Neck pain is very common, especially amongst people sat in front of computers all day. So it’s an area I’m very interested in.

What we do makes us what we are.
By this I mean that our everyday activity, or inactivity, greatly influences what our body becomes. An example would be that if you’re on bed rest your muscles become weaker or if your knee is in a plaster cast the joint becomes stiff. It’s not rocket science.

Sat in front of a computer screen all day has an effect. We tend to sit in poor posture which in real terms means:

• The muscles that give our neck strength and stability get weaker
• Neck joints stiffen because they’re not moving
• Poor postures increases strain on your neck

So it’s no great surprise that neck pain amongst office workers is very common.

The exercise that takes pride of place here has to be good. It has to change our activity because we are what we do day in, day out, remember? It’s not enough to strengthen neck muscles or to make your neck move more easily, it must also improve your posture and the way we move.

Improving static posture and moving in good posture will help us attain:

    • Strength in deep stability muscles
    • Mobility in neck joints

So what are you waiting for?

Neck Retraction Exercise

This person is fully retracting her neck as an exercise.

Method

Sit on a chair with your back supported.

Keep your face straight and upright, then pull your face backwards and upwards.
Because the neck joints are at an angle you should grow taller. You are now fully retracted.

Relax back into the starting position and repeat 5 times, am and pm whilst at work. Of course.

The exercise is to go from normal sitting to an over corrected position. This action will work the muscles that give the neck strength and move the joints and improve your ability to have better posture.

To improve your posture on the last retraction just relax partially so you’re keeping a little retracted.

But you still must make that massive step for mankind and choose your improved posture regularly.
Because if you don’t, remember… what we do makes us what we are!

Have a look at this video of the exercise:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUQ-bY4rd_0

One of the most common complaints of the knee is anterior knee pain syndrome. Anterior being the front of the knee, but in truth, the pain in question can be at the sides, back and even in the thigh. The pain we are talking about could have started out of the blue.

This pain type can be caused by:

    •Faulty exercise techniques,

    • Following back pain,weak hip stability,

    • Following on after a knee injury.

This pain tends to be worse after sitting for a while.

What’s it all about?

We’re talking about a rotated kneecap. The kneecap should sit in a groove made by the thigh bone at the knee joint. The kneecap is connected to muscle and it’s their job to keep the kneecap in the groove. If this muscle becomes weaker on one side then the kneecap tilts. Now just imagine the pressure underneath the kneecap when this happens and you’re bending the knee. Ouch! One side of the kneecap is pressing more and so can cause pain.

Now perhaps you can understand how this pain can start after faulty knee exercise techniques.

 Backpain and weaker hip muscles tend to go hand in hand. One of those hip muscles called Gluteus Medius readily affects the muscle pull of the thigh muscle on the kneecap and so there’s the connection. I’ve blogged earlier about this.

A knee injury can affect the muscle strength and muscle control on the kneecap and so lead on to this kind of pain.

 Patients who have undergone tests with this syndrome prove negative for other conditions. So if you’ve just started with pain at the front of the knee, you’ve not had an injury, why not try this exercise regime to see if you can stop the pain.  

But this exercise can help prevent these causes of pain from starting in the first place…so what’re you waiting for!

Knee Exercise

Method

     •Stand up straight square on to a wall.

     • Keeping your hips square on to the wall infront and take one step forwards with the affected leg.

      •Bend the front knee keeping the centre of the kneecap inline with the third toe. You should have at least half of your weight going through the front leg.

      •Maintain this position and tense the muscles in your thigh as much as you can. This means a maximum effort. To be able to achieve a maximum effort the exercise is          only suitable if this position is painfree.

      • Hold this maximum contraction for ten seconds and then step back, next to the back foot.

      •Repeat this ten times and do this regime three times a day.

Don’t expect miricles. It may take a week or so before you feel an improvement. If this does not help then seak advice from a physiotherapist.

Please feel free to pass this on to anyone you know who may be interested or who it may help.

In the physiotherapy department or at the sports clinic there are some conditions that just keep on appearing. Importantly, they are the type of conditions that can be protected against…or to use my favorite word, prevented.

These four exercises in this series really do deserve a mention…they’re low-key, easy to do – but oh boy, do they pack a punch!

We’re talking about four exercises that target four common complaints…

a  Pulled hamstring muscle,

b   Pain in the front of the knee,

c   Neck pain, and finally…

d   Back pain.

Of course, many situations can cause these pains but it’s worth a go to see if these exercises can put a stop to your problems. These exercises target the most common causes of these pains, so here goes.

Todays it’s…

sddxHamstring Exercise

Only do this exercise if your hamstrings (the muscles at the back of your thighs) are fit and healthy or really well on in their rehabilitation phase. This exercise really helps to protect your hamstrings from restraining.

The hamstrings are often pulled when you’re changing direction at speed or coming to a standstill quickly. To do these things the body must slow down quickly, decelerate, and for this to happen the hamstring muscle group must absorb a lot of energy. It’s this rapid deceleration that really puts a huge strain on the muscle and can strain the muscle to the point of injury.

This hamstring exercise strengthens the hamstring muscle group by utilising the deceleration strain in a controlled way. Exercising this way produces cross connections within the strengthening muscle and this gives the muscle extra resistance to injury.

Word of Warning!

Golden Rule:
It’s OK to feel a slight strain whilst performing an exercise…
…but you must NOT feel worse after.

Method

Lie on your stomach.
Bend one knee, then quickly straighten the knee but don’t let your foot touch the ground.
The idea is your lower leg comes to a sudden stop…a sudden deceleration.

Control is needed here, so you might start slowly and build up your speed.
Build up your speed  as you gain skill and do the deceleration as quickly as you can.
Try to get to 10 repetitions. Repeat again the next day.
Do the exercises once per day and gradually build up to three lots of 15 repetitions, with a short rest inbetween each set of 15.
Once you’re up to three lots of 15 reps, only do the exercise every other day.

Progression

Once you’re up to the three lots of 15 repetitions and you can’t go any faster, fix a small weight onto your foot – say 0.5 kg – then gradually build up the speed.
You may then add another small weight. Large weights are not necessary, so a shoe may suffice.
Don’t do this exercise the same day you play sport – let your body recover for a day or so first.

Try to keep up with this exercise.

Have you tried this exercise?  Please share this information if you think it’s worth having.

To decide which exercises are important we first look at the occupational strains that must be endured plus the typical injuries/pain sources. In an ideal world each individual worker should be assessed to find their weaknesses that would impact their resistance to pain. But this is not possible so I use my 30 years experience and base exercises on the usual physical deficits. And you’d be surprised to know that a burly rugby player tend to have the same deficits as a non sporting person.

It’s not always strength that’s missing!

Poor postural habits literally change the position we’re in at any one time. When you’re sitting at your pc all day the head and chin move into a foreward position, the shoulders become rounded and the lower back flattens. This altered posture means that when we move such as pick up the telephone a different set of muscles are used instead of the one’s you’d use if you were in good posture. This isn’t good because some of the muscles used in good posture have a very important role in stabilising the shoulder, back and say neck. If we continually slouch the body gets used to not recruiting the stability muscles and weakness can come about just because these muscles hardly ever get the chance to be used.

So choice of exercises!

Some specific stretching to actually allow you to get back into good posture. This is so true for the neck…what with that poking chin all the time. With backs – stretching which particularly helps with disc health but also exercises to train the stability muscles. In this area of the body once the back deep stability muscles stop working regularly as they should they forget how to work. Training a skill is what is need here with exercises.

Try these neck exercises. http://www.positiveposture.net/try-these/

At Positive Posture I have specialised in computer worker’s pain prevention.

Did this make sense?

 When I speak to people about their back pain they usually mention “I know I’ve got to keep my back straight when bending”, or “I mustn’t bend my back”. In some instances such as

1 Heavy lifting.

2 Awkward lift,

3 Repetative lifts

…then yes you should lift whilst in good posture. But having flexability in your back is really important. Bending your back fully to pick up one sock is healthy. Providing your back is healthy it will not cause back pain. However perminantly keeping your back straight allows weakness to develop in muscle strength.

The multifidus muscle is attached to the facet joints of the spine. When you bend your back this muscle is activated and it acts like guide ropes on this joint to keep it aligned.

If your back is stiff then you should start very gently and gradually to introduce a bend. Probably starting in sitting with your hands on your knees to give some support and slowly bend forwards. Hold a couple of seconds and then repeat say up to 5 times. But remember you should never feel a pain after finishing an exercise so take it easy.

If you are being treated for backpain always ask your therapist or doctor first.

This one of the exercises I have incorporated in my pain prevention strategy for office pain prevention. Actually bending your back also has a stress relieving effect on the normally compressed lower back and it also helps the lower back discs to take up liquid which tends to get partly squeezed out whilst sitting.

So.. Bending is good

That sounds so ordinary but I must take every opertunity to let you know just how ubiquitous back pain is. 80% of us will get it at some time in out lives (and I’ve had it already). Or if we don’t get an episode of back pain we will know someone close to us who will get one  and so it can affect us all.

Why is it so wide spread?

From the early 80′s many occupations involved sitting down at a computer. From this time there was a massive increase in the incidence of back and neck pain related to occupation. Why? Because we humans are stupid.

The nature of the work involves sitting. Sitting is a greater strain on the spine compared to moving about. Sitting is static and so involves loading the same tissues of the body for prolonged periods of time. Our bodies cope really well with strain but over a long time the fibres of our ligaments and the like just can’t cope and so they fatigue and over strain. Pain.

Not all backs are due to sitting at a computer. One in three cases can identlfy the causing factor such as lifting something too heavy, or slipping or an accident.

So be attentive to your back and follow some of my rules. Why should I? Because two out of three episodes of back pain are preventable.

Rules coming up!

If not take a look at my last blog.

Part 2 – The upper back and shoulders

• Sit towards the front edge of your seat.
• Now find your good sitting posture for the lower back.
• Keeping that position place one finger on your breast bone at the front of your chest.
• Make your chest raise slightly under your finger.
• As this is happening allow your shoulders to stay relaxed and widen.
• Do not move your lower back.

This movement stops you from being round shouldered and stops you from having a humped back. Which takes strain off the front of the shoulders and the base of your neck. This in turn helps to prevent common shoulder tendon strain at the front of the shoulders and neck pain.

By raising the chest wall, widening the relaxed shoulders will make the stability muscles of the shoulders work. This is just one more reason why good posture is so good.

Next blog in this series - Neck and head posture.

Everyone has their own unique, good sitting posture. It’s pain free, easy to maintain with a few reminders and can probably be improved!

The low back

 Image 1   Sit at the front edge of your seat and place your up-turned hands under your bottom. Wriggle about. Do you feel a bony lump above each hand? Move your hands until you do. Come on it’s not difficult. This is the lowest part of your pelvis. Keep your upper body generally over your hips, don’t lean forwards or backwards and now slouch. Yes slouch. We’re good at this. Do you feel the pelvic bones slide forwards. Yes. Good.

Slouched lower back

Over corrected back

Image 2   Now keeping your body over the hips and over correct your lower back by making a big curve inwards at the lowest part of the back. This is now over corrected and just as bad as slouching.

Correct posture with pelvis is pelvic neutral

Image 3    To find your unique good sitting, lower back posture you must now take some of the over corrected movement off to find a mid position. At this point you will really feel the sitting bones of the pelvis because they are pointing down. We call this pelvic neutral.You can also identify this position because there will be a gentle curve inwards at the lowest part of your back.

When finding good posture for the lower back do stages 2 and 3. Following this move your bottom right to the back of your seat and adjust the height, depth, and back rest tilt so that your seating supports you in your own unique good posture.

If for some reason this position feels uncomfortable then allow your back  to slouch a little until you feel comfortable. I could write a book about this last sentence!

Quess whats coming up in my next blog…..upper back and shoulder posture

For years the office culture has been to accept the conditions you have at work until something goes wrong. It’s reactive rather than proactive. So when your back starts to hurt you ask for a new chair but many times this does not solve the problem…either you don’t know how to sit on the chair to relieve discomfort or the chair may not be the root cause of your back pain.

I’m extremely keen to start people exercising at work. Exercise is a vastly under used, extremely potent tool to prevent injury at work. This is a big culture change for most offices but one that would have a massive impact on the number of office workers who get work related pain.

So what’s wrong with exercising at work? I’m not talking about jumping about but subtle neck, shoulder and back movements that would aleviate strain from these vulnerable areas. If you’d like to find out more about preventing office inducd pain, whether at home working or in the office go to Positive Posture.

There’s never usually just one item on the new years resolution list, there’s three or four items so no wonder we break them.

Try thinking about what’s important in life-
    Happiness
    Health
    Being safe from harms way
    Wealth

For me the first three are the important ones, but I wouldn’t say no to a bit of wealth as long as I had the other three.

Health is very important because if you haven’t got health –  it’s difficult to get the other three. Now you’ll probably know where this is leading to! 

  Would it not be one of the best New Years Resolutions to wish to keep good health. One main culprit that makes people absent from work is back pain. Two out of three episodes of back pain have an unknown origin. Those are the ones office workers get. Of course there is a cause and it’s usually tardy posture and a lack of movement during the day.

This is where Positive Posture can take control and make you keep your resolution.