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 opinions, of course Bob.
Doing a video here Brad
I don't think we've ever done before I think we did want on neck headaches, but this is how to stop headaches
It's a new approach that may surprise you because it actually involves neuroscience. Oh.
Wow, big words, scare me with that yeah
Let's take care of this first Brad
You know I don't get into the meat of this before we take into our guests
Please come into our site. If you haven't already and subscribe to us. We provide videos
How stay healthy, fit, pain-free, and we upload everyday.
Also
if you haven't already,
Go over to Facebook and "like" us, because Brad and I as children were ostracized
Picked on, bullied, and now we're trying to turn it around
That might be a little carried away.
Maybe a little bit exaggerating. Carry on. All right Brad, today our information is all based upon from this book
It's called "Your Headache Isn't All In Your Head, and it's by Adriaan Louw and Ina Deiner
I'll put a link down below.
And in fact they have a whole series of books, not.. Adriaan does has a whole series of books on pain, right?
I just thought it was a very interesting approach
And had very interesting
analogies. It's all based on research,
but it's written for the layperson.
Right so, it's easy to understand not a lot of terms that you have to be a specialist to understand. No not at all
It's all just based and they use even kind of examples like we're gonna show today
Is this - how to get rid of your headaches without pharmaceuticals is that accurate?
He's not afraid for you to use pharmaceuticals as part of your treatment
But just the education alone can help decrease headaches, okay, understanding of it
And it just it was an eye-opener to me, and I again. I'm not going to do the book justice
I really have not I mean I'm I hope I'm not screwing this up
Even the way I explain things, but I thought we'd give a brief intro to it.
We're gonna show you some things that you can use, sure, and
you know what's interesting is what he talked about Brad. It doesn't matter what kind of headache you have.
It doesn't matter if you have
Migraines or cluster headaches, you know there's all those different type stress headaches it really the mechanism
of why the headache is happening is very similar in each case, okay?
But what you might do might be a little bit different because you have different triggers. You've heard about triggers?
Like a trigger point? No, trigger: things that set off your headache. Like your dog?
No, like I know my daughter, she gets migraines, and I'm gonna have her read this book, but
She's very sensitive
she can be very sensitive to light and sound and
that means her nerves are a little more sensitive than usual, right, than the average person, sure, and we're gonna show
ways to calm that down too. So certain like you said music or
Whatever may get be the trigger to get that headache going. Right so one of the examples
he uses in the book Brad, and we kind of used a big one here, but is he said you could take, figure,
The example is think about the top of the spinal cord, you have your brain
There's a part of the brain that processes information
Sure, it takes it all in from the entire body what you see, what you hear, what you feel.
You know the sensation. And the pathways for that, most of them are going through the spinal
cord and up, and you hear there's something with the cranial nerves, but we don't want to get too in-depth
but they're going to the nerves they're all it's
providing and he says you want to think of that as like a collection point and you can think of it as with a
recipe cup or whatever a measuring cup and
What happens is each time,
why don't you go ahead and do the pouring, each time a
stressor comes in like let's say you're having pain so that that gives you stress that adds some let's say you're having financial problems
You just balanced your checkbook yeah, and you're in the red. Yeah that adds a little stress
Let's say your kid comes home with a bad report card there you go
So and then you've got to talk to your spouse about the checkbook yeah, that's right a little more stress
So and you know it just could be the stress of
One big stressor is when you're having headaches is like you're a worried that you're gonna have another headache or worried that
Something is really wrong with my head. You know there must be something hurt
inside my head.
Whatever so some other problem that you really don't want to think about. So eventually what happens though
We're not going to do this all the way, but it fills all the way up and it starts overflowing
That's when the headache shows up, so these nerves are just being massively stimulated and
the response is pain in the head. Exactly. The thing is people that tend to get headaches
tend to often have nerves that are a little more sensitive than other people.
They're reacting faster. They're bringing the messages faster, so that thing is filling up faster. Okay, so that's not a good thing.
Okay, and you can often tell if you're one of those people because you might be sensitive to light, to sound, to
What else would be...oh even to touch right, tactile. Yeah, you know if you're walking on a cold floor
You know right? You're gonna be one of those people that when you get the headache
What do you do you you like turn the sound off you go into a quiet bedroom you put
Maybe something over your eyes to block out the sun, get the light down to a minimum, a dark room,
that's a good sign that you may have the highly sensitive nerves.
So if you have the highly certain set of
sensitive nerves we're gonna show you some things to try to do to help calm them down.
Okay, so that's basically what I do. Now one of the things
If the nerves are highly sensitive
One thing that's going to make them more sensitive is if they're not getting enough blood flow to them
Okay
So believe it or not if you tend to get headaches one thing that is good is to do neck exercises
Because it gets more blood flowing to the brain
So we're gonna loosen up the muscles which can help blood flow you're gonna get just movement in general promotes blood flow yeah
And so if you're one of those people that works at a computer
and you just sit and you stay still all day, you're starting to fill up that collection area.
I was demonstrating- a lot of people have poor posture, which is really going to help accelerate and
Drama...dramatize. Yeah make things worse.
Inflame. So let's start off with just a basic whole routine of neck exercises. You can do chin tucks.
This is one. It's not only good for posture, but it also gets some neck movements
So we're tucking our chin in and a lot of times
I take my hand even add a little extra pressure
You can go down, you don't want to go down, you want to go up
You want to just go straight back. First before you do that make sure you've got your shoulders and your trunk
is in a good posture, don't do your chin tucks if you're hunched over.
Now I want you to try and do some neck extensions here, and if this hurts
just go to the point where it hurts and then stop. If it hurts when you go way back,
just do a few extensions out not quite as far. Then you're gonna rotate to the left.
You're gonna rotate to the right.
(Just pretend you're watching a really slow tennis match.)
How many repetitions, Bob?
I would say three to five, just quick things to get blood flow into the area.
Again blood flow up into the brain, which is gonna make those nerves a little bit less sensitive
So if you're working at the computer you don't have to take a ten minute break. You can incorporate these. Let's do some side bending Brad.
And you can even do the little bit of stretch
We just showed this one, where you grab your arm on the chair and pull over a little bit
like this, gently gently, for the levator scapulae here. Yep
And you can go and grab on this side
I could see people thinking what does this have to do with headaches, but it does. It's getting blood flow
to those sensitive nerves.
Alright
Another last one we can do is
raising the shoulders and squeezing the back, yeah.
Again, that's working a lot of muscles that are connected and go up into the neck and up into the lower skull area
Now the second thing we're going to recommend is that you do get some aerobic exercise throughout the day.
And I don't care if it's its high level as biking and running, or if you're just walking. You want to get something
that's gonna profuse that area, and I know they talked about Brad even on bad days when you're having headaches
try to still do something. Try to do even still do
one load of laundry or something. Don't just sit in bed and let things stiffen up and get less blood flow to it.
We're gonna recommend doing some type of aerobic exercise. The third thing is kind of the surprising one.
I am gonna recommend that you do get this book because
just by increasing your knowledge of how the nerves work and again
I'm not going over all the examples that he brought up in the book, the amount,
how sensitive your nerves are, tend to decrease. So he had some actual scans, brain scans,
in the book, and he had him at multiple levels
so I mean you know different levels of the brain. Now these aren't really brain scans, these are Bob's drawings. These are very crude, but the
concept is the same. So this was showing a brain that was at rest. There was no pain, there was no activity going on.
This was the brain doing a painful activity. I don't know what it was.
The person was doing a painful activity, and it was causing pain
and the brain was just lit up, the nerves were all lit up so the red just
represents that the scan is showing activity going on is painful.
The brain was highly active the nerves were fired up
So what they did then is they took that person and did 30 minutes of education.
Basically like this book, and after they did the book they did the education or the book or whatever,
they then had them do the same painful activity and that's how much the activity in the brain had decreased that much, just by
education. I'm really anxious to try this with my daughter to see if she can decrease the amount of
headaches she gets, because she gets the actual migraines. Third one Brad is
breathing. I think we all talk about stress.
You know we all have stressful lives, and you want to decrease the amount of stress in your life
You can do so by taking some deep breaths and do breathing exercises
We've shown this one. You might look it up yourself even, four seven eight breathing
So you're gonna breathe in for four, in through the nose
Then you're gonna hold your breath for seven seconds.
One two three four five six seven hold it and then you're gonna breathe out through the mouth
Pursed breathing like you're blowing out a candle
for eight seconds and
And you can do a couple cycles of this throughout the day.
And you know what I find a lot of times when people under stress they start becoming shallow breathers.
And I do these a lot in the car
I'll do them on the way to work. I do it on the way to doing videos with Brad, because it's very stressful.
It is, it can be a problem. Ask ask my wife, so yeah
She's probably doing this for seven to eight all the time so but it's gonna get things relaxed more blood flow again
Which again is the key to calming down those nerves.
I just want to say in the four seven eight if you can't hold all those seconds if you just start that might be hard
so just
count the numbers and go a little faster. The next one Brad
we kind of alluded to this already and said you want to make sure your posture is really good. When you're in bad posture things
tighten up
less blood flow to the head
So you're gonna want to work on and that's why the chin tucks are good because they remind you you might have been like this
Yeah, I'm gonna get into this position
Now it's kind of a final thing that he had kind of a mantra a saying that he wants you to say to yourself
When you're getting a headache
Number one was hurt does not equal harm in other words a lot of times people when they get headaches is something's wrong up here
There's pain up here. I mean there's something is hurt sure and that's not necessarily the case it
just might mean that you have sensitive nerves and that's
Hypersensitive nerves. Yeah, so
The second thing he wants you know some type of saying that you should say to yourself: my headache does not mean something is wrong
My nerves are extra sensitive. I can do many things to calm them down. This is how you want to think about things, okay?
My nerves are extra sensitive. I can do things to calm down. I'm in control.
Let's just get this under control and the headache will go away right so again. I apologize to Adriaan
I'm sure I butchered it, but you know we will encourage people to go read your book
I think you did a nice job, but again. I think in the book he uses some good analogies that will help clarify.
Reading itself is just a good activity for the brain, and it's going to help bring you from here to here.
Yeah, thanks everybody for watching
You