to full extension
- full extension. Yeah.
- Now this is, I don't know how you do this, Bob
but what I like to do is I have my patients
or myself lean back into the chair.
So you've got good posture.
You relaxed going to a neutral position here
and then just go back gently.
If you do this, and you get sharp pain.
You're going too far.
If you do this and you come back up and you get dizzy, stop.
- Right.
- Do not do this.
- There are people that get dizzy
- right
It's not for you.
- I'm one of 'em actually.
But anyway,
- you're dizzy anyway.
- Yeah. I've noticed that.
- Okay.
Also, if it sends pain anywhere else down the
the arm or anything like that.
- Exactly.
- They're not gonna do that one.
- Right? No radicular symptom become or, or down.
Sometimes I've had people where it's just
down the pinkies or
or the fingers it's like, and they feel
- yeah.
- Tingling in their fingers, but everything else is fine.
- That's still a problem.
- Right. Right.
- yeah
- (chair squeaks)
And you know, the one thing we forgot to
mention Brad is when you're doing the rotations
and the side bending
you can actually do a little extra pressure
if there's no pain.
- Right.
- In fact that's what I would like to see you doing again.
Good posture.
So let's say and go this way.
I've been doing this.
It's been going pretty good.
Now I'm gonna give a little extra stress.
- Sure. Yep.
You're gonna show a technique on
on how
- at the end do it, the trick at the end.
But the same with side bending, you can do a little bit
and you can give a little extra can't you Brad.
- Yep. Little bit fingertip.
- Very, yeah.
Very gentle.
- If you're one of those people, little as good
a lot is lot better.
Stop that attitude.
Fingertip one fingertip is really all you need.
- I would,
- don't go cranking on it.
- I would not do over pressure on extension.
- Yeah.
- And I usually don't have people doing flex.
Do you do, I mean
you spend so much of your day down like this already.
I don't know that you need to stretch it that way.
- Exactly. I usually don't.
- Yeah. Occasionally, but all right.
So that's number one.
You're gonna start getting some motion really important.
Then you wanna do some posture exercises.
I mean, I mean, you wanna make sure that you're
you're having good posture because otherwise
everything you're doing might just come back again.
Even though you're doing all the rotations
- Sure
- and stuff like that.
Why don't you show, show the bowling ball, Brad
why posture is so important?
- All right.
- So our head's weigh eight to 10 pounds.
Right?
- Right.
- And this is a, what?
10 pound bowling ball.
- It, it might be a little more
but whatever your, your head's, you know
pretty close to the weight of a bowling ball ball.
- Nice smiley face.
He's glad to see us, Brad. (giggles)
Isn't that nice.
- Okay. So why are we using this bowling ball on a stick?
The stick represents your neck
or your spine
- Right
- holding up your head.
Now if I in my hands.
- So here's the muscles right of the neck.
- Exactly. My wrists represent the muscles of the neck
holding the neck up.
I'm not working very hard when the head is right
above the shoulders.
- Right. So with me, I'm in good posture right now.
Now my neck muscles, aren't working very hard.
- Mhm
- Okay.
- Now go ahead.
And, and if you got poor posture
at the computer and you're staring
at that TV or the computer now let's look
at the bowling ball model, Bob turn
around.
- Oh, yep.
- Okay. And the head goes forward.
Now, all of a sudden
- now the muscles
of the arms and the are working a lot.
- It's not a really big deal right now
but I can tell a lot more effort.
Now, if I hold this ball for about five minutes
which we're not gonna hold the video that long
I'm gonna get sore wrists.
If I go a half hour
I am not gonna be able to, I'm gonna have tendonitis.
- Right.
- Okay.
- Exactly.
- So this, you know,
- oh geez
- you gotta keep that head up.
Okay.
- Good thing we have muscles in our neck.
- Yeah, no kidding.
- Or else that will happen a lot
- Exactly.
- And that goes back to also the chin tuck spread.
If, if that's why we're trying to show you
that's an exercise to do.
Cause it's a, it's something you can do throughout the day.
If you're down like this
a reminder is to sit up and then do a couple
of those chin tucks where you're bringing your
ears back and you're backing up your face because that'll
you know, is a reminder where to put your head and neck.
- Sure.
- Right. In put right position.
- So much of the revolves around posture.
You know, this started about range of motion.
Now we're in the posture, but the two relate so close.
You really cannot separate 'em
- and I'm gonna show you one other exercise
Brad here that you've never seen this one I bet.
this is a Mulligan technique.
Okay.
- It's called to stick 'em up.
And this is an exercise you can do through the
day and you put your arms like this and you're
gonna squeeze your shoulder blades together
while you bring your arms up.
- Squeeze your shoulder blades together?
- Yep
- Let's let's get this squared away,
- So
- oh, okay.
Here we go.
Yep.
- So I'm bringing arms up.
And I'm squeezing my shoulder blades together.
- Try to get 'em to touch like that.
- Yep and then I bring it down like this again throughout
the whole thing here.
Let me go from an angle
- Squeeze
Are you catching me or am I too tall?
- You got it Ronnie?
- Squeeze
Okay. Ronnie's always gotta follow us wherever we go.
- Nine minutes.
- Okay. All right.
So,
you're gonna
you're gonna make the posture changes in your life.
If you got a TV and you're watching it
and it's over here, you don't want to
you don't wanna be sitting like this all the time.
You wanna put the TV directly in front of you?
- Yeah.
- That sounds like a small thing.
But a lot of people,
- right.
- My wife does this.
She puts her furniture set up and then she she's looking
over like this all the time, you know?
And I go move the chair around so I can look directly at it.
Computer screens.
You wanna make sure they're up high enough.
So you're not leaning down like this,
- sit up tall
bring it up to head level, eye level
- pillows
When you're sleeping, we have a whole thing on that.
I'll I'll link it at the end.
When you're on your back.
A lot of times you wanna prefer
that you have one pillow, not two pillows.
Cause you can see how that brings my head forward.
Yep. But when you're on your side
you want to have two pillows because that keeps my neck
in the middle here as opposed to down like this.
- Right.
And we've got lots of videos
on posture and things just like this in detail.
- Well, let's go to our trick, Brad.
- Yeah. The one you've been talking about.
- Yeah.
- All this time.
- All right.
- People aren't suspense.
- So what you're gonna do is get a towel
and then he Mulligan calls this salvage.
I don't know why the edge on the towel
- the edge of the towel.
I like that.
- Yeah. So you're gonna bring it up
like this and you're gonna kind of bring it
up like this and you're gonna go underneath your ears.
- Yeah.
- Lined up underneath your ears like this and you got
you're made out like this and you're gonna
this is where it gets a little tricky.
You're actually gonna switch hands.
I grab this one and this one goes down
and now I can work on rotations here.
It's just a great way.
If you're, this is what I had this 92 year old
- Okay
- he was able to comprehend this.
- Sure.
- And he was able, he was really stuck this way.
But with the towel,
it was less pain and he could go further.
So the other direction is very simple.
Again, you start off this way.
Switch arms.
- Yep.
- And I'm keeping pressure the whole time
while I'm turning.
- Try and keep the shoulders.
- Yeah. Keep the shoulders still.
- There you go.
Do it.
Do it in properly with the shoulder.
You don't want to do that.
- Yeah. Keep the shoulder back.
Okay. You can also do extensions with this.
- Sure.
- You can go ahead and just go ahead
and keep both hands together like this
and you can put pressure on and go back.
Like this
- Should feel comfortable.
Should feel like a good stretch.
- You can try different levels.
You can go a little bit lower on this one.
Again. It's a nice trick
for getting motion when you're getting stuck
or if you're having pain in one direction.
- Right.
- So, all right.
Those are our little tricks
and we're gonna have plenty more for you to watch
but remember we can fix just about anything, Brad.
- I'm glad you mentioned that Bob, because we haven't gotten
to it yet, but it's that broken heart.
- Yeah.
- But I'm thinking we can get that.
We could be the first one on that.
- Yeah.
- This could be big.
- There it is.
Thanks for watching.(giggling)