If you do, this video is for you, whether you’re looking for someone to help you with your neck pain, or just want some information that you can use to help yourself.

In this video, I’m going to share how we at the clinic help neck and shoulder pain.

Well, neck in this video, shoulder in the next because even though they’re related, I thought it might be a little bit too long to cover all that in one video.

And if you watch to the end, I’ll give you some things that you can start doing right away that will help your neck even if you can’t or don’t want you to come see us in the clinic.

Welcome back. If you’re new, welcome. My name is Katherine. I’m the Founder and Principal Therapist of LSM Clinic in East London Sport and Remedial Massage Therapy Clinic.

In this channel, I share information about how the body works, and just general tips and things that you can do for self care so hopefully you can enjoy your favourite activities and live your life as close to pain free as possible.

This is first of a two parter, we have the neck in this one and the shoulder and this one.

The reason that I’m doing these videos this month is because I’m releasing a Neck and Shoulder Pain Guide, which is going to be available in ebook and printed version and hopefully, eventually audiobook. 

I also wanted to share a little new addition to my desk, that I love, in case anyone else really loves cute little dragons. I’m trying to decide what to name him. So, or her I haven’t decided, it, them. If you have any suggestions, let me know. But it’s an incense holder and I’ve got it at my desk now and it helps me to stop procrastinating because I’m a huge procrastinator. Now I really want to come and sit down at my desk, because I get to see this little guy. I just want to share it because I thought he was cute and I think we can all use more cuteness in our lives, especially at the moment.

When I was telling someone about this plan to do a series about how we help, we’ll help neck pain, shoulder pain, knee pain, hip pain, low back pain, whatever.

They were like, ‘are you worried that you’re kind of just giving away the information of what people can do themselves?’

I was like, well, you know, the way that I see it, and this is what I wanted to explain to you in case you’re wondering the same thing. I’ll probably say it in the other video as well –

Some people like to bake their own cake and some people prefer to buy a cake. And usually, if you and you might have different times at your life that you want to do one or the other.

Usually, if you want to buy a cake you want to know that the person is good and you’re not really interested in them telling you how they make the cake so you can go and make it.

You might want them to know how they make the cake, you might want to know how they make the cake so you can be sure that it’s something that you like, which is you know what this video is doing.

Then if you want to bake your own cake, having someone explain to you how to do it is really helpful. No, it’s probably not going to be as good as if a professional does it but you still just want to go through the process of like doing it because you enjoy it.

You know, there might be cost prohibitions around so you know, if you want to buy a cake and you live in East London, hopefully this will help you decide if we’re the right people for you. And if you just are trying to find a way to bake your own cake as in DIY yourself care around your neck pain, hopefully this video will help you too.

So the first thing let’s talk about neck pain in general, what are the kinds of things that we see?

We see pain in the back of the neck to the top of the shoulders.

We see difficulty rotating, so people can have problems side to side, having pain in various places on their neck.

Sometimes tilting can be a problem, although that’s less important for our day to day lives.

But you know, it’s nice if it’s not painful.

Sometimes you’ll have some pain or a stretch when they’re looking down. So all of these things are things that we look at with neck pain.

Also, sometimes headaches can be related to neck pain. Headaches is a very complex topic. There are loads of different reasons (that you get headaches). There’s genetics. There’s migraines. But if you have a lot of tension in your neck and you have headaches, you may find that doing work on your neck, releasing your neck and reducing the tension in your neck might help your headaches as well.

When someone’s coming to us for neck pain, we’re looking at a few specific muscles.

We’re looking at the scalenes which are three muscles on the neck, that attach on the vertebra of the neck and into the first and second rib. They’re involved in breathing.

If you’re if you need help breathing, if you’re using your accessory muscles, they’ll lift the chest up. If you take a breath and that happens (lifting your chest), you’re probably using your scalenes.

(I don’t know if you can hear that I’ve got the window open and there are kids playing outside during recess so, if you hear the children screaming, that’s what that is, hopefully it’s not picking up.)

The other muscle that we look at is the sternocleidomastoid, which goes from behind the ears down into the front top of the collarbone.

When that’s tight, it will pull your head forward.

When it’s loose, it’s like a diagonal, your heads over your shoulders, it kind of goes in a diagonal down the side. But if it’s tight, it does go up and down and pull your head forward. The fascia also goes around here. These are very normal kind of causative muscles.

Other muscles that have an impact are the tops of the shoulders, which like the upper traps attached into the back of the head, side of the head, kind of behind the ear.

You have levator scapula, which like lifts your shoulders up. That’s from the top of the shoulder blade into the first to fourth vertebra in the neck.

And there are muscles that run down the back of the neck a little bit into the back of depending on which ones we’re talking about.

These are often where people feel pain, or sometimes people will feel pain in the sides in the scalenes. But they’re usually responding to the tension in the other muscles trying to pull them out of alignment.

Now we’ve gone through the muscles, let’s talk about what we look at.

We release scalenes and SCM (sternocleidomastoid). We work on making it easier for your head to be over your shoulders.

This is where the chest comes in and the shoulders come in. Because if you have shoulders rounded forward and a tight chest and it’s pulling you forward, it is impossible to comfortably have your head over your shoulders.

Because you have this pushing you forward and you’re trying to do this and you’re just pushing against all of this forward pull.

So you have to do something to open your chest, which we talk about in a free workshop that we have on our website, which I will mention at the end.

The way that we get the neck position better:

We open up the chest muscles, we help the shoulders be in a better position, which we’ll talk more about in part two, how we help the shoulder.

We release the SCM and the scalenes to allow your head to come back over your shoulder so that your head’s not being pulled forward, and we will do some release on the back and the tops of the shoulders like the side of the neck, top of the shoulders, back of the neck.

But we wait until we’ve released what’s pulling on the front.

A mistake that a lot of people make is that they focus on where the pain is.

That’s actually making the imbalance worse, because this is trying to compensate for what’s here.

If you’re releasing this and you’re not addressing this, then you’re just kind of annoying your muscles really because they’re like, well, we’re doing this job, we want the head to not fall forward, you’re loosening us so we’re not doing that but you’re not taking away the pressure that’s making us want to tense and hold the head up, right.

We also look at breathing mechanics.

This is something I don’t think a lot of people think about when we’re thinking about neck pain but it’s really important because ideally, we’re breathing with our diaphragm and I talk a bit about that in the how your breathing affects your training video that I did.

I can link that (see links in video above).

I talked about the diaphragm in the diaphragm muscle of the month video, so we can link that as well.

But basically, your diaphragm is supposed to be your primary muscle of respiration.

If you’re not breathing with your diaphragm, your diaphragm could be too tight, certain abdominal muscles could be tight. We want to loosen those. And we also want to give you an exercise so that you breathe more with your diaphragm when you’re at rest so your scalenes aren’t being used all the time, because they are so supportive muscles, right?

We look at how can we get your head position in a better place in a way that feels comfortable.

And I just want to say if you’ve ever tried to have good posture, and you felt like it was really uncomfortable, I do have a video about that. Why is good posture uncomfortable, I will link that below as well.

Neck position, shoulder position and breathing mechanics.

That’s kind of the things that we have our clients focus on on their own.

Now I’m going to give you the things that you can do.

These are the things that we tell our clients to do as homecare because no matter how good you are (as a therapist), you do still have to do a little bit of DIY self care, because we can only do so much in like an hour a week or an hour a month, which is like kind of where we get to with our clients, right.

Number one: we have a desk worker workshop, which will walk you through, workshop style, 30 minutes, it’s recorded, but we do it as if we’re doing it along with you.

It tells you how to get better posture in a way that feels comfortable. It shows you a stretch for your chest to make it easier to have your head over your shoulders. And it gives you some good practice to put into place to kind of make that better posture a habit.

The second one, we have a breathing activation, breathing visualisation, where you connect into your abdomen, you visualise your diaphragm and it walks you through practising your breathing mechanics.

That is a pay what you want. But it can be as little as one or two pounds, just like you know, whatever you can afford, more is always appreciated. I wanted to make that accessible so that’s why that’s pay what you want. And, obviously, you can get the neck and shoulder pain guide, if you’d like to.

There was a third one that you can do on your own. The chest stretch.

In the workshop, there’s the chest stretch, and there’s how to adjust your posture and then there’s the breathing mechanics.

If you start to do those three things, you’re going to see an improvement in your neck and shoulder pain.

Like I said, if you want to dive deeper into this and get really detailed, like descriptions of stretches and exercises, and how to do a self assessment, and how to build it into your life so it only takes five to 10 minutes a day, how to prioritise kind of understanding the whole kind of, I guess, ecosystem of your neck and shoulders, my guide is available.

The link is in the linked resources section. If you get it, I’d love to know what you think of it. And I will see you in number two – ‘how we help shoulder pain’. 

Before I go, I just want to say thank you so much for sticking to the end.

If you have any questions about this, feel free to let me know if you try any of the things I suggest I’d love to know about it. If you’re local and you want to come see us for an appointment, the link to book is in the description as well. Lots of links in this video today.

If you liked it, I would love it if you would like the video, subscribe if you’re not already so you’re notified as we get new ones.

Share this video with someone you know has neck pain because you know it really helps the more people that know about this stuff that can help them then the better people in general will feel right, and that’s what we’re trying to do.

If you’d like to be notified when I release a new video or when I share some things that I only share in email like stories and self care tips and older videos that kind of reminding and bringing them back, you can subscribe to the mailing list which is also below. So you have lots of choices what to do from this video today. Thank you so much again for watching and I will see you in the next video.