Hi folks, I'm Bob Schrupp physical therapist, Brad Heineck physical therapist, together we are the most famous physical therapists on the internet
In our opinion of course Bob. Today Brad we're gonna talk about two sleeping positions
You must avoid, this is a good topic to me, timely one because you know there's nothing worse than not getting your sleep
Right being waken up in the middle of night
Painful can't get back to sleep, wondering why what can you do about it?
We got the answers and Brad and I
Just went through daylight savings time, the change so we're losing an hour asleep basically
And I'll tell you I was just all in a funk all day yesterday. I'm just starting to come out of it so this
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What are these two sleeping positions Brad? Well Bob, it's not that easy
We just can't say don't do this and don't do that. We gotta give them reason
We're here for a little education so that once you become educated you understand, and then you do there's a whole philosophy
I don't want to get into that but the biggest area is that cause that our complaints of pain are neck
Shoulder and back, those are probably the most common areas that become irritated and painful throughout the night
So we've got to take care of this and address and understand it, but first of all
Joints in general whether it's the joints in your spine or your shoulders or your back or whatever it maybe your neck
Want to stay in what we call the loose pack position
They're not like being at the end range, right so my shoulder here would be loose back
Here would be end range. Or back here would be end range so
I wouldn't sleep like this either, right so neck if we put our neck over to one side this way
All the joints to your neck are pushed to the end range we call it and
That's uncomfortable after a period of time
Initially it may not be a problem
But you hold your neck over like this for you know 20 minutes or more it becomes uncomfortable so
Keeping that in mind the next thing we want to do is look at the spine
And not just look at it
But understand the spine moves in a twist and what not but we want to keep it in a neutral position Bob
So a neutral position is actually where there's a little curve in the back here
There's a curve in the other direction, so we've got a curve in curve out curve in right
Yep keep these curves in that kind of a general shape
We're not going way out
And if you look at it from the front view now that
Typically want to keep straight, so the curves are looking from the side, and this is looking straight
So this will all come to play when we look at our positioning with sleeping so
Anything else I miss? No you got it right for once,
Well it happens. I was up studying late last night
So the first position is we're gonna talk about prone
Laying on your stomach
So this is a bad position. This is a position because it breaks a number of the rules
We just talked about that create pain gets you out of that neutral position or puts you at end range
so if I'm gonna lay here
Let's just take a regular pillow Bob
And there are people who sleep prone, and they have for a while
And they do okay with it
But the problem that can really occur when you're on your stomach you almost have to have your head one position over
Over to the right or to the left and that puts my neck at end range
And I'm laying there for a long period of time now
I'm assuming people who sleep like this that don't have pain throughout the night turn their head right to left
The other thing is though
I didn't see a study on this
But we do kind of an informal survey of this at a classroom one time
We asked how many people have headaches
And a hundred percent of the people that laid on their stomach
Had headaches, throughout the day or throughout the week
You know I mean had a higher incidence of headaches, so that's something to consider
Is that if you are especially having those headaches that start from back here
You know the neck headaches
That's one of the things I would definitely look into
And I think if you're a prone sleeper you may or may not have a pillow
I guess without a pillow it puts
You more in a neutral position
But you know still if you can avoid the prone position for your neck it's gonna be better
And then the other thing is if you lay on your stomach and with your shoulders if you lay like this
That puts your shoulders at end range, and it also puts your brachioplexus, they can get pinched off and
Actually cut the circulation off into your arms or pinch the nerves and you can wake up with numb or tingling
One time I woke up both my arms were numb
And I was trying to turn the alarm off so I'm going like this
It's a little embarrassing right so and that's
You know there's a name for that Bob. What is it?
When you put your arms up like this, working overhead, sure what is it? I can't remember
I know there's honeymoon syndrome where
If your spouse falls asleep on your arm and it becomes numb then
So next position Bob. I'll think of that in just a little bit, all right sideline now this is it might say well
Everyone's side lies are most people do which I do myself
but oftentimes the shoulder problem will happen when you're laying on the point of your shoulder if you will and
The joint when you relax you can sublex or actually push the joint shoulder joint out
Slightly and can put pressure on the ligaments and the
Capsule etc in your shoulder and cause pain so laying like this on the shoulder
Can really create some pain so what you'll want to do is pull this shoulder out a little bit, so you're actually on a
little bit of a
Slant here, then you're getting more on the meaty part of the shoulder
And that's gonna help reduce that so
Side lying can be a problem, but if you do these little twerks that
We're talking about, another thing that can help you
While you're in this position the other thing is your back is sagging a little bit when you're in this sideline position
Yeah, let's get the spine, show that
So here you know it's straight, but now it's gonna
sag a little bit right here in the low back, so if you're having back problems especially if you sleep like this a lot
All the time you should take like a roll towel
Like we did here, and you can put it in that position or there's actually a sleep roll you can buy
We have it in our Amazon section there by McKenzie and
This one you can actually tie around your waist so it's in your back when you sleep on your back
Or it's on your side when you sleep on your side right
In my case I know I can sleep on my side for about 10 minutes
I never even get to sleep because my back starts to hurt then I have to go to my back
But this is because of my spondylolisthesis
So this how this works, this one's a little bit small for me
It doesn't wrap around but people who have a disc problem often
Use something like this so that here you have the support on your low back in the
Lordotic section and then when you roll to either side you also have that hollow spot being filled in, there's another
Possibility Brad here and besides it being too small for you, maybe your waist is too big for it. Yeah. There you go
Just pointing out that possibility, should we show them the trick with the pillows? Yeah sure let's do that. Let's
Pull this right here. This is a cervical pillow here, but another way
I'm gonna put this on this side Brad just for my mic purposes here, so
You know generally when you're on your side if you're gonna lay on your side you want to have a thicker pillow
So that your neck isn't going like, do you want to take it out once Brad
It isn't going like this, you want to have your neck right in the middle, too
So this is almost a little bit, this one actually needs to go up a little behind
But the other key, we've showed this many times is actually take a pillow a lot of times
It's a more of a throw pillow and that's what I use and I just create the little canal here
Yep, and you can put your arm right in there
And now there's not nearly the pressure on your shoulder there was before so this is that side line making side line
Tolerable and acceptable to keep the shoulder pain from waking you up and now if you're having pain in this
Shoulder and you don't want to lay on it, which is good
Then you should actually besides the canal while you might not even need the canal
But you would put a pillow here and
Another pillow here and support the other one like this and again it puts that shoulder in that loose pack position that Brad was talking about
It's not any end range and it's kind of a little bit forward and it's not
It's not going across the body like this which is also bad, right because then you're getting towards that end range
Right here in the middle. That's where you want to keep it, it's gonna
Do it well and the last thing is
Side lying, a lot of people will get a pillow like this that actually has the form and it's a memory foam, so it'll
Put and there's a gap for the neck right so you get the neck in a neutral position
And that's not necessary you can use a regular pillow and some people you know I'll have some people try
Just a towel roll to fill in that gap to get that
Neutral position in the neck so if I lay here now with the towel roll
See how it really cradles my neck nice and now we don't have the neck sagging either so
That's actually pretty comfortable
Yeah, if this works
But it's not quite as cushy you may want to invest in the memory foam they cost a little more
Or there's the cervical roll too
Yeah, there's a lot of things to keep you comfortable, McKenzie makes a roll here
Cervical we can put it in there, and if you find that all works well
And you don't want to keep using a towel you can go ahead get one of those
So what it sort of boils down too, we got two positions to avoid that prone which we don't have any solutions for and
And side lying which we have a number of solutions for that we just went through so
You know we're helping you know at least on half of these, we're half smart right so thanks for watching
You