Hey everybody it’s Dr. Zack Beatty with Gonstead Family Chiropractic out here in sunny beautiful San Diego, California. Today’s topic is how to help yourself with neck pain and how to help, maybe not correct, but help get better posture. How many of us tend to look down whether we’re working on a computer or maybe we’re a student and writing in this position really hinders our neck. It really puts our neck in a malposition or misalignment and it changes the structure of it. What we want to go over today is an exercise that you can do at home.
It doesn’t cost you a penny to do because all you need is a towel whether it be a bath towel or beach towel and we all have one at home. What you’re going to do with that towel is you’re going to roll it up. What we’re simply going to do is lay on our back and what you’ll do is place this underneath your neck. What you want is the angle of your eyes to be approximately five to ten degrees looking backwards. We want the back crown of our head to just touch the back part or the flat surface of wherever you’re laying so you create an angle.
What this will do is help put a natural curvature into our neck and so that will take a lot of tension and pressure off of your traps, your levator scapulae, and other muscles. From a structural standpoint there’s a big difference in the position of a neck with a curve versus one that’s very straight. This is just a quick way that you can do this at home. I would recommend doing maybe a minute to a minute and a half at most starting out and slowly work your way up. What I recommend is you simply put that towel next to your pillow so then in the morning you do it when you wake up. Then pull it out, go about your day, and leave it there for when you go into bed at night. Do it again for that minute to a minute and a half, pull it out, roll over, and go to sleep. See the video below for a demonstration. You can also click here for some other helpful neck exercises. I hope this tip helps all of you. I hope you guys are all staying healthy, staying happy, and we’ll see you soon.